Assalamualaikum,

Howdy guys, as promised earlier, I’ve uploaded the solution to the second part of your quiz the other day. Do what u should do with it.

Ciao.

solution-to-quiz-1.doc

Definition of Collocation

Definitions of Collocation on the Web:

Phrases composed of words that co-occur for lexical rather than semantic reasons, for example, a heavy smoker is one who smokes a great deal, but someone who writes a great deal is not a heavy writer. This seems to be a lexical fact, not related to the meanings of smoker or writer.
www.essex.ac.uk/linguistics/clmt/MTbook/HTML/node98.html

The frequency or tendency some words have to combine with each other. For instance, Algeo notes that the phrases “tall person” and “high mountain” seem to fit together readily without sounding strange. A non-native speaker might talk about a “high person” or “tall mountain,” and this construction might sound slightly odd to a native English speaker. The difference is in collocation.
web.cn.edu/kwheeler/lit_terms_C.html

The likelihood that a particular word will occur in the neighborhood of another word. This tendency can be exploited by commercial names. The words ’spick’ and ’span’ are an example of collocation. We also associate ‘baa’ with ’sheep’ and ‘moo’ with ‘cow’.
www.catch-word.com/glossary.html

The tendency for words to occur regularly with others: sit/chair, house/garage.
www.finchpark.com/courses/glossary.htm

A grouping of words in a sentence
juxtaposition: the act of positioning close together (or side by side); “it is the result of the juxtaposition of contrasting colors”
wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

Within the area of corpus linguistics, collocation is defined as a pair of words (the ‘node’ and the ‘collocate’) which co-occur more often than would be expected by chance.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collocation

Were caught or are caught?

When do we use ‘were caught’ and ‘are caught’? The former is under past perfect tense while the latter falls under present perfect tense. Now the emphasis is on the timing. ‘Were caught’ is used to describe an event which has happened in the past and will not recur. Meanwhile, ‘are caught’ is used to describe the situation, say when a group of thieves are already apprehended, in the present to inform others the thieves are still in custody.