English Collocation Dictionary

Author: Li Zuowen
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-01-01
Features: This book provides information on English collocations relative to Chinese, where collocations refer to combinations of words used to express the same thing or concept differently across languages. For example, the English word "black" () and the Chinese "red" differ in meaning as adjectives. However, the English collocation "black tea" corresponds to the Chinese "," both referring to the same thing. Similar collocations are explained in this dictionary.
Collocations are not idioms or fixed phrases, which are ready-made lexical units in a language, such as the English "to kill two birds with one stone" () and the Chinese "." When using idioms, people treat them as whole lexical units without considering their internal structure. Collocations, however, are free combinations of words within a language, forming phrases rather than lexical units. But collocations are not ordinary free phrases, like the English "beautiful garden" (). These general free phrases, formed temporarily according to grammatical rules during communication, often have a one-to-one correspondence in form and meaning between two languages. In contrast, while collocations are free phrases, they are not necessarily one-to-one in either language.