Lexical Collocation In English Discourse

With the increasing concern with proficiency, English learners are paying more and more attention to the importance of lexical collocation. Since the father of collocation, Firth, proposed the concept, collocation has been a hot topic for a long time. Different linguists have different views on lexical collocation, such as Neo-Firthian Lexis, Mitchell's integrated approach, Halliday and Hasan's discoursal cohesion, Bolinger's conventional collocation research and Computer-based corpora starting from 1980s.Traditionally, collocation is understood as grammatical or semantic collocation. In the recent two decades, with the development of discourse research and the building of computer-based corpora, the field of collocation is greatly enlarged and collocation research is developed to the co-occurrence in discourse in the broad sense. Different senses of a word not only have their own characteristic collocations, but also their own characteristic syntactic and paradigmatic realizations as well as the collocation determined by topics to show the same field of discourse. The lexical collocation in discourse can be intra-sentential and inter-sentential, or even within several sentences. Lexical collocation can be centred on a certain concept and form a semantic field of concerned concept. Since readers always predict and understand the context with the collocational information, lexical co-occurrence on the discoursal level not only is a cohesive device of discourse but also has the disambiguous function in English discourse. Collocation can make thinking easier and plays am important role of promoting fluency, and of motivating learning in language acquisition for second language learners. The teaching of discoursal collocation can help students understand the surface structure and lexical collocation on the discoursal level better, and train the students to grasp key words, coherent meaning and discoursal structure.This thesis presents the classification of English lexical collocation in recent decades. Taking Halliday and Hasan's lecixal collocation in English discourse as the starting point, this thesis analyses the types, functions and restrictions of the choice of lexical collocations.There are 7 chapters in the thesis. Chapter One is introduction,with the present research on lexical collocation, features of collocation,the prime role of lexical collocation. Chapter Two is Literature Review, mentioning the historical study of collocation and different views of other linguists on collocation as well as theoretical bases of lexical collocation research in English discourse. Chapter Three presents the types of lexical collocation in English discourse, such as lexical collocation reflecting syntagmatic relation, lexical collocation reflecting paradigmatic relation and lexical collocation caused by topics. Chapter Four analyses the coherent and disambiguous functions of lexical collocation in English discourse. Chapter Five illustrates the restriction rules of the choice of lexical collocation in English discourse. Chapter Six shows the practical meaning of the research of lexical collocation in English discourse. And Chapter Seven is the conclusion of the thesis.