Chapter 1 the study of collocations

Table 3.  Examples of Grammatical and Lexical Collocations in the 
BBI Combinatory Dictionary of English  
Code 
 Pattern   Example 
Grammatical Collocations: 
(G4)   
preposition + noun  in agony, at anchor 
(G8)   
verb + to infinitive  decide to come, offer to help 
Lexical Collocations: 
(L1)   
verb + noun   
 
make an impression 
(L3)   
adjective + noun 
 
long hair 
(L4) 
 noun 
+ 
verb 
  dogs 
bark 
(Benson et al. 1986) 
 
 
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 The 
BBI contains seven types of lexical collocations, L1...L7, and eight 
main types of grammatical collocations, G1...G8, with the eighth type consisting 
of nineteen English verb patterns, e.g. SVO to O (e.g. ‘I gave the book to Mary’), 
SVV-ing (e.g. ‘I started crying’), SV to inf (e.g. ‘I want to sleep’), etc.  Altogether, 
there are 33 patterns of grammatical and lexical collocations included in the 
BBI. 
 
One of the disadvantages of the BBI is that its writers do not explain how 
they established that a word combination is recurrent enough to be included in 
their dictionary.  The recent advances in corpus analysis provide more accurate 
examples of significant collocations for their inclusion in a dictionary (see 
COLLINS COBUILD English Words in Use, forthcoming; cited in Bahns 1993; 
also Collins COBUILD English Collocations on CD-ROM); for the advantages 
of using corpus analysis in lexicography see also Sinclair (1985) and 
Greenbaum (1984).  The use of language corpora for the detection of collocative 
semantic lexical relations in the compilation of dictionaries is also suggested by 
Meijs (1992), Noel (1992), Sinclair (1992), (1993), and, for the making of a lexical 
and phraseological grammar, Francis (1993). 
 
Even though the BBI has methodological weaknesses, its major 
contribution to the study of collocations is that it defines explicitly a number of 
patterns and, unlike the previous studies on collocations, it actually organises 
the collocations of a large number of words around those patterns, proving that 
it is possible to use structural patterns in order to study collocations.