ABSTRACT
In corpus linguistics, it is now firmly established that, to fully understand a word, we need to examine ‘the company that it keeps’ (Firth, 1957: 11) rather than examining it in isolation. Firth gives his famous example of dark night where ‘one of the meanings of night is its collocability with dark, and of dark, of course, collocation with night’ (p. 196). Corpus linguistics provides lots of evidence for the ways in which words have distinct and describable patterns regarding the company they keep, and the company they do not keep. For example, we can say both Happy + Christmas and Happy + Birthday, but, while we can also say Merry + Christmas, we cannot say Merry + Birthday (Renouf and Banerjee, 2007) because the collocability of Christmas and Birthday (and, of course, of Merry) differ in this respect. The search for those words that do collocate is a central concern in corpus linguistics and has led to many significant findings.
