Common English collocations

In corpus linguistics, a collocation is a sequence of words or terms that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance. In phraseology, collocation is a sub-type of phraseme. An example of a phraseological collocation, as propounded by Michael Halliday,[1] is the expression strong tea. While the same meaning could be conveyed by the roughly equivalent *powerful tea, this expression is considered incorrect by English speakers. Conversely, the corresponding expression for computer, powerful computers is preferred over *strong computers. Phraseological collocations should not be confused with idioms, where meaning is derived, whereas collocations are mostly compositional.

There are about six main types of collocations: adjective+noun, noun+noun (such as collective nouns), verb+noun, adverb+adjective, verbs+prepositional phrase (phrasal verbs), and verb+adverb.

Collocation extraction is a task that extracts collocations automatically from a corpus, using computational linguistics.

Possessive Adjective

Possessive determiners constitute a sub-class of determiners which modify a noun by attributing possession (or other sense of belonging) to someone or something. They are also known as possessive adjectives.

Examples in English include possessive forms of the personal pronouns, namely my, your, his, her, its, our and their, but excluding the forms such as mine and ours that are used as possessive pronouns and not as determiners. Possessive determiners may also be taken to include possessive forms made from nouns, from other pronouns and from noun phrases, such as John's, the girl's, somebody's, the king of Spain's, when used to modify a following noun.

In many languages, possessive determiners are subject to agreement with the noun they modify, as in the French mon, ma, mes, respectively the masculine singular, feminine singular and plural forms corresponding to the English my.

We use possessive adjectives to show who owns or "possesses" something. The possessive adjectives are:

my, your, his, her, its, our, their

whose (interrogative)

Tongue Twister Peter Piper

A tongue-twister is a phrase that is designed to be difficult to articulate properly, and can be used as a type of spoken (or sung) word game. Some tongue-twisters produce results which are humorous (or humorously vulgar) when they are mispronounced, while others simply rely on the confusion and mistakes of the speaker for their amusement value.

Something in a thirty-acre thermal thicket of thorns and thistles thumped and thundered threatening the three-D thoughts of Matthew the thug - although, theatrically, it was only the thirteen-thousand thistles and thorns through the underneath of his thigh that the thirty year old thug thought of that morning.

To break the Ice - English Idioms and Phrases

An idiom (Latin: idioma, "special property", f. Greek: ἰδίωμα – idiōma, "special feature, special phrasing", f. Greek: ἴδιος – idios, "one’s own") is a combination of words that has a figurative meaning owing to its common usage. An idiom's figurative meaning is separate from the literal meaning. There are thousands of idioms and they occur frequently in all languages. There are estimated to be at least twenty-five thousand idiomatic expressions in the English language.

The following sentences contain idioms. The fixed words constituting the idiom in each case are bolded:

a. She is pulling my leg. - to pull someone's leg means to trick them by telling them something untrue.

b. When will you drop them a line? - to drop someone a line means to phone or send a note to someone.

c. You should keep an eye out for that. - to keep an eye out for something means to maintain awareness of it.

d. I can't keep my head above water. - to keep one's head above water means to manage a situation.

e. It's raining cats and dogs. - raining cats and dogs means it's raining really hard (a downpour).

Passive Voice

The passive voice is a grammatical construction (specifically, a "voice"). The noun or noun phrase that would be the object of an active sentence (such as Our troops defeated the enemy) appears as the subject of a sentence with passive voice (e.g. The enemy was defeated by our troops).

The subject of a sentence or clause featuring the passive voice denotes the recipient of the action (the patient) rather than the performer (the agent). The passive voice in English is formed periphrastically: the usual form uses the auxiliary verb be (or get) together with the past participle of the main verb.

For example, Caesar was stabbed by Brutus uses the passive voice. The subject denotes the person (Caesar) affected by the action of the verb. The agent is expressed here with the phrase by Brutus, but this can be omitted. The equivalent sentence in active voice is Brutus stabbed Caesar, in which the subject denotes the doer, or agent, Brutus. A sentence featuring the passive voice is sometimes called a passive sentence, and a verb phrase in passive voice is sometimes called a passive verb.

• When it is more important to draw our attention to the person or thing acted upon: The unidentified victim was apparently struck during the early morning hours.
• When the actor in the situation is not important: The aurora borealis can be observed in the early morning hours.

Present perfect

The PRESENT PERFECT TENSE is formed with a present tense form of "to have" plus the past participle of the verb (which can be either regular or irregular in form). This tense indicates either that an action was completed (finished or "perfected") at some point in the past or that the action extends to the present:

• I have walked two miles already [but I'm still walking].
• I have run the Boston Marathon [but that was some time ago].
• The critics have praised the film Saving Private Ryan since it came out [and they continue to do so].

The present perfect is a grammatical combination of the present tense and the perfect aspect, used to express a past event that has present consequences. The term is used particularly in the context of English grammar, where it refers to forms such as "I have left" and "Sue has died". These forms are present because they use the present tense of the auxiliary verb have, and perfect because they use that auxiliary in combination with the past participle of the main verb. (Other perfect constructions also exist, such as the past perfect: "I had eaten.")

Simple Future Tense

Future
English is sometimes described as having a future tense, although since future time is not specifically expressed by verb inflection, some grammarians identify only two tenses (present or present-future, and past). The English "future" usually refers to a periphrastic form involving the auxiliary verb will (or sometimes shall when used with a first-person subject; see shall and will). There also exist other ways of referring to future circumstances, including the going to construction, and the use of present tense forms. For particular grammatical contexts where the present tense substitutes for the future,

No Plan

We use the future simple tense when there is no plan or decision to do something before we speak. We make the decision spontaneously at the time of speaking. Look at these examples:

Hold on. I'll get a pen.
We will see what we can do to help you.
Maybe we'll stay in and watch television tonight.
In these examples, we had no firm plan before speaking. The decision is made at the time of speaking.

We often use the future simple tense with the verb to think before it:

I think I'll go to the gym tomorrow.
I think I will have a holiday next year.
I don't think I'll buy that car.
Prediction

We often use the future simple tense to make a prediction about the future. Again, there is no firm plan. We are saying what we think will happen. Here are some examples:

It will rain tomorrow.
People won't go to Jupiter before the 22nd century.
Who do you think will get the job?
Be

When the main verb is be, we can use the future simple tense even if we have a firm plan or decision before speaking. Examples:

I'll be in London tomorrow.
I'm going shopping. I won't be very long.
Will you be at work tomorrow?