Collocational Frameworks

John Sinclair has often spoken of "collocational frameworks" or "grammatical frames", and these are the most common kind of concgram. Common grammatical words such as 'A' and 'OF' often combine with each other to form 'collocational frameworks' (Renouf and Sinclair, 1991). For example, the most common configuration pattern for ‘THE / TO’ is:

TO + INF VERB + THE + NOUN GROUP

e.g. to read the letter, to make the decision, to have the opportunity, to distinguish between the concept

When they form such collocational frameworks THE / TO form a collocational relationship with the words which they frame. A collocational frame can thus be described as co-occurring grammatical words which provide paradigmatic slots into which can be fitted similar words and which form a collocational relationship with the words framed.

Many groups of words which recur in a corpus and are sometimes listed as individual ‘clusters’ are formed from collocational frameworks. For instance, ‘IN TERMS OF’, ‘IN CASE OF’, ‘IN LIEU OF’ etc are all instances of the collocational framework ‘IN * OF’ where the * represents a paradigmatic slot into which may be put a word belonging to the set of words which may be selected. The lexical items ‘terms’, ‘case’, ‘lieu’ etc are all members of the paradigmatic set from which they have been selected.

Searching for collocational frameworks

You can look up collocational frameworks using the Web Concordancer Concgram Search. Just click on the frame listed to perform a search. In these examples, the slot(s) are shown by / *n / which indicates an indeterminate number of words may appear between the framing words.

Frameworks formed with 'A' + preposition
- A / OF (A / *n / OF) - one of the most common frameworks in English, often used to form quantifying nominal groups.
- A / IN (IN -ING A, IN / *n / A, A / *n / IN) - another very common frame, note the configuration 'IN + -ing + A'.
- A / FOR (FOR -ING A, A / *n / FOR) - note also the configuration 'FOR + -ing + A'.
- A / TO (TO / *n / A, A / *n / TO) - here 'TO' is frequently followed by an infinitive verb, usually in the "TO / *n / A' configuration
- A / FROM (FROM / *n / A, A / *n / FROM) - can also be found in the configuration 'FROM + -ing + A'
- A / ABOUT (A / *n / ABOUT, ABOUT / *n / A)
- A / OF / FOR (A / *n / FOR / *n / OF, A / *n / OF / *n / FOR) - a common 3-word frame, here shown only to the right of the centred word
3-word frameworks formed with 'THE' + preposition + preposition or 'THE' + preposition + 'AND'
2-WORD frameworks formed with 'THE' + preposition
Frameworks formed with 'OF' used with other prepositions
Frameworks formed from other prepositions
Frameworks formed with 'BECAUSE'
- BECAUSE / AND (/ *n / AND / *n / BECAUSE)
- BECAUSE / OF (OF / *n / BECAUSE, BECAUSE / *n / OF)

* REFERENCE

Renouf, A. J. and J. M. Sinclair (1991) ‘Collocational Frameworks in English’, in Ajimer and Altenberg (eds) English Corpus Linguistics, pp 128-43.