Collocational restriction is a linguistic term used in
morphology
Morphology, from the Greek and meaning "study of shape", may refer to:
Disciplines
*Morphology (archaeology), study of the shapes or forms of artifacts
*Morphology (astronomy), study of the shape of astronomical objects such as nebulae, galaxies, ...
. The term refers to the fact that in certain two-word phrases the meaning of an individual
word
A word is a basic element of language that carries an objective or practical meaning, can be used on its own, and is uninterruptible. Despite the fact that language speakers often have an intuitive grasp of what a word is, there is no consen ...
is restricted to that particular
phrase
In syntax and grammar, a phrase is a group of words or singular word acting as a grammatical unit. For instance, the English expression "the very happy squirrel" is a noun phrase which contains the adjective phrase "very happy". Phrases can con ...
(cf.
idiom
An idiom is a phrase or expression that typically presents a figurative, non-literal meaning attached to the phrase; but some phrases become figurative idioms while retaining the literal meaning of the phrase. Categorized as formulaic language, ...
). For instance: the
adjective
In linguistics, an adjective ( abbreviated ) is a word that generally modifies a noun or noun phrase or describes its referent. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun.
Traditionally, adjectives were considered one of the ...
''dry'' can only mean 'not sweet' in combination with the
noun
A noun () is a word that generally functions as the name of a specific object or set of objects, such as living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas.Example nouns for:
* Organism, Living creatures (including people ...
''wine''.
A more illustrative example is the one given below:
*''white wine''
*''white coffee''
*''white noise''
*''white
rook
Rook (''Corvus frugilegus'') is a bird of the corvid family. Rook or rooks may also refer to:
Games
*Rook (chess), a piece in chess
* Rook (card game), a trick-taking card game
Military
* Sukhoi Su-25 or Rook, a close air support aircraft
* US ...
''
*''white man''
All five instances of ''white'' can be said to be idiomatic because in combination with certain nouns the meaning of ''white'' changes. In none of the examples does ''white'' have its commonest meaning. Instead, in the examples above it means 'yellowish', 'brownish', 'containing many frequencies with about equal amplitude', 'light-coloured' and 'pinkish' or 'pale brown', respectively.
Bibliography
*
* Crystal, D. (2003), ''A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics'', Blackwell, Oxford.
See also
*
Collocation
In corpus linguistics, a collocation is a series of words or terms that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance. In phraseology, a collocation is a type of compositional phraseme, meaning that it can be understood from the words ...
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Linguistic morphology