The English Collocations CD-ROM for teachers and advanced learners is now only $69.
Available for Windows on IBM or compatible PC.
An amazingly simple but powerful language resource
On this CD-ROM you have
access at the click of a button to 140,000 English collocations
(frequent word combinations) and 2,600,000 real examples of how these
word combinations are used. The collocations and the real examples are
extracted from a corpus of 200 million words: the Bank of English. Here you will
discover idioms, phrasal verbs, compounds, fixed phrases and
grammatical patterns fully supported with evidence from authentic
speech and writing.
Really easy interface: get straight to the real data
- Choose a node word from the 10,000 included on the CD-ROM. These
are the core vocabulary items of English.
- Once you've selected a word just click to bring up on screen a
list of the most significant collocates. Up to twenty collocates are
shown, in decreasing frequency order.
- Choose one of the collocates and click again to see a screen of
examples of this collocation from real texts, spoken as well as
written.
A Quick Guided Tour of the CD-ROM...
Here is the opening screen showing part of the list of 10,000 node words.
The absolute frequency of each node word in the corpus is shown for
easy comparison: all the node words included on the CD-ROM have a
frequency of greater than 500 in the corpus, so peculiar, rare and
highly specialised words are not featured.
Now the collocates are displayed...
The node secure has been selected and the list of collocates
for this word is shown. Alongside each collocate is its frequency of
co-occurrence with the node word secure. You may notice the
second most frequent collocate listed is release: secure
is often used not just as an adjective as in "safe and secure"
but is often a verb with a rather different meaning as in "efforts to
secure the release of the hostages". The collocate efforts also
appears very significant further down the list.
At the top of the collocate list is a "Stopwords" option: when
selected, this switches the display to show whether any of the very high
frequency function words (such as the, of or in,
for example) collocate significantly with the node word. A set of
these frequent function words (just over 50 of them) are treated as
"stopwords"; that is, they are not listed among the normal
collocations but are grouped separately and no examples are provided
for collocations of a node and a stopword. These stopwords collocate
regularly with very many of the node words and can be seen in the
examples for the more lexical collocations. For example,
knowledge appears as a collocate and is found most often in the
phrase "secure in the knowledge that...". The stopwords in and
the will be seen many times in the examples for this
collocation.
Click again to see lots of real examples of the collocation
Here the user has selected the collocate place and displayed 20
examples randomly selected from the 171 instances in the corpus where
secure co-occurs with place. Each line of the text is a
different example. The examples are presented sorted by the word to
the right of the node word: this groups certain patterns together,
such as "secure second/third place". Notice how many
of these examples are from a sporting context in which teams or
individuals compete for a place in the next stage of the event.
Each example can be expanded to show more context...
This example is typical. It is a piece of sports journalism from a
British newspaper. If you were talking to your brother on the phone
about the football match you played in last Saturday and you said
"...and so we secured a place in the quarter-final..." you would sound
most peculiar! The phrase "secure a place" used in a sports context
has a clear journalistic style and is inappropriate in informal
conversation.
