Can you please point me to a good online resource for verb collocations, for American English? Preferably, something with a lot of examples.
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2What kind of verb colocations are you talking about? Phrasal verbs (verbs that go with prepositions after them but those prepositions are not heads of prepositional phrases)? – Mitch Aug 23 '17 at 22:21
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1OED is pretty good about listing collocations of verbs. I can't claim it is complete, but often enough it has them, moreso than other dictionaries. – Mitch Aug 23 '17 at 22:21
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@Mitch Sus2020 is asking for an online resource, which heavily suggests that they are looking for free resources. The OED online is ridiculously expensive. – Mari-Lou A Aug 24 '17 at 7:42
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4freecollocation.com is a free collocation dictionary – Mari-Lou A Aug 24 '17 at 7:48
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@Mitch 'phrasal verbs' are colligations (grammatically specified) rather than collocations. – Edwin Ashworth Oct 5 '17 at 14:26
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@EdwinAshworth Oh. Mari-Lou's suggested website corroborates that (no phrasal verbs given on search, but many collocated true prepositions). As to 'colligation', it is a new word to me, and cursory web searching seems to support that 'collocation' includes 'colligation'. It is not clear to me if 'phrasal verb' is a kind of colligation or not, but is certainly a collocation even if the parts are separated by other terms. – Mitch Oct 5 '17 at 15:20
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@EdwinAshworth It seems to go like this collocation > colligation > phrasal verbs – Mitch Oct 5 '17 at 15:26
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No; collocation and colligation are disjoint features. 'Morning coffee' is a strong collocation whereas 'Morning cocoa' isn't (though it's not ungrammatical). 'The lightning set the woods on fire' uses a colligation whereas 'The rain put the woods off fire' is grammatically unacceptable. – Edwin Ashworth Oct 5 '17 at 15:53
Does this link help at all? I just downloaded it and it's working well.
Some more references:
- OED online At the end of an entry are usually pairs of words starting with the target word.
You get free access to the OED online if you have a public library card number in the US or UK). You may have to access through your public library's website rather than directly through OED's sign-on.
- Google Book NGrams search If you search for road *_NOUN you'll get a list (and graph of historic frequencies) of all pairs of words that are 'road' followed by a noun (and you can change the obvious pattern to look for others). Note that this only gives you the highest frequency ones.
