Chapter 1 the study of collocations

1.4  Collocations and Idioms 
 
 
Before proceeding to the description of the framework employed by the 
present study on collocations, it is necessary to make reference to one of the 
debates concerning the study of collocations: to what degree collocations are 
similar to idioms.   
 
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Along the continuum with free combinations on one end and idioms on 
the other, collocations seem to fall in the middle as they blend together the 
semantic transparency of free combinations and the syntagmatic bonds of 
idioms.  An idiom is usually described as "a constituent or series of constituents 
for which the semantic interpretation is not a compositional function of the 
formatives of which it is composed" (Nagy 1978:296).  Collocations, although 
they are combinations of at least two words, exhibit a degree of syntactic 
frozenness and resistance to lexical substitution; they are semantically 
transparent; and hence they are not idioms.  However, there are certain lexical 
combinations that are semantically transparent, and therefore should be 
classified as collocations, but which also show a certain degree of syntactic 
frozenness and resistance to lexical substitution, just like idioms: for example, 
'foot the bill', 'curry flavour', 'high explosive', 'highest confidence'.  Such 
expressions have been called 'bound collocations' (Cruse 1986:41), 'semi-
productive expressions’ (Nagy 1978:296), and 'partial idioms' (Palmer 1976:99).   
 
There are linguists who do not distinguish between idioms and 
collocations.  For example, Wallace (1979) describes collocations as a class of 
idioms, as stereotyped expressions that are easily decoded from the meaning of 
their constituent elements.  Wallace distinguishes two dimensions to the idiom: 
the dimension of meaning (the semantic dimension) and the dimension of 
grammatical context (the structural dimension) (Wallace 1979:63).  Idioms, 
according to the degree of their decodability, are classified as 'transparent', if 
they are easily decoded, or 'opaque'.  Idioms falling into the area of transparent 
 
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stereotypes are called 'restricted collocations', e.g. ‘Pleased to meet you’, ‘be 
honest with’, ‘use up’. 
 
The semantic approach to the study of collocations also considers lexical 
co-occurrences that are arbitrarily restricted and so lacking a semantic 
explanation.  These are like idioms, i.e. linguistically non-productive, and as 
such they should be left out of the study of lexical fields (Lehrer 1974:187). 
 
By and large, semantic transparency appears to be the only criterion that 
could make a difference in the process of classifying expressions as idioms or 
collocations, while the importance of how clear-cut the distinction is between 
collocations and idioms seems to vary among linguists, with some arguing that 
"it is, of course, a matter of terminology whether collocations should be classed 
separately from idioms or as a major sub-class" (Bolinger 1976:5).   
 
This study examines collocations, i.e. word combinations, in terms of the 
syntactic patterns in which they enter.  Therefore, the degree of their semantic 
transparency is, for the purposes of this study, overlooked.