In linguistics, co-occurrence or cooccurrence is an above-chance frequency of ordered occurrence of two adjacent terms in a text corpus.
Co-occurrence in this linguistic sense can be interpreted as an indicator of semantic proximity or an idiomatic expression.
Corpus linguistics and its statistic analyses reveal patterns of co-occurrences within a language and enable to work out typical collocations for its lexical items.
Analysis of these restrictions can lead to discoveries about the structure and development of a language.
Co-occurrence can be quantitatively described using measures like a massive correlation or mutual information.