Powerful tea and other (im)possible collocations

Photo by Christina Martidou
via ELTpics on Flickr

How do you explain the notion of collocation to your students? Apart from using this great song, I often employ this simple technique: I write on the board: make and do (in the left column), homework and a mistake (in the right) and ask students to match.


I then use the matched combinations (do+homework; make+mistake) as a springboard to talk about how certain words go with certain other words, how these combinations may seem arbitrary and how they may differ significantly from the learners' L1. In fact, in many languages do and make correspond to the same word: cf. ~ faire in French; ~ делать (dyelat') in Russian, which shows how words with similar meanings often differ in their collocational behaviour. 

To illustrate this phenomenon, Michael Halliday, the founder of Systemic Functional Linguistics, who coined the term "lexicogrammar", used the words powerful and strong. In his 1966 article, Halliday demonstrates how, despite having similar meanings, "powerful" and "strong" have syntagmatic restrictions and can be distinguished by virtue of their collocations:

strong tends to go with "tea" (but not with "car"); powerful tends to go with "car" (but not with "tea")

These two (nearly) synonymous adjectives can be said to have different collocational fields, which - in this case - overlap because both adjectives can, for instance, modify the noun "argument": 

strong / powerful argument

For Halliday this is central to his idea of lexis being a separate level of linguistic organisation: it shows how the behavior of two elements in a contrastive pair cannot be predicted syntactically. Following Halliday many authors have used (and abused) powerful tea to illustrate the concept of collocation in general.

My search on Google Scholar yielded a number of papers which refer to "powerful tea":

Liu, D. (2010), Going Beyond Patterns: Involving Cognitive Analysis in the Learning of Collocations. TESOL Quarterly, 44: 4–30

Lapata, M., McDonald, S., & Keller, F. (1999, June). Determinants of adjective-noun plausibility. In Proceedings of the 9th conference on European chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (pp. 30-36). Association for Computational Linguistics.

Martyńska, M. (2004). Do English language learners know collocations. Investigationes linguisticae, 11, 1-12.

Yamashita, J., & Jiang, N. (2010). L1 influence on the acquisition of L2 collocations: Japanese ESL users and EFL learners acquiring English collocations. TESOL Quarterly, 44(4), 647-668.

Then there are books that talk about collocation and use "powerful tea" for illustrative purposes:

Celce-Murcia, M., & McIntosh, L. (1991). Teaching English as a second or foreign language. Heinle & Heinle

Robinson, P., & Ellis, N. C. (Eds.). (2008). Handbook of cognitive linguistics and second language acquisition. Routledge. Chicago

And, of course, there are numerous websites, blogs and PowerPoints which can be found online - all using powerful tea to demonstrate the phenomenon of collocability. Many of them refer to powerful tea as impossible collocation. But as anyone interested in corpus linguistics will tell you, nothing is really impossible in a language - especially when it is used for humorous or creative purposes. Halliday himself never referred to powerful tea as "impossible"; a more accurate description would be "less plausible".

As another neo-Firthian, John Sinclair noted:

“There are virtually no impossible collocations, but some are much more likely than others” (1966, p. 411 as cited in Baker 2011). 

Th issue of possible/impossible is further complicated by the nature of search engines themselves. A quick search on Google reveals that "strong tea" is indeed much more frequent; however, "powerful tea" is nonetheless common. A word of caution is in place here. After sifting through the results you find that it's not really tea that is being modified by the adjective "powerful" but rather the noun that follows "tea" such as:

powerful tea properties
powerful tea party organisations

This is something learners who rely on Google to check their linguistic intuitions may overlook. That is why Google, though perfectly acceptable as a quick-and-dirty tool, is generally not very reliable for rigorous corpus study.

Most interestingly, however, all the mentions of powerful tea on the web - whether it is referred to as impossible or unlikely collocation - are picked by Google and appear as 'legitimate' results. In other words, the more people write about powerful tea, the more likely it is to pop up in Google search results. This blog post, in which powerful appears next to tea at least 7 times, will inevitably contribute to the number of search hits citing "powerful tea" thus increasing the plausibility of the implausible collocation.

But why use this particular example? Surely there are other adjective + noun collocations which can be called upon to elucidate the concept:

current affairs
rough idea
vivid imagination
reckless driver (personal favourite)

These are just some examples my colleagues suggested in a recent Facebook discussion on the topic.

There are many contrastive pairs (like powerful/strong or make/do) which can be used too:

big deal (as opposed to "large")
fast track or fast food (as opposed to "quick")
on a daily basis (as opposed to "everyday")

There's no lack of verb-noun collocations either.

What examples would you give students to explain what a collocation is? Which one is your favourite? Do you find it helps students grasp the idea? And finally how can you convince students of the importance of collocations if it is often a matter of what's more plausible, rather than correct / incorrect? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below (and do check out that song :)

Thanks to Umut Salihoğlu and Avraham Roos for their input

References

Baker, M. (2011). In other words: A coursebook on translation. Routledge.

Halliday, M.A.K. (1966). Lexis as a Linguistic Level. Journal of Linguistics 2(1): 57-67