Beyond single words: the most frequent collocations in spoken English

By Dongkwang Shin, Paul Nation. 2007

242 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This study presents a list of the highest frequency collocations of spoken English based on carefully applied criteria. In the literature, more than forty terms have been used for designating multi-word units, which are generally not well defined. To avoid this confusion, six criteria are strictly applied. The ten million word BNC spoken section was used as the data source, and the 1,000 most frequent spoken word types from that corpus were all investigated as pivot words. The most striking finding was that there is a large number of collocations meeting the six criteria and a large number of these would qualify for inclusion in the most frequent 2,000 words of English, if no distinction was made between single words and collocations. Many of these collocations could be usefully taught in an elementary speaking course. © The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Language and Linguistics, Literature and Literary Theory

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3b53e9d0b3fe402f1689a3b1922d8a6511da655a

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In Developmental and Educational Psychology

In Language and Linguistics

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Citations in the corpus

Learning L2 collocations incidentally from reading (2017, background): “Collocations are more frequent in spoken discourse than in written discourse, and the amount of exposure to authentic spoken discourse that most EFL learners receive is often very limited (Shin & Nation, 2008).”
A Phrasal Expressions List (2012, methodology): “The core criteria are those that Table 2: Top 10 items— Shin and Nation (2008) compared with the PHRASE List Shin and Nation (2008) PHRASE List 1 you know 1 have to 2 I think (that) 2 there is/are 3 a bit 3 such as 4 used to {INF} 4 going to {future} 5 as well 5 of course 6 a lot of {N} 6 a few 7…”
Semantic Variation in Online Communities of Practice (2018, unknown): “Meaning variants that are speciﬁc to a particular community are not highly frequent and thus it is less likely that they take part in collocations (see e.g., Shin and Nation (2008)).”
Examining second language receptive knowledge of collocation and factors that affect learning (2017, background): “In this study, the frequency of the target collocations was determined by the frequency of the individual words that made up the items rather than according to their frequencies as a whole, such as those in Shin and Nation (2008).”