Re: Help with collocations, please

> Django Cat wrote:
> > This fine morning I'm working on the e-learning project on studies
skills for
> > Doctoral students I've been commissioned to develop. I'm writing about
how a
> > knowledge of collocations is essential to develop academic writing
skills, and
> > I'm putting together a table of examples. (Collocations are words
which
> > commonly hang out with each other in phrases which form accepted
blocks
of
> > meaning. In this context I'm looking especially at collocations with
adjectives
> > and adverbs).

> > If anyone is interested, there's a rock paper about this stuff here:
> > http://tinyurl.com/6zgfrz

The draft defines the topic as
> This paper aims to show the relevance of phraseology to an understanding
of non-native
> speaker Academic Writing, an approach that needs to be tentative if not
stealthy at this stage
> in the absence of large bodies of data. . . .
>The term 'phraseology' has for a long time been used by Soviet
lexicologists (Ginzburg et al >1966; Arnold 1986, for example) to refer to
the branch of lexicology that studies such familiar >complexes as
collocations and idioms. There is still unfortunately a great deal of
>terminological confusion and as yet no generally agreed superordinate
term
for the study of >the full range of word combinations. This range
embraces,
on the one hand, such structurally >well-defined collocations as address a
problem, jump through the hoops or play fast and >loose, and, on the other
hand, the much more disparate categories of expressions, such as
>proverbs,
catchphrases and conversational formulae

Problems appear to include:
1.   This 4600-word draft is about what editors call cliches:
but uses this term nowhere, and appears to rely for source
material on a bibliography of 28-odd items in technical linguistics.
No work on good writing style is cited.

2.  This draft defines as its subject matter English written by
non-native English speakers, as distinct from English written by
native speakers.   So far as written sources are concerned,
this separation may be impractical.   E.g. Henry Kissinger's
mother tongue was German but he has since age 20 published
millions of words in English.   Professionals in his community
have no disciplinary way of dividing source texts between
those by authors for whom English is a first or a second language.

3.  The source idea ("phraseology" instead of cliche) is do***ented
to two Moscow publications of 1968.  It is not clear whether the
objective is a typology of errors in English or a typology of correct
English with defective or deplorable style.  Both are discussed as
if similar but we have no reason to suppose them similar.

-- 
Don Phillipson
Carlsbad Springs
(Ottawa, Canada)