Collocation
Is Not a Crime!
A Letter from
SpecGram
Political Editors
Конспиративан Кретен and
Măgăriță Măgar
We have been very disturbed to hear recently how many people are discussing collocation as if it were a crime. Opposition research, an example that has come up in several discussions, is a totally legal collocation—certainly in the U.S., at least—and used all the time. It’s also perfectly reasonable to discuss the significance of any given act of collocation, because not all collocation is the same. Sometimes collocation goes nowhere—it happens once or twice and then never again, making it not at all statistically significant.
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Elena Musi, 2015, “Argomentare parlando e parlare argomentando: la polisemia della parola argomento nella Divina Commedia”, L’Analisi Linguistica e Letteraria Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 265–284.
Chiasmus of the Month
September 2018
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There’s also been a lot of talk about specifically Russian collocation—for example, соучастие в преступлении—but there’s no reason to single out collocation in one language as somehow less legitimate than another.
Another topic that has been showing up in our social media feeds is the vast importance of mid-terms. We firmly believe that students in introductory phonetics courses would do well to pay attention not only to the nucleus (the aforementioned middle of a presumably one-syllable term), but also the onset and coda. The whole term matters, people!
There’s also been talk of introducing a Space Force, which is silly on the face of it. We need to have a more coherent model of Illocutionary Force and Perlocutionary Force before we worry about the comparatively trivial significance of tabs, line feeds, and carriage returns—which barely rise to the level of even mere orthography! Zero-width spaces are nifty, but hardly warrant this level of investment and attention.
So-called “secret” recordings, published in dribs and drabs, have come up more than once, as well. In today’s digital world, of course, there’s no reason to keep your data secret and to yourself! Publish it all! Any theoretical framework with any explanatory power should be able to stand up to any scrutiny the data invites—unless you’re a theoretical fascist!
LATE BREAKING UPDATE: Ohhhhhhh! Collusion. That’s a whole ’nother kettle of ghoti.
