Creative Collocations

Abstract

Chapter 2 looked at Dickens’ familiar collocations of common words and indicated certain distinctive collocational tendencies, Dickens’ characteristic predilection for particular collocations, and his avoidance of collocations frequently found among other nineteenth-century writers through a quantitative survey of his works. As well, some familiar collocations used structurally or rhetorically were (through the analysis of collocations in relation to characters, themes and contexts) shown to be evidence of Dickens’ ‘creative’ language use. However, a more definitive treatment of what may be considered ‘Dickensian’ will be presented in the following sections, which examine unique or unusual collocations, known as ‘creative collocations’. These will be examined under eight categories: (1) metaphorical collocations, (2) transferred collocations, (3) oxymoronic collocations, (4) disparate collocations, (5) unconventional collocations, (6) modified idiomatic collocations, (7) parodied collocations and (8) relexicalized collocations.