4.4 Co-occurrence/correlation/contiguity

Correlation is a concept that should be common knowledge. It is most commonly encountered in the context of statistics. Roughly speaking a correlation is a close numeric relationship between data points. The most common type of correlation we encounter in corpus linguistics is co-occurrence, which is simply the observation that two linguistic structures happen in the same environment, mostly the same text, sentence, phrase or even right after one another. Another con word we have encountered is contiguity. Same prefix (con, Latin for with, together) same general idea, but different context. Contiguity is most often used in the sense of co-occurrence on the level of experience. It stresses the psychological aspects of perception and memory and what is perceived as occurring together. Contiguous stimuli aren’t necessarily correlated from an objective point of view. The main contrast to association that arises from contiguity is association that arises through similarity.

Consider the following scenario:

Every time you leave your house, an elderly woman from next door screams God bless, out of her window. It is likely that you will be reminded of this grandma when you hear this phrase. You associate the two because there is temporal contiguity. You might likewise be reminded of the woman and the phrase when you leave your house and the old lady is not around because there is also local contiguity.

Statistically speaking, there is no correlation between old women and yelling God bless out of windows. On a broader scale, however, the phrase might be correlated, i.e. more common, with older speakers. The correlation might be weak, but it isn’t unreasonable to hypothesize that. In order to judge that, only one piece of evidence alone isn’t enough to establish a correlation.

Now, on a linguistic level, there is definitely a relationship between God and bless. A linguistic con concept (no pun intended) is collocation, which refers to words that occur together significantly often. On the level of the individual piece of data, which is you experiencing this phrase again and again, in this particular discourse situation, the two words simply co-occur. Co-occurrence is just when things happen at the same time and/or same place. In order to know whether God bless is a collocation, you’d need more evidence for both God and bless.

All these differences might be subtle, but they should rarely cause confusion. The biggest differences lies in the communicative context they are used in. In some sense, the relationship between some of those con words is one of synonymy, with which we have come full circle for this week. Them being very similar doesn’t mean, however, that they are interchangeable, especially not in academic prose.

If anything, the principle of no synonymy is even truer in academic language. ;)