Collocations are either grammatical elements, including correct prepositions in phrases like in summary and phrasal verbs like talk about or look into, or conventions of usage, as when only some adjectives are more usually used to modify particular nouns, for example utter joy, or righteous indignation.
You can research prepositions using a good learners’ dictionary, where common preposition and adjective collocations are often explained, or a concordancer; a computer program that searches text corpora for incidences of word usage and displays examples in sentences for easy comparison.
LINKS:
The following online tools are a good place to research correct collocations in English:
- ozdic (collocations dictionary)
- wordandphrase.info (concordancer, thesaurus, formality analysis)