Abstract
COLLOCATIONS AS COHESIVE DEVICES IN ENGLISH AND ALBANIAN
This research will be focusing upon the idea of having to identify the neighboring words and their respective grammatical categories in terms of how they precede or succeed collocations bearing lexical cohesiveness. “Jackson and ZeAmleva (2007) in their book Words, meaning, and vocabulary claim that the best way to predict patterns of co-occurrence between words is to establish lexical fields which contain words belonging to the same register/setting of use” (Jackson and ZeAmleva; 2007). The theory in hand is also known as the theory of ‘semantic fields’ or ‘lexical field theory’. The research in hand reflects the way Albanian and English make use of linguistic items in terms of achieving lexical cohesion within a text through using collocations as lexical cohesive devices. The lack of previous research conducted by Albanian linguists in regard to collocations in general and their neighboring words in particular did hamper the research to some extent since the latter could not manage to rely on other studies made in the field when it comes to drawing conclusions and comparing the results derived. The research concludes that both English and Albanian tend to have the nouns ‘God’ and Religion’ associate themselves with other nouns forming patterns of occurrence which are ought to be modeled and studied. The research also concluded that the nouns ‘God’ and ‘Religion’ reflect a higher frequency of collating with other nouns in Richard Dawkins’ God Delusion whereas Albanian is more diverse in terms of the linguistic items that collate with the nouns ‘Religjioni’ and ‘Zoti’.
Keywords
collocations, context, cohesive devices, text associations, discourse
