Himalayan Linguistics

Collocation in general, refers to the habitual and more predictable co-occurrences of lexical items in a syntactic construction. These lexical items co-occur by choice. Certain lexical items pull each other towards themselves and so their occurrence is more frequent than others. There is no explanation to why we say black tea but dark chocolate , or why blond goes only with hair and not with any other similar object. Collocation adorns an utterance with a more specific and unique sense. J.R Firth (1957) observed collocation as a part of the meaning of a word. This paper explores the basic morphological patterns of collocation in Assamese, a language of the Indo-Aryan family, spoken in the North-East Indian State of Assam. As collocations give interesting insights about how a language community perceives life and the world, I have chosen a few themes to see how creatively Assamese uses collocations and to observe their mappings with the morphological patterns. This paper also throws light on how ‘gender’ and the ‘formal-informal distinction’ affects collocations in Assamese.