The Frequency of Lexical Collocation and Grammatical Collocation Patterns in the Extracts of AL- Shehristani

Abstract

Language is a means of communicating ideas, messages, and thoughts. Todo an effective communication, we have to know not only individual wordsof that language, but also how they fit together. Both the grammatical andlexical words are of central importance to identify a word in question in acertain sense. The combination of words that co-occur together repeatedly iscalled collocation. Collocation is found in all natural languages. It is dividedinto two types: lexical and grammatical collocations. Lexical and grammaticalcollocations are used in English to enrich the language producing native-likewritten production.Hibit AL-Din AL- Shehristani, who is a religious character and attemptsto preserve Islam as it is, uses this phenomenon for various functions. Thus,this paper intends to identify the different categories of lexical collocationsand grammatical collocations used in his articles and to find out which categoryof lexical collocation and grammatical collocation is the most frequent.Moreover, it shows the importance of using each category. The data whichinvolve different extracts taken from the articles of AL- Shehristani are analyzedusing a model of Lewis’ s (2002) categories of lexical and grammaticalcollocations.The study reveals that the translated extracts of Al-Shehristani exploit themost dominant categories of lexical and grammatical collocation but with differentfrequencies depending on what he wants to convey to his readers. Italso reveals that these categories enrich his speech creating native- like articlesand interest in reading wherever the reader is.