Collocations

Wherever a candidate writes in or chooses a single word, in the cloze, the open gap-fill and the Wortkasten, the fixed pair decides a good share of the gaps. In editing it decides nothing: there the error is always a word too many, never a wrong partner.

What follows is not a list of pairs to be learned by heart. It is a set of items shaped like those three tasks, plus a way to recognise a pair inside a sentence you have never seen.

The gap that sent you here

You most likely came here from the cloze, from this very item. Solve it once more.

Notice what was absent here. None of the four words is misspelled, none belongs to the wrong part of speech, and a dictionary permits all four after take. The only thing that makes three of them wrong is the company each of them habitually keeps. That is what a collocation is: two halves, each perfectly correct on its own, which together either occur or do not.

This is why the usual check fails. Translating the sentence is not enough: take responsibility and take into account translate differently, but the choice is not between translations, it is between continuations. So a different order of operations is needed.

The rule and a table

In any such pair one word cannot be changed, because the subject matter of the text fixes it, and the other is chosen to suit it. The one that cannot be changed is called the anchor word here: the word the pair is counted from. In the item above the anchor was the verb take sitting right in front of the gap, and the cost on the right held the anchor in place with it.

The anchor word does not have to sit next to the gap. Sometimes it is on the left, like take above. Sometimes it is on the right: in raise funds the fixed half is funds, and the verb is chosen to suit it. And sometimes it is several words away, when a relative clause or a modifier has pushed in between: in the decision that the board finally took the pair rests on decision and took, with four words between them.

A pair does have a meaning, but that meaning is not assembled from the halves. The verbs make, do, take, have, give and pay carry no meaning of their own inside such a pair, which is why they are called light verbs, and the right one is picked not by the sense of the phrase but by the noun attached to it: make an effort, never do an effort; do someone a favour, never make someone a favour. Some nouns take two: make a decision is the default everywhere, take a decision is standard British English too, and both score, while do a decision does not exist. The nouns beside them are often abstract, naming an action or a state rather than an object: decision, progress, attempt, break, look.

And a third case. Some pairs have frozen whole, function words included: in fact, at last, on the other hand, by no means, in no time, as a rule. Not even an exact synonym fits inside a phrase like that, and the word in the gap there often means nothing at all by itself.

Test the anchor straight away. Below are three open gaps, and in each of them the anchor word sits somewhere different: one word goes in, and there are no prompts.

The anchor has now been found in all three of the places it turns up. Next you have to do the same in a task that shows no options at all, and in one that shows a whole bank of them at once.

The same pair in the open gap-fill and the word bank

Open gap-fill. Exactly one word goes in, there is no bank of options, and nothing can give you a hint.

The noun appointed the verb in all three lines, and the verb gave nothing away. In the word bank the job is the other way round: the pieces come ready-made, and there are more spare ones than needed.

Wortkasten. The bank holds whole pairs, and several of them always fit the grammar.

The light verb has now been seen from both sides: written in, and handed over together with its noun. The next item breaks where nothing at all can be changed.

The same question in the cloze

Cloze. Four options, and all four mean roughly the same thing.

Not one synonym out of three went in. The same thing has to be written into an open gap-fill, where there are no options and nothing to prompt you.

The open gap-fill also likes to cut the one word of a frozen phrase that means least on its own. These phrases turn up in its texts again and again; each is recognised by the words that are left.

Six frozen phrases, all spotted by the words around the gap. From here there are no prompts left: no word bank, no task name, and no clue as to which of the three tests will do the work.

The last pass

A mixed set with no prompts. First a cloze, then a stretch of text with open gaps.

Three foreign anchors have been dropped. Below, the anchor sits somewhere different in each gap again, and the text is short: how a small bakery lasted its first year.

The practice text below is three sentences with three gaps. A real open gap-fill is a whole text with ten scored gaps and a worked example 0. A short text does not train the main thing a long one demands: holding the earlier paragraphs in your head and going back to a gap you skipped ten lines ago.

What to take away

Three tasks where this earns or costs points, and one neighbour that is often confused with it:

Cloze: where all four options are real pairs with different anchors Open gap-fill: where the pair is completed from a single visible word Wortkasten: where the bank holds the whole pair rather than a single word Phrasal verbs: there the particle changes the meaning of the verb instead of suiting a noun Choosing among four words: there four words share one meaning, and the neighbour, the grammar or a detail decides