Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 649):
In general, the semantic basis of many instances of collocation is the relation of enhancement, as with dine + restaurant, table; fry + pan; bake + oven. These are circumstantial relationships (for collocations involving Process + Manner: degree, e.g. love + deeply, want + badly, understand + completely), but as the example with smoke + pipe illustrates, participant + process relationships also form the basis of collocation – the most important ones involving either Process + Range (e.g. play + musical instrument: piano, violin, etc.; grow + old) or Process + Medium (e.g. shell + peas, twinkle + star, polish + shoes); and there are also combinations involving functions in the nominal group, in particular, Epithet + Thing (e.g. strong + tea, heavy + traffic, powerful + argument) and Facet + Thing (e.g. pod + wales, flock + birds, school + fish, herd + cattle, gaggle + geese).
While we can typically find a semantic basis to collocation in this way, the relationship is at the same time a direct association between the words; if pipe is in the text then smoke may well be somewhere around, at least with considerably greater probability than if we just pulled words out of a hat on the basis of their overall frequency in the language. We get ready for it, so to speak; and hence if it does occur it is strongly cohesive (cf. Hoey’s, 2005, notion of lexical priming).