The Lexical Features of Types of Linguistic Collocations: A Study with Special Reference to Selected Public Administration Circulars in Sinhala and Their English Translations

Abstract

Language is designed to fulfil the communication requirements of communities. Each language has specific and unique characteristics in comparison to any other language. Collocation is also a vital concept that assists in enhancing the quality and formality of both written and spoken languages. The concept of collocation means a set of words that naturally or unintentionally co-occur together to deliver a particular meaning. The attention of many researchers and scholars has been drawn to this concept due to the absence of a recognized or fully accurate definition and classification in this regard. This study aimed at identifying the lexical features of the types of linguistic collocations used in Public Administration Circulars in Sinhala. The study focused on four linguistic collocations suggested by Li et al. (2005). Accordingly, lexical features such as word length, word frequency, high-frequency words, and low-frequency words were identified. The data were collected for the research after extensive analysis of circulars and then the specific sets of words and terms were extracted. Content analysis was used to analyze data. The results of the study indicate that the most frequently used type of linguistic collocation in Public Administration Circulars are fixed collocations. The highest word length of fixed and strong collocations belongs to the 3-letter word group and in loose collocations, the 4-letter word group represents the highest value. Furthermore, the word frequency of fully fixed collocations is equal for each word. The maximum word frequency of fixed collocations and strong collocations is 13, whereas the highest word frequency of loose collocations is 4.