Collocation

Martin & Rose (2007: 91):

As we flagged in the introduction to this chapter, the clause construes experience in terms of a process involving people and things, places and qualities. We have explored taxonomic relations between these elements, from one clause to the next as a text unfolds. In this section we will examine lexical relations between these elements within clauses. As they are more or less centrally involved in the process, lexical relations within the clause are known as nuclear relations.

Traditionally these kinds of lexical relations have been regarded as collocations, that is words that are commonly found together in the same structure, such as tennis-ball or play-tennis. What we will show in this section is how such collocations are dependent on the nuclear patterns of the clause, and again we will link lexical relations to the field construed in texts. The categories of nuclear relations presented in this section will then be applied to text analyses in the following section on activity sequences.

Blogger Comments:

[1] See the immediately preceding post for the misunderstandings here. 

[2] To be clear, "traditionally", collocation refers to the habitual juxtaposition of a particular word with another word or words with a frequency greater than chance.  Importantly, this is distinct from Halliday's model of collocation as a form of textual cohesion and from Halliday's model of clause ergativity in terms of nuclearity.  That is, Martin & Rose here again fail to acknowledge Halliday as their source and confuse two distinct regions of the grammar and rebrand the confusion as their model of discourse semantics.

[3] To be clear, collocation is not "dependent on the nuclear pattern of the clause" because

• collocation is not a feature of clause structure, and 
• collocation relations also obtain within in other grammatical domains, such as the nominal group, adverbial group, and prepositional phrase, and
• collocation is distinct from nuclearity, since nuclearity is the perspective on experiential meaning that is provided by the ergative model of the clause (Halliday 1985: 147).

What will be shown here is that Martin & Rose misunderstand Halliday's notion of clause nuclearity, and additionally misconstrue the expansion relations that obtain between the grammatical elements (which they misconstrue as lexical items).

[4] To be clear, in SFL theory, the function of collocation is to create texture by lexical means at the level of lexicogrammar. As such, the relation of collocation does not, in itself, build "the field construed in texts", no matter how "field" is understood.

(As previously explained, Martin & Rose misunderstand field as the ideational dimension of register, which they, in turn, misunderstand as a stratal system of context.  In terms of SFL theory, what Martin & Rose refer to as "field" here actually correlates with the ideational semantics instantiated in text.)