A CONTRIBUTION TO THE SEMANTICS OF COLLOCATIONS
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.4312/linguistica.59.1.301-310Keywords:
collocations, base, collocate, idiosyncracy, semantic cohesion, semantic compatibility, syntagmatic restrictionAbstract
As a specific type of multi-word expressions, collocations still pose a major challenge from a descriptive perspective, despite numerous existing studies. This is especially noticeable at the lexico-semantic level. These syntagmatic word combinations, which form a unity, differ from other linguistic sequences because of their apparent semantic inconspicuousness. However, by comparing them with equivalent multi-word expressions in other languages, some important differences become evident. This relates in particular to the formation of collocations, and thus to the creation of new meanings emanating from particular word combinations, which are language specific. Adopting a functional structural-syntactic view of the collocation components, our goal is to investigate the semantic motivation as well as the semantic cohesion between the elements of the collocation and the possible semantic modifications involved. Since the specificity of the semantic relations often becomes lexically evident only at a cross-linguistic level, examples of collocations in different languages are provided. The aim of the paper is to present the ambivalent character of the collocations and contribute to a clearer understanding of the linguistic phenomenon in question.
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Copyright (c) 2019 Aneta Stojić
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