Colligation is the tendency of a word to co-occur with particular grammatical categories or patterns, just as Collocation describes its tendency to co-occur with particular words. Where collocation is a lexical phenomenon (word + word), colligation is a lexico-grammatical one (word + grammar).
The term was coined by J.R. Firth (1957) alongside collocation, but received less attention until corpus linguistics made it observable at scale. John Sinclair (1991, 2004) developed it as part of his model of the "extended unit of meaning," and Michael Hoey (2005, Lexical Priming) placed it at the centre of his theory of how language is stored and processed.
Every word carries grammatical preferences that are not captured by general grammar rules:
These patterns are probabilistic, not absolute. They are revealed by concordance analysis of large corpora.
Hoey (2005) argued that every word is "primed" through repeated encounters to occur in certain collocations, colligations, semantic associations, and textual positions. Colligation is part of this priming: speakers do not choose grammar and then fill in words; they retrieve words already primed for particular grammatical environments.
This challenges the traditional separation of grammar and vocabulary. If consequence is primed to appear after the and before of, the grammar is not separate from the word; it is part of knowing the word.