SEMANTIC AND PRAGMATIC FEATURES OF ENGLISH COLLOCATIONS: A CORPUS-BASED STUDY

This article explores the semantic and pragmatic characteristics of English collocations through a corpus-based approach. Collocations, as stable combinations of lexical units, play a crucial role in natural language use and reflect both linguistic patterns and contextual meaning. The study aims to identify the most frequent types of collocations in English and analyze their semantic relationships and pragmatic functions in authentic discourse. The research is based on data obtained from major linguistic corpora, including the British National Corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American English. By applying quantitative and qualitative methods, the study examines lexical patterns, frequency distribution, and contextual usage of collocations across different genres. The findings reveal that English collocations demonstrate strong semantic cohesion and are often influenced by contextual and pragmatic factors such as register, discourse type, and communicative intention. Moreover, the study highlights the importance of collocational competence in language learning and translation, emphasizing that inadequate knowledge of collocations may lead to unnatural or inaccurate language production.