The collocations presented in Collopedia were mainly selected from those identified as significant by the CANCODE corpus of spoken English, developed at the University of Nottingham in association with Cambridge University Press, and the Cambridge International Corpus of written and spoken English (now known as the Cambridge English Corpus). There is also an extensive use of the Cambridge Learner Corpus, a corpus of student language which shows what kind of collocation errors learners tend to make. These corpora show that there are many thousands of collocations in English. So how could we select which ones would be most useful for you to work on?
Firstly, of course, we wanted to choose ones that you might want to use in your own written and spoken English, for example shake off a cold and respond well to treatment but not grumbling appendix, which is a strong collocation, but one which – we hope – most of you will not feel the need for. secondly, we decided it would be most useful for you if we focused on those collocations which are not immediately obvious. A pretty girl, a modern car or to buy a ticket are all collocations, but they are combinations which you can easily understand and produce yourself without any problems. We deal here with less obvious word combinations, for instance, flatly contradict (not strongly contradict) and bitter enemies (not serious enemies). There is an exception with collocations that the Cambridge Learner Corpus highlighted as causing frequent problems for students, even in advanced level exams, so you will find them here in Collopedia. We as the team of Collopedia feel that it would be useful to repeatedly draw attention to some collocations, even if we already dealt with them previously.
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