Page "Collocation" Paragraph 0

In corpus linguistics, collocation defines 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 ( from Michael Halliday ) 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.