When complementation gets specific: A study of collocational preferences in verb–object combinations in Norwegian

Abstract This study investigates to what extent there are collocational preferences in the verb–object combinations of a large corpus of Norwegian and how important recurrent combinations are in usage. The material has been extracted from a large web-corpus of 700 million tokens and consists of dependency-based verb–object combinations. The overall importance of collocational preferences is demonstrated by the fact that the most frequent 5% of the verb–object combinations account for as much as 64% of the verb–object tokens in the material. The database of verb–object combinations contains measures of collocational strength and thereby allows us to model the mutual strength between the exemplars in the clusters found with individual verbs. Based on some studies of individual verbs and verb pairs, it seems safe to assume that speakers do distinguish between and prefer certain conventional verb–object combinations to other equally grammatical, equally transparent and equally understandable alternatives, and that speakers have access to complementation information at the level of exemplars.