Between the Phraseological Binomial, Complex Placement and Colosstruction

A “Long and Extended” Examination

Abstract

Despite a persistent terminological diversity, it can be said that, from a conceptual point of view, the taxonomy of phraseology has advanced towards a commendable consensus in the last decade. There remain, however, some controversial or blurred areas, such as complex collocations and ‘collostructions’ (or ‘constructional idioms’), with the consequent technical difficulties in recognizing them in an electronic corpus. This has indirect repercussions on the limits of the theoretical concept of collocation itself, which, depending on how it is defined, may overlap these types of phraseme. Another way to approach this question is to consider that there is a productive syntactic mechanism of phraseological imbrication, whereby a phraseme can be embedded in a larger phraseme without constituting a ‘new’ phraseological category. Thus, an adverbial idiom could be part of a larger-scale collocation with a verb (both in terms of semantics and frequency of co-occurrence), while remaining an adverbial idiom with other verbs (Pamies 2017, 2019). A highly representative case of this indeterminacy would be that of phraseological binomials, which, in some phraseological dictionaries, appear classified as adverbial idioms (a bombo y platillo) but, in others, as verbal idioms (anunciar a bombo y platillo). In order to examine closely this problem, we have chosen the expression largo y tendido, which, despite being totally fixed, is preferentially combined with certain verbs, even allowing synonymic and hyponymic substitutions between them. A (qualitative and quantitative) empirical study of a large electronic textual corpus makes it possible to analyze all the contextual variations that affect its use, testing, at the same time, the statistical methodology of automated detection of collocations. The heterogeneity observed is much greater than expected, but it also reveals certain regularities.