  A perspective of statistical language models which emphasizes their
collocational aspect is advocated. It is suggested that strings be generalized
in terms of classes of relationships instead of classes of objects. The single
most important characteristic of such a model is a mechanism for comparing
patterns. When patterns are fully generalized a natural definition of syntactic
class emerges as a subset of relational class. These collocational syntactic
classes should be an unambiguous partition of traditional syntactic classes.
