Phraseology

Abstract

Abstract Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, there has been a quickening of interest among theoretical linguists, and among specialists in lexicography, discourse analysis, language acquisition, and foreign language teaching, in what were traditionally known as ‘idioms’, and are variously called ‘word-combinations’ (Zgusta 1971), ‘fixed expressions’ (Alexander 1987), and ‘phrasal lexemes’ (Pawley 1985; Lipka 1990). The interest reflects a keener awareness than before of the pervasiveness of ready-made memorized combinations in written and spoken language and a wider recognition of the central part they play in first and second language acquisition and in speech production (Bolinger 1976, 1985; Peters 1983; Pawley and Syder 1983). The notion that native-like proficiency in a language depends crucially on knowledge of a stock of prefabricated units, varying in complexity and internal cohesion, can also be seen as a necessary corrective to the atomistic view that the workings of language can be explained by a system of rules of general applicability, a lexicon largely made up of minimal units, and a set of basic principles of semantic interpretation (Fillmore et al. 1988). This shift of perception is partly the outcome of a steady accumulation of descriptive studies throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and questions of analysis and classification will be the chief focus of this survey. Phraseology, as the study of the structure, meaning, and use of wordcombinations, is not a commonly recognized field of activity among British and American linguists (for an East European view, see Arnold 1986; Gläser 1988); but that it has become a significant focus of research, especially perhaps in Europe, is apparent from the attention given to word-combinations in textbooks on lexical semantics (Cruse 1986), lexicology (Carter 1987; Lipka 1990), and vocabulary in language teaching (Carter and McCarthy 1988), and from the publication of a number of phraseological dictionaries (e.g., Cowie et al. 1983; Benson et al. 1986). It is noticeable, too, that despite the continuing influence in collocational analysis of neo-Firthian lexical theory (Sinclair 1987b), with its emphasis on observed frequency of co-occurrence within stated distances (or ‘spans’) in large computerized corpora, the dominant influences in work are a more directly Firthian strain (Mitchell 1971) and East European (specifically Soviet) phraseological theory, first mediated to non-Russian-speaking students through the work of Klappenbach (1968); Weinreich (1969); Arnold (1973); and Lipka (1974).