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?

Past Simple Tense - English grammar tutorial video lesson

The simple past or past simple, sometimes called the preterite, is the basic form of the past tense in Modern English. It is used principally to describe events in the past, although it also has some other uses. Regular English verbs form the simple past in -ed; however there are a few hundred irregular verbs with different forms.
The term "simple" is used to distinguish the syntactical construction whose basic form uses the plain past tense alone, from other past tense constructions which use auxiliaries in combination with participles, such as the past perfect and past progressive.

The PAST TENSE indicates that an action is in the past relative to the speaker or writer.

• when the time period has finished: "We went to Chicago last Christmas."
• when the time period is definite: "We visited Mom last week."
• with for, when the action is finished: "I worked with the FBI for two months."

The Present Simple Tense

The present tense is the base form of the verb: I work in London.
But the third person (she/he/it) adds an -s: She works in London.

Use
We use the present tense to talk about:

something that is true in the present:
I’m nineteen years old.
He lives in London.
I’m a student.

something that happens again and again in the present:
I play football every weekend.

We use words like sometimes, often. always, and never (adverbs of frequency) with the present tense:

I sometimes go to the cinema.
She never plays football.

something that is always true:
The adult human body contains 206 bones.
Light travels at almost 300,000 kilometres per second.

 

something that is fixed in the future.
The school term starts next week.
The train leaves at 1945 this evening.

We fly to Paris next week.

Let's learn idioms

FALL ON DEAF EARS: be ignored, be disregarded. Jakarta Globe: <<Indonesian lawmakers’ efforts to pull Schapelle Corby into the ongoing wiretapping dispute between Australia and Indonesia fell on deaf ears on Friday as central government officials dismissed the request, telling politicians the drug trafficking convict’s case “has nothing to do with” the spy scandal.>>

Another "twofer"! To FALL FROM GRACE is to lose prestige or power. To NAME NAMES is to give the names of specific people involved in wrongdoing. Jakarta Globe, in a story about the corruption trial of legislator Angelina Sondakh: <<The one-time Miss Putri Indonesia’s dramatic fall from grace began shortly after investigators closed in on Nazaruddin. The former Democratic Party treasurer began to name names before he was even arrested, dropping clues on the involvement of fellow Democrats via Skype from his hideout in Bogota, Columbia.>>

Two for one! A SILVER LINING is a positive aspect in a negative situation. PALE IN COMPARISON: seem insignificant when compared to something else. The word "pale" is a verb here. Daily Beast: <<One silver lining for the GOP [the Republican Party] in Jackson’s shambolic campaign was the optimism that the Republicans could pick off Northam’s state Senate seat in a special election. But that paled in comparison to the costs of a statewide campaign with an outlandish, gaffe-prone candidate.>>

A note for word fans: "Shambolic" is a British word, meaning disorganized, confused, in a shambles. But it has recently started showing up in American English.

MAKE HAY WHILE THE SUN SHINES: seize opportunities as they arise (because the opportunity may not last log). Both a proverb and an idiom. GhanaWeb: <<Folks, in Ghanaian politics, there is no certainty except the strong conviction among some of us that the Ghanaian politician is not to be trusted to sacrifice personal interests at the expense of the national one.
When it comes to self-serving, what is on the mind of the Ghanaian politician is nothing but making hay while the sun shines (Or as my Nigerian friend puts it: Making HASTE while the sun shines---because the sun won't shine forever!). >>