Reading Theory Through Collocations: How Words Acquire Conceptual Force
A reader encountering a theoretical text may know the words on the page without yet understanding what they are doing there. This is especially common when a familiar word acquires a more specific function within an author's vocabulary. Grid, trace, order, presence, subject, and language are ordinary enough words. Yet in a theoretical work, their ordinary meanings may no longer be sufficient to explain their use.
An author does not necessarily invent a new word when introducing a concept. More often, an existing word is redeployed. It retains something of its familiar sense while acquiring a particular role within a network of terms, distinctions, and arguments. The difficulty for the reader is therefore not always to discover a new definition. It may be to discover what the familiar word is doing in this particular text.
How, then, can we begin to determine what a word is doing when its theoretical function is not immediately clear?
One useful place to begin is with the company it keeps.
This is where the notion of collocation becomes useful. In lexical analysis, attention to recurrent combinations and patterns of co-occurrence can reveal aspects of use that remain invisible when a term is considered in isolation. The purpose is not to treat these patterns as ready-made interpretations. Rather, they provide evidence from which an interpretation can begin to be developed.
A simple principle will guide the discussion: A collocation is not an interpretation, it is a clue.
The usefulness of such a clue becomes particularly clear in Michel Foucault's The Order of Things, where the familiar word grid acquires a distinctive conceptual function.
1. Start with the Word You Don't Understand
Consider Foucault's formulation in the Preface to The Order of Things:
“the grid created by a glance, an examination, a language”
The word grid is not particularly difficult in itself. A dictionary might give us a network of intersecting lines, a framework, a structure divided into sections, or perhaps a table used for organizing information. None of these meanings is irrelevant to Foucault's sentence. Yet none quite tells us what the term is doing in this context.
This presents a familiar problem in reading theory. We recognize the word and therefore assume that we understand it. But recognition can be misleading. The difficulty may lie precisely in the fact that the word is familiar.
One response is to look for a definition. We might search for the passage in which Foucault explains what grid means, or consult a commentary that offers an interpretation. Both can be useful. But there is another, more immediate possibility: look at the word's other occurrences in the text.
With a digital copy of The Order of Things, this can be done with a simple document search. Search for grid. Collect the passages in which it occurs. Rather than reading each occurrence as an isolated definition, examine the words that repeatedly accompany it and the contexts in which those combinations appear.
The procedure is straightforward:
- search the document for the term;
- collect its recurring combinations;
- examine the surrounding sentences;
- compare the different contexts;
- ask what function appears to persist across them.
The method is simple enough to be used by a reader without specialized linguistic software. A PDF search function is sufficient to begin.
The important change is in the question we ask. Instead of starting with:
What does Foucault mean by grid?
we ask:
What does Foucault put around grid?
The first question seeks a definition. The second begins by looking for a pattern of use. That pattern may not settle the significance of the term, but it can give us something from which to work.
2. What Grid Keeps Company With
A search through The Order of Things produces a revealing set of combinations. Among them are expressions such as:
- grid of identities
- grid of differences
- grid of analysis
- grid of thought
- grid of language
- grid of denominations
The first thing to notice is not what these expressions mean but how they are constructed. The word following grid changes each time. Identities, differences, analysis, thought, language, and denominations are not interchangeable. Yet grid continues to perform a recognizable operation across these contexts.
A grid of identities suggests an arrangement through which identities can be distinguished. A grid of differences points toward a framework within which differences can be established. A grid of analysis evokes an organized field through which something can be examined. A grid of language connects the term to articulation and representation. A grid of denominations brings naming and classification into view.
The point is not that these expressions all have exactly the same significance. They do not. What matters is that they begin to reveal a recurring function.
The term repeatedly appears in contexts involving distinction, organization, comparison, naming, and intelligibility.
This gives us a first hypothesis about the word's role. Grid is not simply a metaphor for a physical arrangement. In Foucault's usage, it tends to designate some framework within which things can be related and differentiated.
But this hypothesis comes from the pattern of use, not from any single collocation.
This is why it is useful to return to the passage with which we began:
“the grid created by a glance, an examination, a language”
The sentence now looks somewhat different. Glance, examination, and language are not merely three incidental nouns placed after the word. They belong to the same semantic environment suggested by the other occurrences. A glance can distinguish; an examination can analyze; language can name and articulate. The grid is associated with the conditions through which such operations become possible.
The search has therefore not produced a definition of grid. It has done something more modest and, for a reader of difficult theory, potentially more useful. It has given the term a local semantic environment.
This distinction matters. The surrounding words do not define the concept for us. They give us evidence about the function the word performs.
We can now read the sentence with a more informed question. Rather than imagining a grid as simply a pre-existing structure imposed upon a collection of things, we can begin to ask what kind of arrangement allows identities, differences, examination, and language to operate in relation to one another.
The word has become less isolated. And that is precisely what makes the next step possible.
3. Collocations Are Clues, Not Definitions
It would be easy to turn this procedure into a mechanical method: search for a word, collect its collocations, and treat the resulting list as its theoretical meaning. That would be too simple.
A collocation tells us something about use. It does not, by itself, tell us how that use should be interpreted within an argument.
The distinction can be put schematically:
Dictionary definition
→ tells us something about the possible meanings of a word.
Collocation
→ shows us something about how the word is being used.
Conceptual interpretation
→ asks what that pattern of use means within the author's argument.
The movement is therefore not:
collocations → meaning
but:
collocations → evidence → interpretation
Suppose we encounter grid of identities and grid of differences. The expressions themselves do not explain why Foucault needs the concept of grid. They do, however, make something visible. The term repeatedly occurs where Foucault is concerned with relations of identity and difference, with processes of analysis and classification, and with ways in which things become intelligible.
That pattern allows us to formulate a hypothesis: grid may designate a framework or arrangement within which things can be distinguished, related, named, or understood.
But a hypothesis is not yet an interpretation. It has to be tested against the larger passages in which the term occurs.
This makes the procedure iterative rather than mechanical:
search → observe → hypothesize → reread → test
The search gives us a pattern. The pattern suggests a question. The question sends us back into the text.
This last movement is essential. The purpose of collocational analysis is not to replace close reading with counting words or collecting phrases. It is to give close reading a starting point when the function of a familiar term is unclear.
A reader may begin with a word that seems transparent. The search then reveals that it repeatedly occurs alongside certain kinds of expressions. Those patterns make a possible function visible. The reader returns to the passages and asks whether the proposed interpretation actually explains what is happening there.
In this sense, the digital search function is more than a convenience. Used carefully, it becomes a small instrument of interpretation. It allows the reader to move from the isolated word toward its textual environment before deciding what the concept is doing.
And that movement—from the term toward the network in which it operates—is what allows a familiar word to become visible as a theoretical one.
4. One Collocation Can Change the Reading
The pattern becomes more revealing when we encounter a passage in which Foucault gives grid a more specific role. Describing the Classical episteme, he writes of:
“language as the spontaneous tabula, the primary grid of things, as an indispensable link between representation and things”
Several features of this formulation deserve attention. Grid is no longer simply associated with identities, differences, or analysis. It is modified by primary and directly connected with things. More importantly, language itself is described as this “primary grid.”
The expression changes the question we should ask about the earlier occurrences. If grid were merely a convenient metaphor for a framework used to organize knowledge, we might expect it to operate at the level of classification: things are already there, and the grid provides a way of arranging them. Foucault's formulation suggests something more fundamental. The grid concerns the relation between representation and things themselves.
The word primary is particularly significant. It suggests that the grid is not simply applied after things have been encountered. It belongs to the conditions through which things can enter a particular relation with representation in the first place.
The surrounding passage makes the point historically precise. Foucault describes a Classical configuration in which representation provides the foundation of possible orders and language occupies a privileged position as the link between representation and things. From the nineteenth century onward, this arrangement changes: language loses that privileged status and becomes a historical form with “the density of its own past.”
This additional passage therefore does more than provide another example of grid. It reorganizes the evidence gathered from the earlier occurrences. What initially looked like a general metaphor for arrangement now appears to participate in a specific account of how things become ordered and represented within a historical configuration.
The collocations gave us the first clue. The larger passage allows us to test and refine it.
This is the point of following a theoretical word through a text. We do not begin with a complete interpretation and then search for confirmation. We allow recurring environments to generate questions, and then return to the argument to see what those questions reveal.
The method has taken us from a familiar word to a more precise understanding of its conceptual function.
5. From Collocation to Conceptual Network
There is a broader linguistic intuition behind this procedure. Saussure's theory of linguistic value makes explicit something that collocational reading can put into practice: a linguistic element becomes intelligible through the relations in which it functions. We do not need to revisit that theory here. What matters for the present purpose is the methodological consequence.
We begin with lexical relations and use them as evidence for reconstructing conceptual relations.
This distinction also helps clarify why the procedure is useful when reading theoretical authors whose vocabularies are particularly interconnected. Derrida, for example, explicitly directs attention to the network surrounding deconstruction. In Letter to a Japanese Friend, he says that the word acquires its value through a “chain of possible substitutions,” naming écriture, trace, différance, supplement, pharmakon, marge, entame, and parergon, among others.
Derrida gives the reader the network explicitly. Collocational analysis can help the reader discover a network that has not yet been made explicit.
This is especially useful when the difficulty lies not in an unfamiliar word but in a familiar one whose function has changed. The reader may recognize grid perfectly well and still fail to see why Foucault needs the word. Searching its occurrences does not solve the problem automatically. It gives the reader a body of textual evidence from which the problem can be reconstructed.
The same procedure can be extended beyond grid. When encountering a difficult term in a theoretical work, one can ask not only what the word means according to a dictionary or commentary, but what terms repeatedly accompany it, what distinctions surround it, what verbs it occurs with, and what kinds of objects it connects.
The result is not a glossary. It is a map of use.
And this may be one of the practical advantages of digital texts for reading theory. A search function allows a reader to follow a concept through a book rather than encountering it only at the point where it first becomes difficult. The text itself can become the first source of commentary on its terminology.
Conclusion — Read Outward
When a theoretical word seems difficult, our first instinct is often to isolate it:
What does grid mean?
But theoretical reading may sometimes require the opposite movement.
Look outward.
Search the text. Examine recurring combinations. Notice which terms change and which relations persist. Then return to the passages with a hypothesis about the word's function.
The point is not to replace interpretation with lexical analysis. It is to give interpretation a more concrete starting point. A dictionary tells us what a word can mean. Its collocations begin to show us what the word is doing.
This matters particularly when a theoretical author redeploys an ordinary word. Its familiar sense may remain present, but its role becomes clearer through the company it keeps within the text. Following those associations can reveal dimensions of the concept that an isolated definition leaves invisible.
The procedure is therefore modest. A collocation does not explain a concept. It does not establish a theory. It is simply a clue. But a good clue can change the way we read a difficult passage.
Sometimes the quickest way to understand a theoretical word is not to look more closely at the word itself, but to look at what surrounds it.
References
Lewis, M. (1993). The lexical approach: The state of ELT and a way forward. Language Teaching Publications.
Saussure, F. de. (1983). Course in general linguistics (R. Harris, Trans.). Duckworth. (Original work published 1916)
Foucault, M. (1970). The order of things: An archaeology of the human sciences (A. M. Sheridan Smith, Trans.). Tavistock Publications. (Original work published 1966)
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