Definitions of Collocations and Their Usefulness : From the Viewpoint of Writing Collocations Dictionaries

神奈川県茅ヶ崎市The introduction in Oxford Collocations Dictionary for students of English (2002) says, to paraphrase, that the learning of English collocations is very important because the proper use of collocations makes students of English speak or write more natural and more native-speaker-like English. As the importance of learning or teaching collocations has been recognized, more and more different definitions of collocations have been provided by scholars. In this paper, I first examine several definitions of collocations recently provided by English scholars. I then make a draft plan as to what kinds of collocations should be chosen and entered in future collocations dictionaries based on these definitions, reviewing my ten-year experience of writing The Kenkyusha Dictionary of English Collocations (1995