Phraseology: A Corpus-Based Analysis of Collocations Between English Adjectives and the Noun Deal

Citation: Ibrahim, J. (2025). Phraseology: A Corpus-Based Analysis of Collocations between English Adjectives and the Noun Deal. Tasambo Journal of Language, Literature, and Culture, 4(1), 160-165. www.doi.org/10.36349/tjllc.2025.v04i01.016.

PHRASEOLOGY: A CORPUS-BASED ANALYSIS OF COLLOCATIONS BETWEEN ENGLISH ADJECTIVES AND THE NOUN DEAL

Jalaludeen Ibrahim, Ph.D.
Department of English and Literary Studies
Zamfara State University
jalalmaradun@gmail.com

Abstract

Using appropriate phraseological units and collocations is a prerequisite to proficient language use. Studies have shown that language learners do face challenges with collocations at both written and spoken levels since the majority of the learners rely heavily on language rules rather than context appropriateness when forming language chunks (Foster, 2001). This suggests that learners would often use words separately without taking note of the context of use. This project examined the phraseology and collocational patterns of adjective-noun combinations, specifically the noun deal and its collocations with big, good, and great. The analysis was based on the 100-million-word British National Corpus (BNC). The choice of this corpus was because it is one of the largest monolingual British English corpora. Targeted collocations were retrieved by browsing through the concordance software in the BNC using a simple query language. The findings demonstrate that native speakers’ knowledge of English collocations develops in parallel with their understanding of vocabulary, unlike non-native speakers, which may be in part because collocations are not taught.

“You shall know a word by the company it keeps”. J.R. Firth (British linguist, 1890-1960)

Keywords: British National Corpus (BNC), Collocations, Language Learners, Phraseology

1. Introduction         

Phraseology as a study of phrases plays an essential role in the corpus linguistic study of language. Choueka (1988) defined phraseology as “a sequence of two or more consecutive words …whose exact and unambiguous meaning cannot be derived directly from the meaning or connotation of its components”. This concept is further defined as the tendency of words to occur in a preferred sequence in naturally occurring language data (Groom, 2006: 25; Hunston, 2002: 138), implying that the meaning of words cannot be detected in isolation. Thus, the most effective way of studying phrases is by examining their collocations.

Collocation, which has been studied for about five decades, was brought into prominence in linguistics by Firth (1957: 194) when he said, “I propose to bring forward as a technical term, meaning by collocation, and apply the test of collocability”. The notion of collocation is essentially word-oriented and cohesive as it includes two (or more) lexical items that co-occur more frequently than would be expected by chance. Howarth (1996: 37) defined collocations as “fully institutionalized phrases, memorized as wholes and used as conventional form meaning pairings”. Therefore, the notion of phraseological collocations implies much more than inventories of idioms and systems of lexical patterns, which makes collocations mostly compositional. In this project, I used the term collocation in its Firthian sense, which can be interpreted as empirical.

While collocations seem natural to natural writers and speakers, the production of wrong collocations makes their spoken or written language awkward and non-native, partly because they learn them in very restricted contexts. For example, it is unnatural to have combinations like: the quick train, a fast shower or excruciating joy, but the fast train, a quick shower or excruciating pain. Collocations can also be partly or fully fixed expressions that are context-dependent – such terms as pay attention, blue sky, crystal clear, bright day and the nuclear family. This further confirms that a grammatically correct sentence may appear awkward if collocational preferences are violated, as appropriate use of collocation is now considered to be one of the key prerequisites for proficient language use. This project is limited to the study of noun deal and its collocations with the adjectives big, good, and great. The use of the noun deal in this context is not only metaphorical but also in its literal sense. Big deal: is usually an event or situation of great importance or consequence. Good deal: is an approval of something as pleasing (usually refers to a bargain). Great deal: often refers to a considerable quantity (that can also be applied to a business sense of transaction).

The purpose of this study is to have a deeper understanding of the meaning of noun deal and its actual usage in a sequence of words by native speakers of English, which will be useful to language learners as to how they can best use appropriate collocations. This study answers an immediate question that concerns the association of the noun deal with the adjectives big, good and great. While this study looks at the use of these collocations according to speaker sex, it further examines which of the collocations are frequently used by native speakers of English at both spoken and written levels and which are used in more formal and informal situations.

2. Previous Research

Hunston (2002:102) points out that corpus-based studies concerning phraseology have had an immense influence on applied linguistics and transformed the design of reference materials, particularly grammar books. Dictionaries now tend to define phrases rather than individual words, use definition sentences to illustrate phraseology, and further attempt to introduce collocational information into definitions. Collins Cobuild English Language Dictionary (Sinclair, 1995) and the Oxford Collocations Dictionary (Lea, 2002) are examples of such corpus-based dictionaries.      

Although the idea that certain words tend to occur near each other in a natural language is based on widely shared intuition, the concept of collocations has been one of the most controversial notions in Linguistics. Bartsch (2004: 76) emphasizes that collocations are “lexically and/or pragmatically constrained recurrent co-occurrences of at least two lexical items, which are in a direct syntactic relation with each other”. McCarthy (1990) opines that "collocation is a marriage contract between words and it forms an important organizing principle in the vocabulary of any language" and that the lack of collocational knowledge is one of the most important signs of foreignness among foreign language learners. Jackson (1988: 96) on the other hand argues that “the combination is not a fixed expression but there is a greater than chance likelihood that the words will co-occur”.

Kennedy (1991) carried out a study regarding the adverbial and prepositional uses of through and between (these are words many language textbooks have difficulty distinguishing the use of). After studying the collocations of these two words, Kennedy discovered that through is usually used after verbs such as fall, pass, go and run, whereas between is more frequently found after nouns like distinction, agreement, meeting and differences. In a study of the mismatch between prescriptive statements and actual language use, Berry  (1994) after studying the use of unless and if not came to a similar conclusion.

Dechert and Lennon (1989) in their study on the acquisition of collocations by advanced learners discovered that advanced English major subjects who had studied English for about ten years with contact with native speakers could not produce the language that conformed to native speaker criteria. Even though the production caused interrupted comprehension, the researchers maintain that the errors made by the subjects are only lexical ones, whereas the grammar is correct. Similarly, Seto (2009) conducted research on 54 expressions of agreement in 5 Hong Kong secondary textbooks and those in the Hong Kong spoken English corpus. The results revealed that only 7 of the 54 expressions of agreement used in the textbook corpus occurred in real language use. In the present study, I looked at adjective-noun collocations in BNC, with a focus on the noun deal and the adjectives big, good and great. This project is a first attempt at investigating these sets of collocations in the BNC.

3. Methodology

This study focused on the analysis of the actual use of the noun deal and its collocations with big, good, and great. The 100-million-word British National Corpus served as the basis of this analysis, due to the fact that it is one of the largest monolingual British English corpora. This corpus is selected as a reference for this project because it contains a wide range of both spoken and written British English. To address the formulated question, a simple query language method of search (BNCweb, version 4.3 CQP-Edition, 2010) was employed, the software of which is available from http://bnc.humanities.manchester.ac.uk/. It also has a built-in concordance program, through which the datasets were accessed for analysis. All relevant search functions are accessible in the BNC User Reference Guide (XML edition), 2006, available from http://www.natcorp.ox.uk/docs/URG/posguide.html.

4. Procedure and Queries

Targeted collocations were retrieved by browsing through the concordance software in the BNC using the following simple query language: (big| good| great) deal_NN* for the general search. For individual collocation search, I applied: 1. Big deal: (big) deal_NN* 2. Good deal: (good) deal_NN* & 3. Great deal: (great) _deal_NN*. I also applied “ignore case” in the query mode box to accommodate all instances of both lower and upper cases. Examination of the frequencies of collocates for the given nodes was conducted by applying “distribution” in the “New query” box. The approach employed in this study is both quantitative and qualitative.

5. Results and Discussion

Table 1: big deal, good deal, and great deal in the BNC

Collocation	Overall Frequency	Frequency Per 1m Words
Big deal	146	1.49
Good deal	1276	12.98
Great deal	4021	40.9
Total	5443	55.36

Figure 1: big deal, good deal, and great deal in the BNC

Table 1 and Figure 1 show the frequency of the target collocations as they appear in the BNC.  The collocation big deal consists of 146 hits with a frequency (per 1m words) of 1.49. The collocation good deal consists of 1276 hits and a frequency (per 1m words) of 12.98 while great deal consists of 4021 hits with a frequency (per 1m words) of 40.9. The total number of hits for the noun deal with big, good, and great is 5443 and a frequency (per 1m words) of 55.36. This demonstrates that great deal is the most frequently used phrase, which occurs as a collocation and good deal, is the second most frequently used one, which is much more often used than big deal.

Figure 2: frequency per 1m words for spoken and written texts

Figure 2 shows an analysis of the result based on whether a text is spoken or written as appeared in the BNC. For spoken text, big deal has a frequency (per 1m words) of 2.31, with good deal and great deal having 5.48 and 39.67. For written text on the other hand, big deal has a frequency (per 1m words) of 1.39 while good deal and great deal have 13.87 and 41.4. This shows that, for the collocation big deal, there are more occurrences in spoken texts than in the written texts in the BNC, while for good deal and great deal, there are more in written texts than in spoken texts. 

Figure 3: frequency per 1m words according to speaker sex

Figure 3 shows an analysis of the results based on the frequency (per 1m words) of speaker sex. For male speakers, big deal consists of a frequency (per 1m words) of 2.83 while good deal and great deal consist of 7.07 and 47.48. For female speakers, on the other hand, big deal consists of 1.22 while good deal and great deal consist of 3.65 and 20.36. This analysis demonstrates that male native speakers of English use the collocations big deal, good deal, and great deal more frequently than their female counterparts. The examples below illustrate the use of all three collocations in both formal and informal situations as appeared in the BNC:                                                      

1.      …it was no big deal to shut up shop in the middle of the day. (A6E 996).

2.      There’s no big deal about it. (JXT 2646).

3.      Still, it was no big deal, she tried to soothe her conscience. (JY2 1235).

4.      I don’t think it’s a big deal. (ADR 1335).

5.      The Fisheries Commission has made a big deal of the fact… (K2W 1323).

6.      I got a very good deal on the buoyancy aid. (KE0 4817).

7.      It’s used a good deal in the United States. (KRH 1474).

8.      There’s a good deal I could do. (ACE 249).

9.      I’ve written a good deal about traps. (ADY 613).

10.  Sponges vary a good deal in size and shape. (AMM 130).

11.  This system used to result in a great deal of food wastage. (A0C 1293).

12.  Temperatures can fluctuate a great deal at this time of year. (A0G 574).

13.  In fact, it does a great deal less! (A0M 1040).

14.  We have built up a great deal of knowledge… (A21 31).

15.  But things could be a great deal worse. (A3B 19).

6. Summary of Findings and Conclusion

The major findings of this study are summarised in relation to the postulated research question, which is based on the analysis in the BNC. The findings demonstrate that the most frequent of collocations great deal and good deal are used more often in writing than in speaking. The collocation big deal is used more often in speaking than in writing. Male native speakers of English do use all three collocations more often than their female counterparts. Native speakers of English often use all three collocations both in formal and informal situations. Mastering contexts of occurrence and appropriate use of these collocations plays a crucial role in equipping language learners to become more fluent, natural, and effective users of English. This is because native speakers often use these collocations instinctively, making their speech natural and elegant. Instead of saying “there is no large deal about it”, native speakers say “there is no big deal about it” as illustrated in (2) above. This attests that recognising correct collocations reinforces learners to understand conversations more quickly. For instance, knowledge of collocations makes learners more comfortable with expressions like “I got a very good deal on the buoyancy aid” or “But things could be a great deal worse” as demonstrated in (6) and (15). It is also important to point out that using the right collocations helps enhance clarity and professionalism in everyday interactions. Taken together, the findings derived from the corpus evidence reported here suggest that native speakers’ knowledge of English collocations develops in parallel with their understanding of vocabulary, unlike non-native speakers, possibly because collocations are not taught. With the availability of large samples of textual data and automated tools in the BNC, several directions for further study can be taken at this point.

Acknowledgment

This publication has been funded by the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) under Institution-Based Research (IBR) intervention. This grant is hereby gratefully acknowledged.

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