Ali Usman Umar: Aspects of Meaning

Aspects of Meaning by
Collocation and the Degree of
Collocability in Hausa Recurrent Word Combinations

Ali Usman Umar
Sashen Harsunan Nijeriya
Jami'ar Tarayya ta Lafia
+234 706 375 8416
alusumshariff@gmail.com

Introduction

This chapter deliberates on collocational use and behaviour of certain recurrent set expressions in Hausa with respect to their aspects of collocative meaning and the degree of collocability. Collocation is ubiquitous in everyday language communication, as a result of, which it is so substantial that language users need to take its pervasive practice into consideration; for, they should know when and why to be processing the collocational resources. It is obvious that meaning, context and culture are closely intertwined foregrounding with which the foundation for the background knowledge of more and more collocational information are naturally institutionalized for language use. The method employed for this paper is based on careful listening, consideration and observation of what native speakers are used to saying as their institutionalized expressions. We then intuitively retrieved such data in justification of the behaviour and usage of collocating words, and also the same data are analysed using contextualism or contextual field theory as its speculative yardstick. In the final analysis, the paper rationalized that the collocative meaning of the collocating words could be determined either in abstraction or literal meaning. Also, the reasons why words collocate or co-occur are because of their context of use, cultural norms, meaning relations, and mutual expectancy. Another thing which rendered the collocational use in the language more readily accessible, interesting, and worthwhile is both its ubiquity and the degree of collocability.

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