Idiomen, kollokationerna och lexikonet

Against the background of the extensive use of language corpora in the dictionary-making industri of today, the paper stresses the importance of including set phrases in future lexicographic undertakings. A distinction is made between idioms and collocations, and it is argued that while the significance of the former category has long been recognised, the latter has only recently come to attract the attention of lexicographers. To gauge the relative importance of the two categories in modern English, a few experiments were undertaken, the results of which indicated clearly that collocations are greatly superior to idioms in frequency and can be said to make up the backbone of language. Consequently a plea is finally made for the inclusion of larger quantities of collocations in dictionaries of the future