Deducing collocations

Resum

There is a certain consensus on some defining features of collocations (they are frequent, recurrent, conventional, institutionalized, etc.), but there is not much agreement on other characteristics, for example whether or not they constitute binary lexical relations, and, crucially, whether they are arbitrary, and must be stipulated, or should instead be deduced or inferred. I will argue that most collocations are not instances of binary relations, and also that these combinatorial associations are not memorized as individual pieces of lexical information. Collocates should not be stipulated or specified individually, since the appropriate bases for them constitute large paradigms which meet a number of restrictive semantic criteria. Speakers (whether native or not) who learn collocations have intuitive access to these abstract semantic features, which are proven to be recurrent throughout the grammar. Lexical functions in Meaning-Text Theory (MTT) could also be formulated taking these semantic groups as bases, instead of the specific keywords provided by their respective paradigms.