WORDS TOGETHER

Students frequently worry about the meaning of individual words. However, English language is far from putting together strings of individual words because English language uses collocations, lexical chunks and idiom that frequently occur together in pair of groups.

Examples:

do business do the cooking get married save money catch a bus take a taxi

COLLOCATIONS

It refers to a group of two or more words that usually go together. However, there is often no reason for collocation.

CO meaning together.LOCATION meaning place.

Verb+Noun combination= COLLOCATIONS

LEXICAL CHUNKS

They are strings of words which behave almost as one unit.

Some of these are fixed (which means you cannot chane any word)

Over the moon Out of the blue

Some of them are semi-fixed (which means you can change some words

Nice to see you

Good to see you

Great to see you

IDIOMIt is a lexical phrase where the meaning of the whole phrase may not be comprenhensible even if we know the meaning of each individual word.

Examples:

Full of beans = Energetic

As plain as the nose on your face = Obvious

Many phrasal and multi-word verbs cause problems for learners precisely because they are idiomatic.