There is little guidance on how to teach different meaning senses of
collocations as most pedagogical materials treat collocations as word partners
which co-occur together. However, if we consider meaning, collocations fall
into three categories. Literal collocations are combinations where the literal
meanings of the words are simply added together. Figurative collocations
have idiomatic meanings which are not derivable from the component
words. Duplex collocations are polysemous, having both literal and figurative
meanings. This exploratory study analysed 54 collocations and found that even
though the majority of the collocations appeared to be literal, a substantial
percentage had both literal and figurative meanings, and relatively few
seemed to be solely figurative. We discuss the teaching implications of this,
depending on whether the most important collocational characteristic is a
pattern of co-occurrence or of meaning. Overall, we argue that considering
meaning can bring useful insights to the nature of collocations and how to
teach them

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Perpustakaan FITK Pusat

Tersedia

• The figurative and polysemous nature of collocations and their place in ELT

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