Introduction

Abstract

The goal of our special issue is to delineate certain current tendencies in the development of phraseology that are significant from the perspective of lexicography. For several reasons, phraseology is at present one of the most actively evolving disciplines. First, present-day linguistics is devoting more and more attention to irregular phenomena in the structure of language. The classical notion that language consists of two autonomous macro-components – grammar and lexicon – is increasingly being called into question. In certain versions of the authoritative theory of Construction Grammar, for example, the boundary between the lexicon and the grammar is erased entirely. In accordance with the traditional, ‘classical’, so to speak, model of the structure of a language all that is needed to describe it exhaustively and consistently is a good grammar that contains all the productive rules for constructing utterances and a comprehensive dictionary encompassing the entire lexicon of the language – that is, roughly speaking, all of its words. In reality, however, it turns out that many rules affect only individual words or individual lexico-semantic classes (in this sense as well grammar is not entirely independent of lexis), whereas many words combine with others according not to productive rules of syntax and semantic combinability but in conformity with certain difficult to predict principles that often merely amount to preferences of usage. Consequently, more and more word groups of very different types fall within the scope of the dictionary. Second, as a linguistic discipline concerned with fixed expressions, phraseology itself has recently significantly expanded its purview. If previously it basically dealt with idioms, proverbs, and restricted collocations, today its sphere of interests embraces all semi-fixed expressions with open slots in their structure that permit a wide variety of fillers. Phraseology also includes word groups which are compositional from a semantic point of view (and hence ‘free’ from the perspective of traditional linguistics), but which have such high frequency that it is reasonable to consider them units of the mental lexicon. Such combinations of words are not generated anew each time in the process of communication, but are extracted ready-made from memory. In such cases we deal with cognitively entrenched units.