A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics David Crystal

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idioms, clichés, etc. Another important feature of collocations is that they are
formal (not semantic) statements of co-occurrence; e.g. green collocates with
jealousy (as opposed to, say, blue or red), even though there is no referential
basis for the link. Lexical items which are ‘collocated’ are said to be collocates
of each other; the potential of items to collocate is known as their collocability
or collocational range. A related notion is ‘semantic prosody’ (see semantics).
Collocational restrictions are analogous to the notion of selectional restrictions
in generative grammar. Collocations should not be confused with the
notion of word association in psychology, which refers to any kind of mental
relationship between words – for example, car might produce the association
New Zealand or Uncle Joe. Word associations of this kind are being increasingly
studied as part of psycholinguistics, especially for the light they throw
on cultural differences (e.g. in relation to bilingualism). See also paradigmatic,
syntagmatic.
colouring (n.) In phonetics, a perceived slight change in the quality
(‘colour’) of a vowel sound due to the influence of some nearby sound. For
example, ‘r-colouring’ occurs when a vowel is affected by the resonance of
a following r-type sound, most noticeably a retroflex; a following /h/ can
cause ‘h-colouring’.
combination (n.)
see combinatorial
combinatorial (adj.) A fundamental function of linguistic units to ‘combine’
with one another to produce more complex patterns. The ‘combinatorial properties’
or ‘relations’ of consonants and vowels, for example, can be used as a
definition of syllable (vowel as nucleus, consonants as margins). Combination,
in this sense, is a syntagmatic relation, and opposed to the paradigmatic
notion of contrast.
comitative (adj./n.) In languages which express grammatical relationships by
means of inflections, this term refers to the form taken by a noun phrase
(often a single noun or pronoun) when it is expressing the meaning ‘along
with’ or ‘accompanied by’. A comitative case (‘the comitative’) occurs in Basque,
for example, equivalent in English to the with-phrase seen in I went with my
friend.
command (n./v.) (1) A term used in the classification of sentence functions,
and defined sometimes on grammatical and sometimes on semantic or sociolinguistic
grounds. syntactically a command is a sentence which typically
has no subject, and where the verb is in the imperative mood, e.g. Come
here! Semantically it is primarily used to tell someone to do (or not do) something.
From a speech act point of view, the function of command may be
expressed using other forms, e.g. that boy will stand up, or by a dominant
intonation. The term is usually contrasted with three other major sentence
functions: statement, question, exclamation. In grammatical discussion,
commands are usually referred to as ‘imperative’ in form.
(2) In generative grammar, the term is used to express the structural relations
that hold between two elements in a tree. There are several uses of the