Yearbook of Phraseology 5

Phraseology stands at a crossroads: should it now be considered as a linguistic theory of its own, combining semantic and syntactic phenomena and integrating them into a cultural perspective, or should it seek guidance from well-established lines of linguistic research, such as corpus and computational linguistics, pragmatics and discourse analysis, cognitive linguistics, lexical grammar, construction grammar, frame semantics? On the other hand, research on collocations and set phrases in the broadest sense is coming under pressure from proponents of methodologies and definitions inspired by the exact sciences. Thus, Stefan Th. Gries (2013) complains that after “50-something years of work on collocations”, the results are still disappointing, and he recommends exploring new avenues of research on collocations. The same may hold true for set phrases or phraseologisms: in spite of the abundant literature on phraseology, the very definition of what is actually a set phrase, for instance, is still a most controversial topic. Some researchers may invoke the psycholinguistic reality or the perception by native speakers, or semantic and syntactic criteria, or even statistical scores computed on the basis of large linguistic corpora. Even then, the frequency of a given structure, its statistical co-occurrence score in a given corpus, and its recurrence across different representative corpora, may be more difficult to interpret than would appear at first sight