ABSTRACT
Language involves choice from among many possibilities which are restricted only by whether they are good grammar or not. But making a choice at one point often commits one to further choices which follow on from the first choice. Words are not independent of each other and, indeed, combine with each other to form new lexemes. The subject of this chapter is lexemes that consist of more than one word form, and, in the case of collocations, more than one lexical unit. These multi-word units are so common in normal language that they, rather than single words, should be considered the basic organizing principle in language production. They are well established and well known to every member of the speech community and are in constant use, so much so in fact that their use is often criticized, see 3.1 below. They are often contrasted with creative, original language such as can be found in fictional texts:
Her clothes smell faintly of the Smeaths’ house, a mixture of scouring powder and cooked turnips and slightly rancid laundry . . .
