Phraseology, Collocations and Learners' Dictionaries

The aim of the present research is to consider the study of phraseology in connection to new types of learners’ dictionaries. The growing interest in fixed lexical expressions and collocations, which cannot be entirely reduced to minimal units, is reflected in lexicography and in the creation of thematic dictionaries that are specifically designed. Differently from idiomatic expressions with a more stable presence in learners’ dictionaries, collocations have gained attention only quite recently, also thanks to the development of Corpus Linguistics and the Lexical Approach in foreign language teaching. Through the use of a descriptive approach, the main objective is to investigate the way collocations are treated and presented in recent learners’ dictionaries, which move away from being merely imagined as decoding tools and become encoding instruments aimed at helping students make appropriate linguistic choices, in relation to the right context and connotation of words. The lack of a fixed and generally accepted definition for collocations leads to different methods adopted to present and classify them, proving that the topic is still part of a work in progress