Semantic Analysis Of Lexical Collocation

Vocabulary is the basic element of language. As for any foreign language learner, knowing a certain number of words is the first step to master a language. However, if two people "know" the meaning of a particular lexical item, their lexical knowledge may not be identical. Collocation, the co-occurrence of lexical items, is one important aspect of vocabulary knowledge. It is usually seen that learners confuse a collocation while he know the meaning of each word well. Therefore the key point of this research lies on the semantic correlation of one word with another.Collocation has been studied for a long time by many famous linguists. Some studied it from syntax, some studied it from pragmatics, and some carried it out from lexicography, corpus and second language acquisition. This thesis tries to study it from the viewpoint of semantics. Although some linguists find the intimate relationship between semantics and lexical collocation, this field of research is relatively weak compared with other studies concerned collocation. As there are various kinds of collocations, the author emphasizes on lexical collocation and tries to study it from the viewpoint of semantics and exposes the semantic relationship between words when they are collocated. Several famous semantic theories are employed, such as componential analysis, semantic field, selection restrictions and semantic prosody to analyze the principle of acceptable collocations and the reason of the existence of unusual collocation.As in China, although teaching of vocabulary has been given weight during the last two decades, there seems to be a lack of awareness of the importance of collocation. They emphasize more on learning words in isolation and memorizing their lists of meanings. That teaching method does no good for learning collocation. So this paper expects to contribute something to English language teaching and learning. The author analyzes the application of lexical collocation in English language learning and teaching and puts forward some suggestions in classroom activities. There is also an exercise which will be helpful for students to learn lexical collocation in appendix one.