Collocation Colligation and Dictionaries

COLLOCATION, COLLIGATION ANDENCODING DICTIONARIES. PART I:LEXICOLOGICAL ASPECTS

Dirk Siepmann: Universita« t-GH Siegen, Fachbereich 3, Adolf-Reichwein-Stra�e,D-57068 Siegen,Germany ([email protected])

Abstract

This article attempts to synthesise recent advances in collocational theory into a

coherent framework for lexicological theory and lexicographic practice. By posing a

number of fundamental questions related to the definition of collocation, it critically

reviews frequency-based, semantic and pragmatic approaches to collocation. It is found,

among other things, that two types of collocation, namely ‘long-distance’ collocation

and collocation between semantic features, have suffered almost total neglect. This leads

to suggestions for a new division of the collocational spectrum and for a revised

definition of ‘collocation’ based on the notions of ‘usage norm’ (Steyer 2000) and

‘holisticity’ (Siepmann 2003). It is argued that this new view of collocation considerably

widens the dictionary maker’s brief, since future lexicography will have to provide a full

account of both structurally simple and structurally complex units, including fixed

expressions of regular syntactic-semantic composition (see Part II of this article, to be

published in the March issue of this journal).

1. Introduction

According to modern science, there is no such thing as ‘independent existence’;

at least since the advent of chaos theory, there has been full recognition that

all forms of life and material phenomena, whether at the micro-level or at the

macro-level, are interdependent. In linguistics, this realization has found its

fittest expression in the idea of linguistic rather than literary ‘intertextuality’,

whereby the meaning of one text and its constituent elements depends on

millions of other texts using similar or identical elements. Textual meaning is

thus created by the interplay of two types of repetition, viz. (a) collocation

(in the largest possible sense, including colligation1 and phraseology) and

(b) cohesion. It turns out that one instance of collocation and the entire

language are mutually illuminating, since the instance is understood in terms of

International Journal of Lexicography, Vol. 18 No. 4� 2005 Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions,please email: [email protected]

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the whole, and the whole in terms of the instance (cf. Hunston 2001: 31); taking

this a bit further, we might say that not only is each pattern necessary for

comprehending the sum total of similar patterns, but each pattern is

also a miniature version of that sum total, as shown by the fact that the

meaning of individual patterns (e.g. German ‘sonniges Gemut’ [‘sunny

disposition’¼ irrepressible high spirits] vs ‘sonnige Lage’ [sunny location]),

even if shorn of any context, is evident to the native speaker.

This relatively recent view of meaning creation (Hoey 1991, 1998, 2000,

Feilke 1994, 1996) seems much more in keeping with speakers’ intuitive

knowledge about language than was the case in earlier structuralist theories.

The latter tended to assume that expressions such as ‘sonnige Lage’ have

both a compositional, literal meaning and a non-compositional, figurative

meaning (Feilke 1996: 128). In an intertextual or socially-based view of

meaning creation, the compositional meaning is exposed for what it is, namely

an abstraction of the linguist which has no base in the native speaker’s

mental lexicon; the expression ‘sonnige Lage’ is then considered to be a

‘holistic’ sign that is irreducible to the sum of its parts. In a related

development, computational and cognitive linguists have used corpus-linguistic

insights to work out models of language grounded in actual usage rather

than abstract general rules (Chandler 1993, Croft and Cruse 2003, Skousen

1989). In these models word or clause formation is by analogy with existing

exemplars, and it will be seen that such models can also be applied to

collocation.

This article reviews, one by one, the various defining criteria that have in

the last half century been called upon to define the notion of collocation,

pursuing a dual objective: (a) to show that none of these criteria apply in

all cases, so that we can at best give a prototypical definition of collocation,

and (b) to demonstrate that the problems associated with the definition

of collocation stem from the mechanistic, old-paradigm view of language

embodied in structuralist theories which try to impose theoretical abstractions

on an infinitely complex reality arising from communicative interaction and

the institutional practices such interaction puts in place. This will then allow

us to provide a more secure and more broadly based underpinning for the

treatment of colligation and collocation in lexicography. With the exception

of Steyer (2000), no such model has as yet been proposed.

The subject of collocation has been approached from two main angles:

on one side are the semantically-based approaches (e.g. Benson 1986, Mel’cuk

1998, Gonzalez-Rey 2002, Hausmann 2003, Grossmann and Tutin 2003) which

assume a particular meaning relationship between the constituents of a

collocation; on the other is the frequency-oriented approach (e.g. Jones and

Sinclair 1974, Sinclair 1991, Sinclair 2004, Kjellmer 1994) which looks at

statistically significant cooccurrences of two or more words. This theoretical

distinction is paralleled by a geographical divide: the semantic approach has its

410 Dirk Siepmann

origins in continental European research into phraseology, while the frequency

approach is firmly rooted in British contextualism. There has until now been

surprisingly little exchange between the two groups, and when the semanticist

Hausmann (2003) claims to have won the war over collocation, one wonders if

that war has ever been fought.

A third, more recent approach to phrasemes and collocations (Feilke 1996,

2003) might be termed ‘pragmatic’, since it claims that the structural

irregularities and non-compositionality underlying such expressions are

diachronically and functionally subordinate to pragmatic regularities deter-

mining the relationship between the situational context and linguistic forms.

In this view, collocation can best be explained via recourse to contextualisation

theory (Fillmore 1976).

In what follows, I shall argue that there is no reason to resort to the military

metaphor, let alone go to war on matters of collocation. It is much wiser to

unify the three approaches. Tersely stated, I shall argue the following theses:

(1) Only the frequency-based approach can provide a heuristic for discovering

the entire class of co-occurrences; in a way, it is safe from refutation, but

empty – it gives us all the raw material, but tells us nothing about how this

material came to be or how it is to be structured; it has also resulted in

lexicographic products of doubtful value, such as Kjellmer (1994) and

Sinclair (1995) (cf. Hausmann 2003: 319–320, Siepmann 1998).

(2) By contrast, the semantically-based approach is fragmentary – it cannot

account for all possible cases. It would nevertheless seem absurd to

abandon such an intuitively appealing approach at the first appearance of a

counterexample, since it has given rise to reliable collocational dictionaries

such as Langenscheidts Kontextworterbuch Franzosisch-Deutsch.

(3) Likewise, as I shall explain below, a purely pragmatic approach relying on

the extralinguistic context cannot explain a large number of co-occurrences

operating at the level of semantic features.

(4) It follows from this that the debate between the various approaches is a

more/less rather than a yes/no issue. What is needed is an extension of the

semantically-based approach that will take account of strings of regular

syntactic composition which form a sense unit with a relatively stable

meaning. ‘Lexical bundles’ (Biber et al. 1999) such as je sais que c’est or it’s

been will not be included among the class of collocations (cf. Siepmann

2003). Although such sequences may perform similar or identical functions

across a range of texts, they have no meaning ‘by themselves’. In sharp

contrast, there are good theoretical and practical reasons for subsuming

under the notion of collocation such colligational patterns as regarde ou tu

vas, dans les colonnes de (þ name of newspaper or magazine) or si elle est

prise a temps (referring to an illness), which have so far been regarded as

free sequences of words subject only to general rules of syntax and semantics.

Collocation, Colligation and Encoding Dictionaries 411

For greater expository convenience, the various questions raised by the

discussion of the above theses will be broken down under five separate heads:

(1) How many elements make a collocation?

(2) What elements make a collocation?

(3) Are collocations arbitrary?

(4) Can we distinguish between collocations and phraseology on the one hand,

and collocations and free combinations on the other?

(5) Are collocations monosemous and monoreferential? Are there synonymic

collocations?

This will lead to a division of the collocational spectrum into four major

categories, all of which have their role to play in the making of dictionaries,

especially those aimed at the non-native speaker.

My theoretical arguments will be leavened with a large number of concrete

examples encountered during the ongoing compilation of three unabridged

bilingual thesauri intended mainly for non-native speakers of English, French

and German (the ‘Bilexicon’ project). All of these examples have been drawn

from the following authentic sources (for a detailed account of corpus

construction, see Siepmann 2005):

(a) electronic editions of wide-circulation quality newspapers and news

magazines (The Times, The Guardian, The Economist, Le Monde,

Le Monde Diplomatique, Suddeutsche Zeitung, Frankfurter Rundschau,

Der Spiegel );

(b) a large corpus of academic texts produced from reviews, journal articles,

doctoral theses and portions of books;

(c) 50-million-word corpora of fiction and fan fiction freely available on

the Internet;

(d) a 100-million word corpus of the language of motoring based mainly on

Internet sources.

Table 1 gives a breakdown of the sources used by corpus type, content, size,

baseline year and analysis software.

2. Howmany elementsmake a collocation?

It is accepted wisdom among European researchers that collocations are

binary units, and this is probably true for the majority of the class. Thus, the

most common type of collocation is the combination of a noun with a verb,

and there are hundreds of thousands of examples which confirm this point

of view (e.g. take a step, launch an appeal ). Mel’cuk (most recently 2003)

argues that the constituents of such collocations tend to be linked by a

standard lexical function, such as Magn (rely on [Magn]¼ heavily, beautiful

412 Dirk Siepmann

Table 1: Corpora used in this study

Corpus (Abbreviation) Type Content Word Count Baseline Year

Corpus of Academic

English (CAE)

full-text reviews, journal articles, doctoral

theses and portions of books

30 million 1980 (less than 5% of texts

predate 1980)

Corpus of Academic

French (CAF)




predate 1980)

Corpus of Academic

German (CAG)




predate 1980)

Corpus of English

Fiction (FE)

full-text and samples reviews, journal articles and

portions of books from CAE

50 million 1980

Corpus of French

Fiction (FF)


portions of books from CAF

50 million 1980

Corpus of German

Fiction (FG)


portions of books from CAG

50 million 1980

Corpus of English

Motoring (CME)

full-text and samples Internet forums and chatrooms,

electronic magazines, transport

sites, encyclopaedia and

dictionary articles

100 million 1995

British Newspapers and

News Magazines (NE)

full-text Issues of The Times, The

Guardian and The Economist,

published in London

100 million 1990

(Continued)

Collo

catio

n,Collig

atio

nandEncodingDictio

naries

413

Table 1: Continued

Corpus (Abbreviation) Type Content Word Count Baseline Year

French Newspapers and

News Magazines

full-text Issues of LeMonde and LeMonde

diplomatique, published in Paris

100 million 1990

German Newspapers and

News Magazines (NG)

full-text Issues of Suddeutsche Zeitung,

Frankfurter Rundschau and Der

Spiegel, published respectively

in Stuttgart, Frankfurt and

Hamburg

100 million 1990

414

Dirk

Siep

mann

[Magn]¼ drop-dead2). Furthermore, as Hausmann (2003), Siepmann (2003,

2004) and Schafroth (2003) have argued, many three-element collocations can

be shown to be reducible to a binary structure:

(1) allgemeine Gultigkeit haben -4 (allgemeinþGultigkeit)þ haben

hohes Ansehen genießen -4 (hohesþAnsehen)þ genießen

ulcere gastrique benin -4 (ulcereþ gastrique)þ benin

prendre une bouffee d’air -4 (airþ bouffee)þ prendre

joli petit cul -4 (culþ petit)þ joli

not wildly original -4 (originalþwildly)þ not

The same goes for combinations of multi-word idioms and other items;

consider for example his plan came to fruition or their disagreement brought

them to blows.

Some of these three-element collocations have a higher frequency of

occurrence than their constituents, which suggests that they are learned and

reproduced as wholes rather than recombined each time, but this presents no

serious challenge to the view of collocation as a binary phenomenon. More

threatening to this view are irreducible three-element collocations such as the

following:

(2) the car holds the road well (?holds the road [may be used of tyres]) -4la voiture tient bien la route/tient la route (meaning either ‘holds the

road well’ or ‘stays on course’) -4 der Wagen hat eine gute Straßenlage

(*hat eine Straßenlage)

the car has too wide a turning circle -4 la voiture braque mal -4der Wagen hat einen zu großen Wendekreis

In two of the languages under consideration the three-element collocation

cannot be broken down into what seem to be its two major constituents. Thus,

while it is perfectly possible to single out gute Straßenlage as one constituent

of the German collocation, the word combination *eine Straßenlage haben

is inadmissible in German.3 It is also pertinent to note that the English

collocation does not appear to have a negative counterpart (a search for

hold the road poorly/badly on Google yields no results), whereas the opposite

is true of the French collocation, where the adverb is optional and a negative

wording appears admissible (la voiture tient mal la route). Other examples of

this type include:

(3) avoir un geste deplace (FF) -4 (?)avoir un geste

recevoir un accueil chaleureux -4 (?)recevoir un accueil

take a harder line (against) (NE) -4 (?)take a line (against)

shall I break this note into something smaller (NE)

den Kasten sauber halten (NG) (football)


Once we have grasped this concept of the three-element collocation, it is easy

to see that many binary word combinations which have traditionally been

regarded as free (such as accepter des pieces) are in fact embedded in larger

structures of a collocational nature, such as the following three-element

collocations with a non-human object:

(4) the pay and display machine (parking meter, etc.) only takes twenty cent

coins -4 l’horodateur (le parcmetre, etc.) n’accepte que des pieces de

20 centimes -4 der Parkscheinautomat (die Parkuhr usw.) nimmt nur

20 Cent-Stucke

the battle (war, etc.) claimed many casualties -4 la bataille (la guerre, etc.)

a fait beaucoup de victimes -4 die Schlacht (der Krieg, etc.) hat viele

Opfer gefordert

cette experience a marque ma vie -4 dieses Erlebnis hat mein Leben

gepragt

The list of such examples could be lengthened. With collocations such as

hold the road (subject: tyre), tomber a gros flocons (subject: neige), emporter la

conviction (subject: argument) or eine Kurve machen (subject: Straße), it would

clearly seem difficult to identify a standard lexical function (in the sense of

Mel’cuk) that can provide a systematic link between the verb and the noun;

this is because the entire collocation is semantically dependent on a specific

subject.

The English translation of the German collocation eine Kurve machen,

where the prepositional phrase road is a standard postmodifier of bend

(Kurve¼ bend in the road or bend ), shows how closely the two concepts4 are

connected:

(5) die Straße macht hier eine Kurve (NG) -4 there’s a bend in the road

here (CME)

Likewise, current theorizing on collocation does not make allowances for

the relationship between collocation and verb complementation, or ‘valency’.

Thus, (auto)routeþ filer (literally: ‘road’þ ‘rush’) may well be considered a

collocation in Hausmann’s and Mel’cuk’s theories, but this disregards the

fact that the collocation itself requires a particular verb pattern including a

locative element (l’autoroute file vers la vallee, a gauche, etc.); in other words,

it cannot be used with all the verb patterns entered by filer (cf. *l’autoroute

file, *l’autoroute file a toute allure). A related case is that of the German

collocations ein Kind schenken and ein Kind machen, where the former can only

be used with a female subject and the latter only with a male subject. In other

words, collocation and verb complementation are intimately related, since

many noun-verb collocations require a specific distribution of semantic roles.

416 Dirk Siepmann

Clearly, then, the two-word combination (auto)routeþ filer cannot possibly

be viewed as a fully-fledged collocation.

Evidence is also gathering of three-word collocations one of whose

constituents is delexicalised, and hence redundant. Kenny (2003: 343) cites

the German phrase die Augen weit aufreißen, where the semantic feature

‘wide open’ (= weit) is included in the meaning of the verb aufreißen. Such

delexicalisation has long been observed in so-called ‘support verb construc-

tions’ (take a decision), but it seems to be just as common in other types

of collocation.

The evidence of such examples points to the conclusion that multi-word

collocations cannot always be split up into two basic constituents, and that

collocations consisting of three items or syntactic ‘slots’ are in fact quite

common. This is particularly true of collocations involving neither a human

subject nor a human object, such as experienceþmarquerþ vie. Strictly

speaking, then, we would not be entitled to define collocations as binary

units, as do Hausmann and Mel’cuk, unless we are willing to adopt a very

broad prototypical definition.

From the vantage point of practical lexicography, then, it is preferable, and

to some extent already established practice, to record tripartite lexical units

even where binary units could be justified (e.g. schmal geschnitten -4 die Hose

ist schmal geschnitten [NG]), since dictionary users could be led astray if such

information were missing.

3. What elementsmake a collocation?

This section starts by discussing the distinction made by European collocation

scholars between semantically dependent ‘collocates’ and semantically

autonomous ‘bases’, or nodes. It goes on to show that this distinction, as

well as the related assumption of directionality in collocational attraction,

is not applicable in a great many cases, and that a large number of word

combinations, notably long-distance collocations, operate at the level of

semantic features rather than lexemes. This leads to suggestions for a new

typology of collocations.

3.1 The autonomous/dependent distinction

At the heart of collocational theory is the assumption that the constituents of

the collocation differ in what Hausmann (1999: 122ff.) calls their ‘semiotactic’

status: an ‘Autosemantikon’, or semantically autonomous lexeme such as

decision or disaster functions as the base, which co-occurs with an arbitrarily

selected, semantically dependent ‘collocate’ (‘Synsemantikon’) such as take

or unmitigated. Intimately connected with this is the idea that the collocate


takes on a meaning peculiar to the collocation. Diagrammatically this can

be represented as in Table 2.

This definition is echoed in meaning-text theory (cf. Mel’cuk 1998), albeit

in slightly different terms:

‘A collocation AB of language L is a semantic phraseme of L such that

its signified ‘‘X’’ is constructed out of the signified of one of its two

constituent lexemes – say, of A – and a signified ‘‘C’’ [‘‘X’’¼ ‘‘AþC’’] such

that the lexeme B expresses ‘‘C’’ only contigent on A.’ (Mel’cuk 1998: 30)

The dependency relation between B and C covers four types of collocations

(cf. Mel’cuk 1998: 30–31):

(a) ‘C’ 6¼ ‘B’, that is, B does not have the corresponding meaning in the

lexicon, and a) ‘C’ is empty, that is, the lexeme B is a delexical support verb

selected by A [e.g. give (s.th.) a vacuum, take a decision, porter un jugement)

or b) ‘C’ is not empty but the lexeme B expresses ‘C’ only in combination

with A [e.g. black coffee, biere bien frappee]

(b) ‘C’¼ ‘B’, that is, B has the corresponding meaning in the lexicon, and a)

‘B’ cannot be replaced by any synonym when it appears in conjunction

with A [e.g. strong coffee rather than *powerful coffee, heavy smoker] or b)

‘B’ includes the meaning ‘A’ (e.g. rancid butter, artesian well )

3.2 Criticism ofthe autonomous/dependent distinction

There are four main problems inherent in the autonomous/dependent

distinction; let us expound these in greater detail.

3.2.1 Semantic autonomy vs semantic dependency. The dividing line between

semantically autonomous and semantically dependent words is hazy and not

clearly defined (cf. Brauße 1992). For some linguists, it runs parallel to the

boundary between word classes, with items able to function as sentence

Table 2: Hausmann’s distinction between free word combinations and

collocations

semantically autonomousþ

semantically autonomous¼ free

word combination

semantically autonomousþ

semantically dependent¼ collocation

he likes money moneyþwithdraw

look at the sea! decisionþ take

he prefers fish to meat cloudsþ scudding

418 Dirk Siepmann

constituents (nouns, verbs and adjectives) on one side, and words with a

morphological or syntactic function (articles, prepositions, etc.) on the other.

Other scholars assume that the boundary cuts across different parts of speech;

according to them, a noun such as scholar is semantically autonomous, whilst

a noun like member is semantically dependent on its linguistic environment

(e.g. party member, family member). Yet others (e.g. Lutzeier 1981) go so far as

to claim that there are no criteria at all allowing us to differentiate between

words that have lexical content and those that do not. Indeed, words that

have been intuited as semantically dependent by collocation scholars may, on

inspection, turn out to be semantically autonomous (see 2.2.3 below).

3.2.2 Collocations ofregular syntactic-semanticcomposition. As seen in Section 1, the

collocational character of seemingly free combinations such as accepter des

pieces (‘take coins’) only comes to light if the wider context is taken into

consideration. Similar considerations hold true for other types of combinations

involving items with the same or a similar semiotactic status; here are a few

typical examples:

(6) I’ve got grease all over my shirt. (FE)

regarde ou tu vas! (FF) (¼ pass auf, wo du hintrittst; watch where you are

going/stepping!, watch where you put your feet!)

I didn’t bring the car (FE)

look at the time! (FE)

From the perspective of structuralist linguistics, such sentences would be

considered composite units whose meaning is the sum total of the literal

meaning of its constituents; in other words, they would be viewed as falling

within the scope of the open-choice principle. On inspection, however, they

turn out to be semi-phrasemes (i.e. collocations). Three main reasons can be

advanced for this: firstly, they are clearly not idioms, since they are

immediately comprehensible to anyone who is familiar with their basic

constituents; thus, the first example can be analysed as follows: [subject]þ have

gotþ [object]þ [locative]. Secondly, it is evident that the ‘literal’ meaning of

the first sentence could only be construed as referring to a shirt every square

inch of which was entirely smeared with grease, but, of course, this is not what

the sentence means to a native speaker, who will take it to mean that only

part of the shirt’s surface has been stained.5 Thirdly, the same meaning could

be expressed quite differently in another language such as German: ich habe

mein Hemd mit Fett beschmiert/mein Hemd ist voller Fett/mein Hemd ist ganz

fettig. What we are dealing with, then, is an instance of a collocational

framework (Renouf and Sinclair 1991) or, more precisely, a type of colligation,

that is, a recurrent grammatical pattern that is lexically restrained: have

gotþ [liquid, crumbs, etc.]þ on/all over [item of clothing, body, body part].


Similar observations can be made for the second example, where the

interlingual equivalents clearly show that the phrase is idiomatically

constrained. The standard German translation uses two entirely different

and more specific verbs (regarder -4 aufpassen (¼ ‘pay attention’), aller -4hintreten (= ‘step [somewhere]’).

This kind of finding links up with Hausmann’s (1997) claim that ‘everything

in language is idiomatic’ and with Hunston’s (2001) investigation into

colligation, which shows that even grammatical strings of a fairly random

nature may carry a particular semantic prosody. Thus, the sequence NP

may not be a(n) NP is used as a signal of concession commonly followed by

a contrasting clause introduced by but (Hunston 2001: 24).

This is also obvious from such interlingual correspondences as those given

in Table 3.

These examples show that translational equivalence can usually be achieved

at the level of ‘constructions’ (in the sense of Fillmore). Probably the most

frequent case is the rendition of one construction type by the same type in

another language (e.g. espionner, c’est attendre; to spy is to wait; spionieren

heißt warten); it is by no means uncommon, however, to find one construction

type translated by another. Thus, equivalences 1–3 of Table 3 can be accounted

for in terms of a shift from an English complex and schematic construction,

whose rules of semantic composition are fairly general, to a German complex

and substantive construction, whose rules of semantic composition are more

specialized (for a listing of construction types, see Table 4). The French phrase

Table 3: Translational equivalences at different levels

Seemingly free combination Collocation/idiom

1. den Rock enger machen take in the skirt

2. on a clear motorway / sur (une)

autoroute degagee

auf freier Strecke (alongside: auf

einer freien Autobahn)

3. einen Unfall nach dem anderen

bauen [‘have one accident after

another’]

collectionner les accidents

colligation colligation1 collocation

4. his attempt on the (NP:

mountain / record)

sein Versuch, [Berg] zu bezwingen /

[Rekord] zu brechen

free combination of morphemes colligation

5. Freizeit-(N), Hobby-(N),

Gelegenheits-(N)

[Gelegenheitsdichter,

Freizeitmaler, Hobbykoch]

N a ses heures [ poete, peintre,

cuisinier a ses heures]

420 Dirk Siepmann

sur (une) autoroute degagee (example 2), where the indefinite article is

optional, shows how increased use may result in greater fixity and brevity,

in other words, in ‘phraseologicization’ (cf. German Porsche fahren alongside

einen Porsche fahren, or French sur chaussee mouillee alongside sur une

chaussee mouillee). Equivalence 4 is remarkable as demonstrating that mainly

schematic constructions in one language may correspond to combinations of

schematic and substantive constructions in another. Even stronger support

for the notion of different construction types comes from such equivalences

as 5, where a complex but bound construction in German corresponds to a

complex and schematic construction in French.

3.2.3 Contingent meaning. The autonomous/dependent distinction presupposes

that, in the words of Mel’cuk (1998: 31), ‘the problem of the lexicographic

description of lexical units is an independent problem that has to be

solved . . . prior to any discussion of phraseology’. Thus, Mel’cuk seems to

assume that the meaning of the adjective rancid, which occurs in the noun-verb

collocation rancid butter, can only be defined with reference to butter. This

assumption is, however, belied by even the briefest corpus enquiry; it is found

that the adjective itself has a wide combinatorial range, which divides into

two separate meaning groups, viz. (a) food, butter, bacon, milk, meat, cream,

fat, grease, flour, wheat, oil, chocolate; smell, odour, aroma; socks, sweat; water

and (b) atmosphere, sentiment, academics, affair, show, humour, prune. This

shows that the adjective has at least two metonymically related meanings of its

own which might be glossed respectively as ‘(of food) having a rank smell or

taste as the result of decomposition or chemical change’ and ‘(of people or

things) having vile, revolting, obnoxious qualities’; these two meanings would

have to be recorded in the dictionary. Similar analyses have been proposed for

other seemingly ‘unique’ collocations of Mel’cuk’s type 2(b), such as schutteres

Haar (‘thin hair’; Steyer 2003: 107), with the same results. Another reason why

Table 4: The syntax-lexicon continuum (Croft/Cruse 2003: 255)

Construction type Traditional name Examples

Complex and schematic syntax SBJ be-TNS Verb –en

by OBL

complex, substantive verb subcategorization

frame

SBJ consume OBJ

complex and substantive idiom kick-TNS the bucket

complex but bound morphology [NOUN-s], [VERB-TNS]

atomic and schematic syntactic category [DEM], [ADJ]

atomic and substantive word/lexicon [this], [green]


lexical entries cannot simply be presupposed as given is that some nouns simply

do not have any meaning in isolation. One example cited by Feilke is German

Lage (‘situation’), and the same goes for its standard English and French

equivalents. The French collocation situationþ faire (‘la situation faite aux

protestants’) could therefore be said to consist of two semantically empty

items, and yet the combination of the two yields a meaningful collocation.

3.2.4 Collocation of semantically autonomous items. Even if we assume that a

sharp line can be drawn between content words and ‘delexical’ words, there

remain numerous examples of collocations made up of two semantically

autonomous items (printed in bold below), some of which have interlingual

relevance:

(7) an empty parking space (or: a vacant parking space) -4 un emplacement

libre -4 ein freier Parkplatz (cf. ein leerer Parkplatz¼ an empty/deserted

car park)

a quiet drink (hypallage) -4 (cf. prendre un verre en toute tranquillite) -4(cf. the idiom: in Ruhe einen trinken)

(have) cold feet (in the non-figurative sense) -4 (avoir) les pieds geles /

glaces (cf. also: avoir froid aux pieds) -4 kalte Fuße (haben)

to stop for petrol (for coffee, for a pee) -4 (free combination: s’arreter pour

faire le plein) -4 (free combination: anhalten um zu tanken)

to tell a joke -4 faire une blague -4 einen Witz erzahlen

The first example shows that English distinguishes between ‘free’ (¼ free

of charge) and ‘empty’ (¼ unoccupied) parking spaces. The second example

illustrates a case of ‘frozen’ hypallage: the semantic features of the adjective

quiet are incompatible with the noun drink; it is the situational context in which

the drink is taken that would normally be described as ‘quiet’.6 The third

example demonstrates that French cannot use the adjective froid attributively

when reference is made to parts of the body. The fourth example illustrates

equivalences between seemingly free combinations in German and fixed

expressions in English. Although there is a small number of variants in

evidence, we cannot assume compositionality here. The fifth example is

interesting in that there are synonymic collocations where the verb would be

regarded as semantically contingent on the noun: crack/make a joke.

3.3 Collocations of verbs with locative prepositional phrases

Once we have realised that there are too many exceptions to the definition of

collocation as a combination of items with a distinct semiotactic status, it

becomes evident that a large number of other lexical units should be classified

422 Dirk Siepmann

as collocations. A clear example is afforded by combinations of a locative

prepositional phrase with a verb:

(8) to hide behind the curtain (cf. also ‘to be a curtain twitcher’) -4 guetter

derriere le rideau -4 hinter dem Vorhang stehen (sich hinter dem Vorhang

verschanzen)

to wipe out on the bend/to go out of control on the bend/to be unable

to stay on its own side of the road -4 se deporter dans le virage -4 aus der

Kurve getragen werden

There are two main reasons for including such items among the class of

collocations. One is that they are both cognitively and semantically similar

to nounþ verb collocations of the type trimþ hedge, serrerþ vis or Horerþ

abnehmen. In the case of the latter, the verbs (trim, serrer, abnehmen) describe

an action that is typically performed with the object in question; similarly,

verbs such as guetter and se deporter designate actions that typically occur in

particular places: nosy neighbours make a habit of hiding behind the curtain,

and speeding drivers run the risk of losing control of their vehicles on a bend.

The second reason is that these word combinations tend to be interlingually

unpredictable (cf. the above examples), making them prime sources of

difficulty for second-language learners.

3.4 Directionality

A related problem is the assumption of directionality (Hausmann 1979)

or of a hierarchical relationship between the constituents of the collocation

(Gonzalez-Rey 2002), whereby the selection of the collocate is contingent on

the prior selection of the base. While this is more or less obvious with items

such as tableþ lay/set or moneyþwithdraw, we have already seen above that

examples such as roadþ hold cast serious doubt upon the validity of the theory.

Hartenstein (1996: 95) cites counterexamples of the type hereþ pauvre (‘poor

wretch’) where the noun cannot be viewed as semantically autonomous since

it has no referent in present-day French. In similar vein, Scherfer (2002) notes

that even such textbook examples of collocational theory as celibataireþ

endurci (‘confirmed bachelor’) may be viewed as bidirectional, since the

adjective endurci combines with any noun carrying the semantic feature [þ fige

dans son comportement]: criminel, catholique, Parisien, etc; it is monosemous,

semantically autonomous and just as clearly defined as the noun celibataire.

Similar considerations hold for adjectives such as crowded or busy in

combination with nouns like street, road or square. Another example of this

is the French adjective sauf, as witness the concordance given in Table 5

(cf. Siepmann 2003).


The syntagm we are dealing with here can be formalised as NP

(abstract)þ etreþ sauf. From a directional point of view, the adjectival

collocate sauf would only take on its full meaning through the presence of

the semantically independent noun phrase (e.g. l’honneur des Bafana Bafana)

(cf. Hausmann 1979: 191–192). In the present case, however, this argument

does not hold water. The adjective sauf is as sharply defined as honneur,

apparence, tradition and morale, and it is the adjective that is the invariable

factor in the equation. This becomes even more apparent if we look at English

or German translations of the phrase, which use the clearly delimited verbs

keep up/save and wahren/retten respectively:

(9) les apparences sont sauves -4 appearances are kept up -4 der Schein ist

gewahrt

la republique etait sauve -4 the republic had been saved -4 die Republik

war gerettet

3.5 Collocation between semantic features

Taking this one step further, I would like to suggest that dependencies exist

not merely between lexical units, but also between semantic features. Consider

the examples in Table 6.

As can be seen from these examples, the French lexical units (in the sense

defined by Cruse (1986) mordre sur (1) (‘veer off course onto/into’) and mordre

sur (2) (‘cut into’, ‘overlap with’) impose severe lexical constraints on the

choice of subject and (prepositional) object: mordre sur (1) takes a subject

designating a vehicle and an object designating a part of the road, mordre sur

Table 5: sauf/sauve1 honneur, morale, etc.

etre assure, c’est que son univers est sauf, et qu’en depit de bien des zig

mique du pays. Le consensus social est sauf, les exportations allemandes ne

euve. L’honneur des Bafana Bafana est sauf, leurs seances d’entraınement a

int. Mine de rien, l’honneur a ete sauf, on a termine septieme sur neuf

silence. Le conservatisme ambiant est sauf. Dominique Lecourt evoque en

ite fait sa force. Mais la morale est sauve ; le bon sens aussi : ’’ Vivre

le conseil de guerre. La morale est sauve : les innocents seront punis e

udrier incarne le peche. La morale est sauve puisque l’auteur chatie son he

(XO de preference). La tradition est sauve ! Pour l’amateur de Oolong . . . P

CERTES, toutes les apparences sont sauves, et on peut mettre au credit

sensibles. Certes, les apparences sont sauves, et le parti sorti vainqueur

i les apparences de la democratie sont sauves, la guerilla est quand meme

424 Dirk Siepmann

(2) requires both the subject and object slots to be filled by items denoting

areas (mainly geographical areas or parts of the body). The question

then arises whether the relationship between subject and object can be

best captured in terms of selectional restrictions inherent in the verb or in

terms of collocational restrictions operating across the entire phrase

(verbþ two nouns).

To resolve this question, we may turn to Cruse’s (1986: 278–279) distinction

between selectional and collocational restrictions. Cruse defines selectional

restrictions as being logically necessary: according to him, it is logically

necessary for the subject of the verb die to carry the semantic traits ‘organic’,

‘alive’ and ‘mortal’. It is different with kick the bucket, which, although

identical in meaning to die, arbitrarily requires a human rather than an animal

subject (*the horse kicked the bucket vs the horse died ). Following Cruse, we

would be entitled to consider the above example as an instance of collocational

rather than selectional restriction. Firstly, there are no logical constraints on

the subjects of mordre sur (1) and (2), whose meaning is simply glossed as

‘empieter sur’ (‘overlap into’, ‘eat into’) in the Tresor de la Langue Francaise;

indeed, mordre sur occurs with a wide range of subjects and objects in a more

general sense:

(10) les luttes politiques, religieuses et morales, les activites de parti, l’agitation

electorale, le fait que les associations croissent de facon excessive, tout

ceci . . .mord sur le temps de detente (‘all this . . . takes up a lot of our

spare time’)

je ne voudrais pas mordre sur le temps des questions (heard in a lecture)

(‘I don’t want to take up any of the time reserved for questions’)

Table 6: Typical linguistic environments of the French verb mordre (sur)

subject (semantic field: vehicle) verb prepositional object

(semantic field: part of the

road)

un car mord (sur) (1) le cote

un bus la ligne blanche

une voiture la voie opposee

subject (semantic field: region) verb prepositional object

(semantic field: region)

trois villages dont le territoire mord (sur) (2) Jerusalem

la region urbaine de Lyon les departements de la

Loire, de l’Ain et de

l’Isere

sa bordure meridionale le continent africain


plus nous vivons dans les signes, et moins les choses mordent sur nous

(‘less things will affect us’)

sans jamais leur (aux lois, D.S.) permettre de mordre sur son esprit (‘never

allowing them to affect one’s mental state’)

le nazisme a mordu sur une large tranche du proletariat (‘many working-

class people were drawn to Nazi ideology’)

une abstraction qui mord sur le reel (‘an abstraction which is close to

reality’)

(all examples except the second from NF)

Secondly, there is a mutual dependency between the subject noun phrase

and the object noun phrase in that (e.g.) a subject noun phrase denoting

a vehicle will entail an object noun phrase designating a part of a road,

and vice versa. We are thus dealing with collocation between certain semantic

properties rather than between specific lexical items. Again, as with the

example of autorouteþ filerþ locative discussed above, we have a three-slot

collocation mixing collocational attraction and valency: vehicleþmordre

(sur)þ locative(part of a road).7 Valency theory does not make allowances

for collocational constraints of such a specific nature, as it posits only three

levels of semantic restrictions, the ‘highest’ of which is selectional restrictions

of the type [þ human] (cf. Blank 2001: 238). Collocation thus turns out

to have a paradigmatic as well as a syntagmatic dimension, with an entire

semantic set (body part, region) - rather than a clearly delimited lexical set

(tousledþ 1. hair 2. mane) - sharing the same syntagmatic environment.9

The case for collocation between semantic features is strengthened further

when we look at adjectival collocations. A fine example is provided by

cooccurrences of the adverb beautifully with participial adjectives such as

carved, draped, drawn, restored, etc. The verbs on which these participial

adjectives are based share a common semantic feature in describing artwork

or craftwork. Thus, there is a lexical dependency between a specific semantic

feature and a lexeme.10

The list of such examples could be lengthened. To take but one more case,

the adjective bad and the adverb badly co-occur significantly with a semantic

feature which can be glossed as ‘physical imperfection’; thus, we have:

(11) I never had a bad chest

he’s had a bad concussion

Never had a bad cough, not even a sniffle.

He had a bad heart. Hole in the left ventricle.

He stuttered badly. (all examples from FE)

Note that a distinction could be made between two types of collocation here,

viz. (a) words which share the semantic feature ‘bad’ (concussion, cough, stutter,

426 Dirk Siepmann

limp) and (b) words which require the adjective to add the notion of ‘badness’

(chest, heart).

It is important to reiterate that many such collocations between semantic

features and lexemes are bidirectional. With a collocation such as beautifully

carved it is perfectly conceivable that speakers begin by encoding the type of

craftwork involved, but it is equally likely that they are awe-struck by the sheer

beauty of a painting or other work of art, and the first thing that comes to their

minds is an adverbial expression of the concept of beauty. This latter

hypothesis is also borne out by the high frequency of the unspecific collocation

beautifully done, which does not specify the type of work involved. The notion

of beauty would seem to be just as semantically or cognitively autonomous as

that of craftwork, so that the collocation should be regarded as bidirectional

or even as one conceptual unit.

Similar but less regular collocational dependencies have been observed by

Grossmann and Tutin (forthcoming), Mel’cuk and Wanner (1996) and

L’Homme (2003). These authors prefer to analyse such regularities in terms

of ‘semantic classes’. In weighing the two analyses, my judgement is that the

assumption of semantic features is more consistent, especially if long-distance

collocations (Siepmann 2003; 2005) are taken into account.

By long-distance collocations are meant lexical dependencies which

manifest themselves over considerable stretches of text. A convenient

illustration is provided by the topic initiator turning to, which is commonly

followed at some distance by informers such as I/weþ find/see/note or it

appears that:

(12) Turning to the use of semi-auxiliary is to/are to in if-clauses, we find that a

fifth of the instances in the sample (and 1340 in the corpus as a whole)

appear in this syntactic environment.

In this respect the speech of younger British speakers appears to be following

the lead of American English. Turning to the speech of older speakers,

we note some words which are suggestive of hesitation, uncertainty or turn

manipulation: well, mm, er.

The corresponding Middle High German forms are fuoss, fuesse; mus, muse.

Modern German Fuss: Fusse, Maus: Mause are the regular developments

of these medieval forms. Turning to Anglo-Saxon, we find that our modern

English forms correspond to fot, fet; mus, mys.

Turning to requirements involving both age plus service, it appears there has

been an increase in the propensity of participants to have normal retirement

available at age 62 with a combination of years of service. (all examples

from CAE)

A similar phenomenon can be observed with the marker of

comparison any more than. This marker, which introduces a


subordinate clause, is always preceded by the negative particle not in the

main clause:

(13) Not all women are ‘carers’ any more than all women are ‘victims’ or

‘contractors’. (CAE)

Such examples could be multiplied; they force us to recognise that, in

order to account for at least some collocational links, it is necessary to

abandon the four-word span on either side of the node which Sinclair (1991)

postulates as the cut-off point for collocational significance because

95 per cent of collocational attraction occurs within this span (Jones and

Sinclair 1974: 21f.). Sinclair’s idiom principle should therefore perhaps

be revised to accommodate ‘long-distance’ collocations entered by multi-

word markers; I propose the following restatement of the idiom principle

for written text:

One of the main principles of the organisation of text is that the choice

of one semantic feature, word or phraseological unit affects the choice of

other words or phraseological units, usually within a maximum span of

several paragraphs. (based on Sinclair 1991: 173)

This reformulation of the idiom principle also takes account of cases

where there is a great deal of variation among the node and the collocate(s).

One typical case is the collocation of the contrast marker not so with lexical

items such as surely, seem, appear, you/one might think that, it was hoped

that or one hears that, all of which contain a semantic trait implying

‘uncertainty’ or ‘error’:

(14) Some might think Volkswagen, which now owns 70 per cent of the

Czech company, would have thought the Skoda’s identity problematic.

Not so. VW sees Skoda as one of the most recognised brand names in

advertising. (NE)

After recriminations last summer, when a number of big trading houses

were accused - nothing was ever proved - of forcing the FTSE 100 higher

ahead of options expiry dates, it was hoped the Stock Exchange had

nipped things in the bud. Not so. Yesterday afternoon, after a solid if

unspectacular morning’s business, shares in some of the biggest Footsie

companies - the ones heavily weighted in the premier index - motored

sharply upwards. (NE)

Regulators and providers ought surely to be kept apart. Not so, according

to the NRA’s board - and to Lord Crickhowell, who insists that water

management and regulation are inextricably linked. (NE)

428 Dirk Siepmann

So when some 100,000 demonstrators clogged the streets of the capital,

Minsk, on April 10th to support striking industrial workers and to protest

against price rises, it seemed as if discontent had come out of the blue. Not so:

beneath the surface the republic had been stirring for months. (NE)

Here one might make a case for the collocation of underlying rhetorical

strategies rather than strings of words or semantic features. This would be

correct to the extent that the discourse preceding not so sets up an expectation

which is not fulfilled in the subsequent discourse. In actual fact, however,

rhetorical strategy and occurrence of semantic features are two sides of the

same linguistic coin.

Not surprisingly, the ‘error’ part of the above pattern may also be

found in nominal form; in the following example from an academic

text, you might think has been converted to the more formal noun

misconception:

(15) Another misconception about meditation is that the meditator should

fall into a trance. Not so. As a famous Chinese Buddhist put it: There is a

class of foolish people who sit quietly and try to keep their minds blank (. . .)

(CAE)

A more complex realisation of a long-distance collocational pattern is

seen in the following extract:

(16) But if one considers that in college dictionaries the average number of

column-lines allotted to each entry (not each definition) is a bit less than

two, one will see why space is at a premium. (CAE)

In the present case the collocational relationship holds between two types

of SLDM which occur in, respectively, the main clause and the sub-clause of

a complex sentence: the topic shifter (if) one considers (þ wh-clause / NP) and

the suggestor one will see (þ wh-clause / NP). Again, it is not so much the

lexical items themselves which enter into collocation; rather, we are dealing

with a recurrent type of semantic-functional relationship, where both the

second and the first part of the collocation may be replaced by other lexical

items. A few more examples follow:

(17) If one considers that the various paths do not exist except as perceived

by some mind, then one immediately arrives at the conclusion that the

probability of a path should be chosen proportionally to its algorithmic

information. (CAE)

If we consider the nature of Christian persecution as it is

currently understood, we can easily see how the personal attitudes of the


presiding official could have been a significant factor in any particular

trial. (CAE)

If, however, one reads the early dramas of Augustus Thomas and Clyde

Fitch, it will be realized how dexterously the American playwright

profited by the French technician in whom the commercial manager had

faith. (CAE)

French concession markers, too, are evidence of lexical dependencies

operating across considerable spans of text. Thus, the concessive en admettant

que tends to pre-empt the choice of an adversative marker such as pourtant,

encore faut-il que or le fait demeure que:

(18) R.-L. Wagner (1968), qui note que le « terme de ‘‘mot’’ en est venu assez

tard en francais a traduire la notion d’une unite lexicale autonome », tout en

admettant le bien-fonde de l’analyse qu’A. Martinet fait de la notion de

« mot », refuse pourtant d’abandonner ce terme parce que la lexicologie

porte sur l’etude des signes en situation. (CAF)

The uncovering of such patterns is of great value for language teaching.

Just as lexico-grammars (Francis, Hunston and Manning 1996, 1998) have

illustrated the close links between word complementation and meaning, so

future text grammars and dictionaries may reveal the collocational nature of

specific rhetorical moves.

Again, such examples could easily be multiplied. They all illustrate the

density and conformity of lexical patterning in text, and suggest that a

‘semantic feature’ approach to collocation holds greater explanatory power

than one based on the assumption of semantic classes, since it would be

difficult to group such items as it is hoped, misapprehension and seem in

one class.

To sum up our discussion so far, we can say that the case for distinguishing

semantically autonomous and semantically dependent constituents of colloca-

tions is extremely weak.

3.6 A typologyofcollocation

The inescapable conclusion to be drawn from this section is that collocational

phenomena span the entire range of morpho-syntactic constructions. The

terms ‘collocation’ and ‘construction’ turn out to be almost synonymous,

a clear indication of the fact that phraseology is at the centre of language

rather than at the periphery. The only category of collocation that

cannot be captured by the notion of construction is collocation of

430 Dirk Siepmann

semantic features. We might therefore posit four main types of collocational

relationship:

(a) Colligation (t’avais qu’aþ INF, ignorer tout deþN, il n’y a qu’aþ INF,

ce/cette N [tradition, etc.] est reste(e), NP dans l’ame, typischþN, far be it

from me toþ INF, etc.); note that this definition of colligation goes further

than Hoey’s (see endnote 1). Colligation concerns not only the

grammatical preferences of individual words, but also those of longer

syntagms. Thus, the phrase t’avais qu’a can be said to be in colligation with

an infinitive clause.

(b) Collocation between lexemes or phrasemes (de meme . . . de meme que,

briser ses chaussures, c’est-a-dire en l’occurrence, regarde ou tu vas, bon ben,

a la fin, etc.).

(c) Collocation between lexemes and semantic-pragmatic (contextual)

features (beautifullyþ [result of creative activity], [uncertainty]þ not so,

[question]þ eh bien, [expectation]þ duly, [negative contextual aspect]þ

(not) detract from s.o.’s enjoyment, [vehicle]þmordre surþ [part of

the road], help! (on such one-word collocations, cf. Gonzalez-Rey 2002:

95, 101).

(d) Collocation between semantic-pragmatic features (extended lexical

units, cf. Sinclair 1996/2004, 1998/2004; long-distance collocations,

cf. Siepmann 2005).

We are now in a position to reconsider the question we started out from

in this section: what elements make a collocation? The answer now appears

almost disarmingly simple: any colligational pattern may provide the basis for

collocation. Some patterns are particularly common and therefore account

for the majority of collocations (cf. Siepmann 2003):

XþY (grand maigre, gros mal, reaction a chaud, bon ben, ou la, de meme

queþ de meme)

XþYþZ (þ n) (vilain petit canard, petit coin tranquille)

Xþ etþY (sain et sauf, sel et poivre, sick and tired)

XþPrep (wedded to his profession, averse to risk, a la fin)

XþPrepþY (grand chasseur devant l’eternel)

XþVerbþY (to say . . . is to say . . . ., la voiture a mordu sur la ligne

blanche)

We have also seen that some collocations, especially long-distance

collocations, are not merely, or not at all, based on colligational, that is,

syntactic relations, but on semantic relations. Diagrammatically, this gives us:

semantic feature of Xþ (semantic feature of) Y


4. Are collocations arbitrary?

It seems likely that collocational knowledge is prototypical: to return to one

of the aforementioned examples, children acquiring French as their first

language come across several prototypical utterances containing the lexical

unit mordre sur (1) and then intuitively proceed to build up paradigmatic

classes. These prototypical utterances are made against a specific situational

background, namely motoring. It is the entire figure-ground-relation (moving

object/person – mordre sur – a part of the road [background: account of a car

ride, a car race, etc.]) that is acquired, not just the verb. This creates numerous

associations in the speaker’s mind, so that there are several pathways to

accessing the prototype: seeing a car, using the word ‘car’ at the start of a

sentence, thinking of a car race, etc. Once such associations have been

acquired, it becomes possible for the native speaker to initiate language change

by modifying existing collocations syntactically or semantically via the same

processes (e.g. metaphor, metonymy) as those underlying change in individual

lexical units.

It is not surprising therefore that some authors (Grossmann and Tutin,

forthcoming) have entertained the bold hypothesis of an underlying semantic

systematicity of collocational networks, only to find it disproved by a detailed

study of intensifiers accompanying nouns denoting emotions ( parfait bonheur,

amour fou, etc.); Grossmann and Tutin (forthcoming) conclude that the

positioning and generativity of such adjectives is ‘hard to predict’. Further

confirmation for this is provided by the aforementioned investigation into

road transport vocabulary, where it became clear that, while collocational

synonymy makes for economy of learning (e.g. la route/l’autoroute/le chemin/

la rue passe/arrive/conduit/mene quelque part), there are also divergent

tendencies (e.g a little alley vs *a little boulevard, l’autoroute file vs

*le chemin file; desservi par une autoroute vs *desservi par un chemin de terre).

This is even clearer with collocations such as fashionably late or flou

artistique, where there does not seem to be any previous semantic model on

which the collocation could have been based. Thus, although a post hoc

explanation is sometimes possible, collocation remains an arbitrary phenom-

enon based on ‘language games’ where semantics clearly play an unpredictable

role. However, although semantic relationships can only be discerned post

hoc, we should not forget that they may lighten the language learner’s task.

5. Canwe distinguish between collocations and phraseology on the one hand,and collocations and free combinations on the other?

This section is concerned with the various strands of argument that have been

deployed in favour of a clear distinction between collocation and phraseology

on the one hand, and collocations and free combinations on the other. These

432 Dirk Siepmann

arguments can be broadly classified into two variants, viz. the argument from

syntax and the argument from semantics.

First, let us look at the argument from syntax. It has been repeatedly claimed

by theoretical linguists that a sharp boundary can be drawn between

collocations and fixed expressions by resorting to standardised tests such as

passivization or pronominalisation (Gross 1996, Scherfer 2002). Thus, a fixed

expression such as prendre la tangente can indeed be neither passivized nor

pronominalised (or rather, it is not normally passivized or pronominalised):

*la tangente a ete prise par lui

*la tangente, il l’a prise

Detailed observation of real language use, however, leaves the theoreticians

without a leg to stand on. As Moon (1998), Partington (1998), Burger (1998)

and Siepmann (2003) have shown, modification of ‘standard’ citation forms

of phrasemes is almost the rule rather than the exception, and we find

numerous instances of passivization or relativization where we might not have

expected it. A few examples will suffice:

(19) jeter un pave dans la mare -4 ce pave dans la mare etait lance par

quelqu’un qui . . .

decouvrir le pot aux roses -4 le pot aux roses a ete decouvert

cracher dans la soupe -4 la soupe dans laquelle peu osent cracher

avaler des couleuvres -4 en compensation des couleuvres qu’elle a du

avaler (all examples from NF)

Our linguistic competence invariably allows us to modify previous

utterances, and this seems to occur quite commonly with phrasemes.

The argument from syntax is spurious for another reason, namely that, just

like phrasemes, collocations (in the traditional sense defined by Hausmann and

Mel’cuk) may also be syntactically or otherwise restricted. One such restricted

collocation is the French nounþ verb combination situation [‘ensemble des

circonstances dans lesquelles une personne (un pays, une collectivite) se

trouve’]þ faire (cf. Siepmann 2003: 244–245). In this construction faire

invariably introduces a participial relative clause:

(20) la situation faite aux protestants

la situation faite aux immigrants

la situation faite aux prisonniers guineens (all examples from NF)

A construction of the type ‘on a fait une situation (ADJ) aux protestants’

appears to run counter to the norms of French prose. Such examples could

be multiplied (e.g. la confiance qui l’habite; see Siepmann 2003); they show that


grammatical preferences must not be left out of consideration when dealing

with collocation, despite claims – still to be found even in recent scholarship –

that collocations can be represented as quasi-mechanical associations of the

type Sonneþ sitzen (Steyer 2000: 110).

Turning now to the argument from semantics, we find that this argument is

far more difficult to get to grips with, since it raises fundamental questions

about a theory of collocation and language, some of which we dealt with in

Section 2 above. There we found that the assumption of a differing semiotactic

status for the constituents of a collocation, though intuitively appealing, runs

into severe difficulties.

Another semantically-based suggestion for drawing the dividing line between

collocations and phrasemes has been put forward by Gonzalez-Rey (2002:

120ff.); it is based on the endocentric/exocentric distinction which is quite well

known from morphology, where it serves to differentiate different types of

compounds (e.g. credit card [endocentric] vs blackhead [exocentric]). Consider

the examples in Table 7.

The left-hand items are said to be exocentric because none of their

components can be deleted, their meaning is not derivable from their

constituents, and they can only be understood in a specific situational context.

Endocentric items, on the other hand, are said to be characterized by the

following features:

(a) the constituents are deletable (e.g. un ton aigre, un ton doux)

(b) the meaning of the whole is compositional

(c) the expression has a referential meaning

Unfortunately for Rey-Gonzalez’ theory, there is no basic difference

between the kind of context-dependence posited for exocentric items and

that which applies to purportedly endocentric items such as ‘quiet drink’,

‘sudden bend’, ‘le paysage defile’, ‘lu et approuve’ or ‘pour valoir ce que de

raison’ (the last two being cited by Rey-Gonzalez). The meaning of such items

can hardly be referred to as compositional, since there is no compatibility

between their institutionalised senses. A landscape cannot ‘rush’, any more

than a bend in the road can be ‘sudden’. Hausmann (2003) cites a number of

Table 7: Exocentric vs endocentric items

Exocentric (phrasemes) Endocentric (collocations)

Tiens! faire l’autopsie d’un corps

Quand le chat n’est pas la, les souris dansent. avoir interet a

poivre et sel (¼ gris) aigre-doux

un panier perce un panier a salade

434 Dirk Siepmann

similar borderline cases, such as krummer Hund, where it must be assumed that

Hund has the langue-meaning ‘person’ if it is to be considered the base of

the collocation.

It is also doubtful whether deletability can serve as a valid definining

criterion. Counterexamples are not far to seek; thus, it is quite common to find

the second part of an idiom, especially a proverb, deleted, as in ‘speak of the

devil, . . .’ or ‘quand le chat n’est pas la, . . .’.

Feilke (1994, 1996, 2003) was the first to discern the root cause of such

classificatory problems with full conceptual clarity. Recognizing that linguistic

expressions can be ‘idiomatic’ while at the same time being syntactically

and semantically well-formed, he advocates the theoretical decoupling of

idiomaticity and syntactic-semantic compositionality (Feilke 2003: 60).

According to him, it is the context and the participants placed in that context

which, via a figure-ground relationship, bestow meaning on such collocations

as the landscape rushes past or lu et approuve. This is all the more convincing

since some words (e.g. ‘Lage’ [‘situation’]) have no distinctive meaning

components, so that it is impossible to attribute a summative meaning to

such expressions as sonnige Lage (‘sunny location’).

6. Are collocationsmonosemous andmonoreferential? Are there synonymiccollocations?

According to Gonzalez-Rey (2002: 117), collocations are monoreferential

and do not allow synonymic variation:

‘L’unite ne peut se constituer comme variante, exprimee sous la forme de

periphrase, d’un mot deja etabli, ni admettre d’autres variations pour

le meme referent, a moins d’en creer des sous-categories.’ (Gonzalez-Rey

2002: 117, my emphasis)

Although this statement is generally correct, here too it is relatively easy

to find a number of counterexamples, such as to stick to/keep to the speed limit;

Verbrechen begehen / veruben11; parvenir/arriver a un compromis; la pluie baisse /

baisse d’intensite / diminue / se calme, etc. It is often claimed that such synonyms

differ in some aspects of their meaning, especially according to style level, but

this line of argument clearly does not apply to the first two examples just cited.

It is also interesting to note that one collocation may take on several

meanings, a factor that has been neglected both in lexicological theory and in

dictionary making. A simple example of a polysemous collocation is English

‘avoid an accident’:

(21) s.o. avoids an accident (1) -4 qqn evite un accident -4 j-m vermeidet

einen Unfall


s.o. avoids an accident (2) -4 qqn echappe a un accident -4 j-m entgeht

einem Unfall

To take a more complex example, the French collocation donnerþ exemple,

normally translated by giveþ example and gebenþBeispiel, can occur in two

different types of linguistic environment (cf. Siepmann 2003). Compare the

following groups of examples:

(22) Les grammaires disent encore que les adjectifs verbaux issus d’un participe

present ou passe ou d’une de leurs formes prefixees sont presque toujours

places apres le nom. Mon corpus donne de nombreux exemples d’infractions

a cet usage (. . .)

D’autres exemples ont ete donnes a la reunion de la Societe francaise de

microbiologie a l’Institut Pasteur en decembre 1997.

Les economies regionales autarciques ont existe jusqu’au moment ou se

sont developpes les moyens de communication. G. Kuhnholtz-Lordat

en donne un remarquable exemple dans le « pays de Costiere » (departement

du Gard).

L’Arabie Saoudite donne un exemple d’Etat islamique moderne.

R. T. T. Forman et M. Godron (1986) definissent un paysage comme un

espace de plusieurs kilometres carres, ou un assemblage particulier

d’ecosystemes interactifs se repete a peu pres a l’identique. La

mosaıque des champs, des pres, des haies et des bois d’un bocage en donne

un exemple.

De sorte que les villes ont cru, se sont transformees et fragmentees,

d’une maniere qui depasse tout ce que l’on avait pu imaginer. Le meilleur

exemple est donne par Mexico, la ville du monde la plus peuplee, dont il est

desormais impossible de fixer les limites et de dresser le plan. (all examples

from CAF)

In the first group of sentences donner has retained one of its dictionary

meanings (‘communiquer, exposer’). In functional grammar terms, the

subject of donner would be labelled an ’actor’; the construction belongs to

the material process type. It is somewhat different with the second group of

sentences, where donner has an equative meaning characteristic of the

relational process type. Its subject is a ’token’ that has a ’value’ ascribed to

it in the form of an object. Since the English collocation giveþ example and

the German collocation gebenþBeispiel can only be used with material

processes, a literal translation of the second group of examples is out of

the question. We thus have to resort to equivalents based around copular be.

436 Dirk Siepmann

The first sentence of the second group, for example, could be translated as

follows:

Saudi-Arabia is an example of a modern Islamic state.

Saudi-Arabien stellt ein Beispiel fur einen modernen islamischen Staat dar.

The above considerations also hold true for noun-adjective combinations

such as heures creuses (literally ‘hollow hours’). Heures creuses is a semi-

technical term which occurs in at least four different fields: power generation,

rail transport, road transport and telecommunications:

(22) Les radiateurs a accumulation necessitent la mise en oeuvre d’un

asservissement aux heures creuses EDF.

la SNCF renforce les trains aux heures creuses entre Paris et Combs-

la-Ville

0,075 ou 0,105 (Bouygues) aux heures creuses (all examples from NF)

Such collocational polysemy is also apparent from the paradigmatic

relations entered by heures creuses. Thus, whereas in telephony the antonym

of heures creuses is heures pleines, in road transport it is heures de pointe.

Somewhat counterintuitively, collocational polysemy is particularly

common in special-purpose language. Thus, some French noun-(relational)

adjective combinations of the type roue interieure can usually be disambiguated

in context only, since at least one of its meanings arises from the deletion

of an intermediate element: roue (a denture) interieure (Forner 2000: 180ff.).

7. Conclusion: A redefinition of collocation for lexicographic purposes

It should have become clear that previous definitions of collocations have

relied too heavily on introspection rather than corpus evidence. This has

prevented linguists from realizing that what has traditionally been known as

‘collocation’ or ‘phraseology’ is only one aspect of idiomatic language use,

and that the boundaries between the two are hazy and uncertain. The only way

out of this dilemma is a rigourously corpus-driven approach to the study

of lexis and grammar, and this is the approach that has been taken in the

present study.

Our discussion suggests that even the most sophisticated structuralist

definitions cannot adequately capture the phenomenon of habitual

co-occurrences, and that the frequency-based approach to collocation cannot

account for the collocation of semantic features. We would therefore be

justified in loosening the definition of collocation to a considerable extent;

collocation could be defined pragmatically with reference to the notions of

‘Gebrauchsnorm’, or ‘usage norm’ (Steyer 2000: 108), reflected in concepts


such as ‘minimal recurrence’ (Kocourek 1991, Siepmann 2003) or ‘statistical

significance’ (Sinclair 1991), on the one hand, and the notion of ‘inhaltliche

Geschlossenheit’, or ‘holisticity’, on the other hand (Siepmann 2003), the latter

referring to the facts that (a) native speakers can ascribe meaning to general-

language collocations even if these are divorced from context and (b) that

such units are intuitively considered as self-contained ‘wholes’:

a collocation is any holistic lexical, lexico-grammatical or semantic unit

normally composed of two or more words which exhibits minimal recurrence

within a particular discourse community

‘Holisticity’ should here be taken to include colligation with a particular

grammatical category, such as a noun phrase. Thus, the collocations the future

belongs to (die Zukunft gehort, l’avenir appartient a) or l’autoroute file would be

felt to be incomplete by most speakers, requiring as they do a prepositional

object. This variable complement is conceived of as part of the collocation.

There is some evidence from a psycholinguistic study by Schmitt et al. (2004)

to suggest that the above definition, first proposed in sketchier form in

Siepmann 2003, is psychologically valid. Schmitt and his colleagues adminis-

tered an oral dictation task to a number of native and non-native English

speakers, who were asked to reproduce dictation ‘bursts’ of considerable length

which contained different types of recurrent clusters. It was found that not all

statistically significant clusters retrievable from corpora are stored as holistic

units in the mental lexicon; there was a discernible tendency for semantically

transparent clusters (e.g. to make a long story short) rather than sentence

fragments (e.g. in a variety of ) to be reproduced intact. This finding seems all

the more plausible since even participants’ failure to reproduce original

sequences does not mean that they are not stored in the mind, for the simple

linguistic reason that many so-called ‘fixed’ expressions admit of variants

(e.g. to cut a long story short; see above) that participants may prefer.

From this section there emerge two important conclusions for linguistic and

lexicological theory. Firstly, collocation, as defined above, dominates language

use (at least from a statistical perspective). That is, Sinclair’s open-choice

principle only has a marginal role to play compared to his idiom principle,

which, as seen in our discussion of long-distance collocations, needs to be

considerably widened. Secondly, collocations should be considered as fully-

fledged linguistic signs in their own right, so that Saussure’s word-based

linguistics will have to be complemented by a collocation (or ‘expression’)-

based linguistics (cf. Feilke 1996, 2003).

This redefinition of collocation enables us to account for the ways in

which language users operate with wholes (words, collocations) and at the

same time with parts (words, semantic features) which they have extracted

from contextual wholes – a key demand to be placed on any semantic theory

438 Dirk Siepmann

(cf. Bolinger 1965: 570–571). Both operations have been shown to be governed

by collocation, thus providing further evidence for Hoey’s claim that

collocation is indeed one of the central mechanisms involved in meaning

creation (see introduction).

It thus appears that both structurally simple (i.e. [bound] morphemes,

lexemes) and structurally complex units (i.e. collocations/colligational

patterns) are linguistic signs. If the dictionary is meant to be a record of

such signs, the task of the lexicographer is to gather together evidence of both

types of sign. So far it has been lexemes, non-compositional idioms and

morphemes that have received the bulk of lexicographic attention, but the

future clearly belongs to collocation and colligation in the widest possible

sense.

In the second part of this article, I shall discuss some of the implications

such a change in perspective – not to say paradigm shift – has for the making

of encoding dictionaries.

Notes1 For those readers who are not yet familiar with the relatively recent notion of

colligation (a term originally coined by Firth), here is how Hoey (1998) defines

colligation:- the grammatical company a word keeps (or avoids keeping) either within its own

group or at a higher rank.- the grammatical functions that the word’s group prefers (or avoids).- the place in a sequence that a word prefers (or avoids).2 Even a superficial glance at lexical functions shows that they disregard contextual

relationships. Thus, the adverb drop-dead may intensify the adjective beautiful with

reference to women, but not with reference to buildings.3 On an alternative construal, the German sequence might be viewed as a

colligational pattern or schematic construction (Croft and Cruse 2003): eine ADJ

Straßenlage haben, but this seems problematic to the extent that very few adjectives can

fill the slot.4 I use the term ‘concept’ more or less in its standard terminological sense to

refer to a ‘unit of thought constituted through abstraction on the basis of properties

common to a set of objects or phenomena’.5 Clearly, then, the notion of literal meaning turns out to be a linguistic abstraction

(see also the introduction to this article).6 A point of criticism that might be raised is that we are here dealing with an instance

of regular polysemy. The meaning of ‘drink’ could be glossed as referring to an occasion

where people have a drink, and the same reasoning would apply to cases such as quiet

dinner/breakfast/lunch/tea. I would argue that such apparent regularities are in fact

more or less accidental; as Blank (2001) and Grossmann and Tutin (forthcoming) have

shown, nouns belonging to the same semantic class may share some of their collocations

or colligations, but not all of them (e.g. nach der Schule gingen die Schuler nach Hause vs

*nach dem Parlament gingen die Abgeordneten nach Hause).7 Or a three-item construction in the sense of Croft and Cruse (2003).


8 Blank is not unaware of the fact that verbs may also be associated with particular

circumstantial complements (‘Zirkumstanten’) which may themselves carry selectional

restrictions, but he considers these two levels to be of lesser importance. As our analysis

has shown, however, it is often the particular collocation that determines the verb

pattern (l’autoroute file quelque part). Put another way, valency and collocation appear

to shade off into each other; speakers have semantically and syntactically prepatterned

collocations or ‘constructions’ (Fillmore) at their disposal.9 Interestingly, the distinction we have just established between selectional and

collocational restrictions has a parallel in theories of formal grammar, such as Head-

driven Phrase Structure Grammar, where selection refers to the process whereby

a head selects its complements and an adjunct selects its head. Using the example of the

German verb fackeln, whose linguistic environment invariably comprises a durational

modifier (most commonly nicht lange), Sailer and Richter (2002) show that the

durational modifier cannot be interpreted as a complement of the head verb, but rather

as an adjunct. Therefore, they argue, the relationship between the head verb and the

relational modifier is one of collocation rather than selection.10 An alternative, cognitive-linguistic explanation might take the conceptual back-

ground as its starting point. Since paintings, carvings, etc. are often perceived

as aesthetically pleasing, the adjective beautiful readily springs to mind to describe

them. Collocations incorporating the adverb beautifully could then be regarded as

being derived from the original collocation (beautiful carving -4 beautifully carved ).

The problem with this explanation is that such derivation is not always possible.11 Dieter Wirth, personal communication.

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