Volume 55, Issue 3

This paper gives an overview over the development of the concept and the term collocation, focussing on French lexicography. The first section examines the place of collocations within phraseology, introducing the two constituents of collocations, base and collocator. The article then goes on to present a history of the treatment of collocations in dictionaries; furthermore, the author reflects on the role collocations have had in linguistic theory, pointing out that collocations have only been treated systematically in the second half of the 20 th century. Vorbemerkung Die folgende Darstellung bezieht sich vorrangig auf das Franzosische und Deutsche. Aus anglistischer Sicht ist sie zu lesen als Pladoyer für die Erforschung der englischen Kollokationslexikographie vor Aufkommen des Kollokationsbegriffs.

The production of learners’ dictionaries raises a number of specific problems regarding the treatment of collocations and examples. It has been claimed, among other things, that example sentences should not be based exclusively on collocations. The present article argues that a clear distinction must be drawn between collocations and examples, and that, under certain conditions, collocations must also be exemplified. It discusses various approaches to the microstructural arrangement of collocations and establishes guiding principles for the choice and presentation of examples.

This paper seeks to explain the process and principles behind the selection and presentation of collocations in the Oxford Collocations Dictionary for Students of English. It argues for a pragmatic interpretation of the concept of collocation, based firmly on the needs of language learners. Thus, the whole range of collocations is included, from the relatively weak to the strongest and most restricted, but with the greatest emphasis on the “medium-strength” collocations between these two extremes. Judgements were not made as to the “predictability” of particular word combinations. The presentation of the collocations in the dictionary is designed to make selection of the best collocate by the user as intuitive as possible. Where possible, grammar is “pre-digested”, with collocates presented in the form in which they are most likely to be used. Collocates are grouped (but not labelled) according to semantic categories. The aim was to make the dictionary accessible not only to keen linguists, but to all who wish to improve their writing in English, whether interested in the mechanics of the language or not.

This article studies advanced French-speaking learners’ knowledge of make-collocations. It suggests that, while an investigation of the errors found in a learner corpus may be enlightening, it should ideally be complemented by two other types of analyses, namely a comparison of the learner corpus data with native data, which highlights phenomena of overuse or underuse, and elicitation tests, which focus on competence rather than performance. Using such a threefold approach, this study shows that, while the learners under study do not make many errors, they tend to underuse make-collocations and limit themselves to those which have a direct equivalent in their mother tongues and are therefore safer. When forced to produce certain collocations or judge their acceptability, on the other hand, they reveal their collocational deficiencies and unreliable judgements.

Of-less noun phrases like a couple tons, a lot food, a pair clogs are not unusual in modern English. The paper attempts to describe the phenomenon, assess its significance and explain its history. It is concluded that the construction is less of a modern careless defective variant and more of a historically motivated one.

The following article discusses nominal constructions with syntactic dependents. The focus lies on so-called “shell nouns”, such as fact, idea or problem, i.e. nouns that can be described as “containers” reducing complex pieces of information expressed by clauses. After describing the relationship between the two linguistic approaches of idiom principle and construction grammar, the article goes on to present a corpus analysis of shell nouns and their respective syntactic complementations, coming to the conclusion that these complementations can be described as constructions, in the sense that the syntactic patterns can be said to convey a meaning that goes beyond the semantic sum of the constituents.