COLLOCATIONAL PATTERNS OF THE VERB MAKE IN BRITISH ENGLISH: EVIDENCE FROM THE BRITISH NATIONAL CORPUS

Annotatsiya

Collocation is one of the fundamental concepts in corpus linguistics because words do not occur randomly but tend to form recurrent combinations with other lexical and grammatical elements. The present study investigates the collocational patterns of the verb make in British English, with primary emphasis on the British National Corpus (BNC). The verb make is selected because of its high productivity and its ability to participate in a wide range of lexical, grammatical and semantic patterns. The study focuses on noun collocations, adjective-related constructions and selected grammatical patterns involving make. Particular attention is given to combinations such as make a decision, make an effort, make a mistake, make sure and other recurrent structures. The BNC is used as the principal corpus because it contains a large and varied collection of authentic British English from both written and spoken sources. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) is employed as a secondary comparative corpus to examine whether selected collocational tendencies are shared by British and American English. The study demonstrates that corpus-based analysis provides a reliable framework for identifying recurrent phraseological patterns and for distinguishing productive grammatical constructions from conventional lexical combinations. The findings highlight the importance of collocational competence for linguistic description, English language teaching and translation.