ABSTRACT
This chapter explores collocates – words that share a frequent or statistically marked relationship of co-occurrence – and the methods by which they can be analysed in a corpus. This chapter considers how such relationships of word co-occurrence within and across texts can contribute to representation in discourse through a focus on their associations, evaluations and connotations. Beginning with an introduction to the concept of collocation, the chapter then discusses how collocation analysis has been used to study representation in discourse, before demonstrating this application by way of two case studies which uncover the representations of social actors by, respectively, investigating discourse prosodies and interrogating collocation networks. The chapter then offers practical activities that readers can engage in to perform their own collocation analysis and concludes with a discussion of methodological reflections and current debates in this area.
