Another category is the idiom, where the meaning of the overall expression is often different from the sum of its individual parts and frequently involves metaphorical meaning: 'the lion's share', 'a pain in the neck', 'a fly in the ointment'. At one extreme such idioms shade into proverbs and proverbs provide a useful entry into this subject for foreign learners. If we take a common idiom/proverb such 'a watched pot never boils' (difficult ostensibly to predict the collocation 'watched pot'), we might well find that the learner's own language has an equivalent expression (cf. French 'une marmite surveillée ne bout jaimais). Finding points of comparison in this way helps learners to understand this aspect of language more easily.
A third category is collocations that belong to formulaic utterances which are used in very specific contexts. Examples of these are 'once upon a time' , 'suffice it to say', 'unaccustomed as I am', 'be upstanding in court,' 'time, gentlemen, please'. A characteristic of these formulae is that they allow us to predict fairly accurately the situation in which they will occur. The last category worth mentioning is that which describes how comestibles are sold or wrapped: 'a bar of soap', 'a tin of sardines', 'a ream of paper', 'a leg of lamb,' ' aside of beef', 'loaf of bread'. This is perhaps the most accessible of the categories for learners to cope with, partly because such collocations will exist in their native tongue and partly because they are practical, easily employable and easy to identify as 'clusters' even when embedded in text.
Implications for the Classroom
Learners need to be aware: a) that it is not denotative meaning alone which determines the way we select words to form sentences; b) of the need to record collocations as discrete lexical items and not try to learn vocabulary word by word. This can be done from the very start of their language learning when they meet such collocations as a loaf of bread, a packet of cigarettes, a bar of soap, a pair of socks.; c) authentic texts are more likely to contain useful collocations than specially constructed texts; d) training is needed on how to spot a collocation or a cluster and determine its boundaries.
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