Combination, Collocation and Multi-Word Units

There is a profusion of labels used for the phenomenon of multiword units (MU’s), yet they are notoriously underrepresented in handbooks of both grammatical and dictionary type alike. After an illustration of both, problems of criteria which delimit MU’s are raised up, together with an number of open issues and necessity of a functional approach is stressed. As three major issues, stableness, typicality and potentiality are discussed. A number of urgent questions waiting for a systematic solutions is listed and a final plea for a more balanced selection and approach is made. 1 Syntagmas, Combinations, Collocations and Other In the multitude of approaches and handbooks a number of labels, both familiar and less familiar, is used to designate various syntagmas and word combinations that one comes across. If anything may be pointed out in these in general, then it is a lack of consistency of many types to be found here. In the situation of general consensus lacking and conflicting theories and views being proposed, this situation is not surprising. What is surprising is that the same or very similar phenomena are given widely different names even in the same single approach and book. 1.1 Grammatical Approaches Grammatical approaches often tend to play the multiword units (MU’s) down and neglect them. For a first illustration of this, let us have a look, at a representative grammar work, a modern classic now, namely Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (Longman 1985) by R. Quirk, S. Greenbaum, G. Leech and J. Svartvik. It seems that a number of rather different approaches have been applied here. There are three main areas where multiword units have been observed or, rather, noted to exist, namely, verbs, prepositions and, up to some extent, nouns. The respective verbs are illustrated by such casese as drink up, dispose of, get away with and are called multi-word verbs (pp. 1150ff.) here. These are then further subclassified as phrasal verbs, prepositional verbs and phrasal-prepositional verbs, respectively. All of these cases are said to be a class of words which behave as single units. The apparent contradiction is disposed of by a somewhat unorthodox argument: "The term "word" is frequently used, however, not only for a morphologically defined word classes, but also for an item which acts as a single word lexically or syntactically... It is this extented sense of ’verb’ as a ’unit which behaves to some extent either lexically or syntactically as a single verb’ that we use in labels such as ’prepositional verb’".