CHUNKS OF LANGUAGE

Students with good chunk-knowledge of English will effortlessly anticipate the missing words in the following phrases, for instance:

> "As a matter of ____, the woman who was burnt at the____ wasn´t a witch at____.
> "When he saw his daughter was unharmed, he breathed a sigh of ___."
> "Got to get___now. I´ve got a train to ____."

Half a century ago J. Firth famously stated that "You shall know a word by the company it keeps". Eventual recognition of the truth of this statement has led to the publication of better and better collocation dictionaries and the creation of hugely useful on-line, corpus-based collocation samples which can be used to learn about "strong collocates". (Strong collocates of a given word are words that very often co-occur with this word in a kind of chunk knwon as a "frequent collocation" - e.g., commit is a stronger collocate of crime). To give another example the following words were thrown up by the free collocation sampler on the Collins Cobuild website when we typed in a certain preposition as query word: years, all, control, take, victory, again, weekend, handed, head, shoulder, win, world, place, and, here, days, dispute, controversy, row, time, presided, concern, came, counter, turned, bent and run. Can you guess what preposition we were interested in? If so, your chunk knowledge for this preposition is at least fairly good.
*Over - e.g., over (the...) years, all over, control over, over again, over (the...)weekend... .

Selected and adapted from Teaching Chunks of English by Seth Lindstromberg and Frank Boers.