ABSTRACT
This renewed interest in collocation has been motivated by the lexicalist turn present in various linguistic approaches and theoretical frameworks. From applied linguistics to language teaching, the context in which the concept of collocation originated, the attention paid to lexical combinatorics seems to follow naturally from the proposals of the lexical approach (Lewis 1993, 1997, 2000), which specially focuses on polylexical units and chunks. In other approaches, access to large computerized corpora has revealed the tendency of languages to repeat lexical patterns, thanks to increasingly refi ned search tools for the automatic extraction of linguistic information. Consequently, Natural Language Processing, in its interest in modeling human language, has looked for a way to identify the most frequent lexical combinations, which are claimed not to be random but linguistically motivated. In view of these fi ndings, theoretical linguistics has attempted to understand the linguistic motivation behind a word’s combinatorial possibilities. Likewise, lexicography, which is concerned with the adequate representation of word meaning, has also taken collocational information into account, particularly in dictionaries oriented to language production.
