The term ‘collocation’ is used to refer to a group of words that belong together, either because they commonly occur together like take a chance, or because the meaning of the group is not obvious from the meaning of the parts, as with by the way or to take someone in (trick them). A major problem in the study of collocation is determining in a consistent way what should be classified as a collocation. This is a problem because they occur in a variety of general forms and with a variety of relationships between the words that make up the collocation. In this book, the term collocation will be used to loosely describe any generally accepted grouping of words into phrases or clauses. From a learning point of view, it makes sense to regard collocations as items which frequently occur together and have some degree of semantic unpredictability. These two criteria justify spending time on collocations because of the return in fluency and nativelike selection.

Collocation is often described as a ‘Firthian’ term (Kjellmer, 1982: 25; Fernando, 1996: 29), but Palmer used it many years before Firth and produced a substantial report which used a restricted definition of collocation, focusing mainly on items whose meaning is not obvious from their parts. ‘Each [collocation] … must or should be learnt, or is best or most conveniently learnt as an integral whole or independent entity, rather than by the process of piecing together their component parts.’ (Palmer, 1933: 4)