The grammatical associations that a word may have are known as colligations. Hoey (2003) shows that the word 'consequence', for example, when compared with other abstract nouns, is much more often employed as the subject rather than the object of a verb, and is very likely to be used as part of the complement, following the verb 'to be'. This colligational knowledge is important to advanced learners, who may know the word but produce sentences using it which sound 'ungrammatical'. Moreover the word, 'consequence' prefers to appear in prepositional phrases such as 'as a consequence' or 'in consequence', which appear at the beginning of a sentence. This positional preference of words is called textual colligation.