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While British Contextualism at first focused on the intra- and intertextual relations which collocations establish within texts, significance-oriented approaches were from the very beginning more concerned with an adequate description of a collocation’s internal features and structures. This is because, unlike British Contextualists, these approaches are predominantly linked through the same purpose: EFL-oriented lexicography. Hence, Cowie, Howarth, Mel’cuk, Hausmann, and Siepmann might not be as closely linked by their academic vitae as Firth, Halliday, and Sinclair, but as lexicographers, they are all interested in finding a way to identify suitable language material which is relevant for learners of English and the compilation of a (learner’s) dictionary. Among the pioneers in western European lexicography were Harold Palmer, A.S. Hornby, and A.P. Cowie. Towards the beginning of the twentieth century, Palmer had opened a school in Belgium and became increasingly interested in lightening students workload with the help of a restricted vocabulary; a list that contained the most important and productive words for everyday conversation. This was the start of what since then has often been referred to as the Vocabulary Control Movement. In the 1930s, authorities in Tokyo commissioned him to design a limited vocabulary list for Japanese schools. A number of well-established publications arose from this project, such as the Second Interim Report on English Collocation (Palmer 1933), the General Service List (West 1953/1983) and of course The Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English (Hornby/Gatenby/Wakefield 1948)1. From a very early stage, while working on the First Interim Report on Vocabulary Selection (Palmer 1930), Palmer and one of his young colleagues, A.S. Hornby, realised that it would not be sufficient to provide learners with a mere alphabetical word list. Therefore, they collected 3879 collocational pairs and structured them according to word-class and internal structure. The introduction of the Second Interim Report on English Collocation outlines the main objective of this project as follows:

It is not enough to suggest in a haphazard way the inclusion or exclusion of any word, word-compound, phrase, proverbial expression, etc. that may occur to us. The work must start with collecting and classifying, and this must be done on a large scale and according to an organized plan – and we have been doing on a large scale and according to an organized plan this work of collecting and classifying those things that must be collected and classified. (Palmer 1933: 1)

Coming back to Humpy Dumpty’s phraseological chunks: scornful tone or neither more nor less do not occur at all. Do work and make a remark, on the other hand, are both part of a rather large and heterogeneous category called “verb collocations: combinations of verbs with specific nouns” (Palmer 1933: 50). Introducing notions like (x to x N₃) or x to x N₃, the authors tried to subdivide this group into members which take or can take an additional2 object, like make a remark and those which remain unaltered, such as do work. This is interesting since the idea of a lexically fixed word combination with a slot for potential alternation is quite similar to patterns in valency theory (Herbst/Heath/Roe/Götz 2004) or pattern grammar (Hunston/Francis 2000) and of course semi-lexical constructions like Goldberg’s argument structure constructions (Goldberg 2006: 19–44). However, since the verbs are listed in alphabetical order, this again resembles a rather long list of more or less random entries selected by proficient native speakers. Thus, in later publications, such as Thousand-Word English (1937), Palmer and Hornby included information on pronunciation, as well as morphological alterations and disambiguation for polysemous words. The latter they achieved through linking, for example, the lemma with its potential antonyms and collocations, as can be seen in the example of do (box 2.1):

Box 2.1: Entry for the lemma do from Thousand-Word English (Palmer/Hornby 1937: 43)

In general Palmer’s own selection subsumes a rather wide range of word occurrences and syntactic patterns under the term collocation (Palmer 1933: 7); nonetheless, his work has without a doubt had “a profound and enduring influence on modern EFL dictionary-making” (Cowie 1999: 52). Since then lexicographers have struggled to develop a classification for “those things that must be collected and classified” (Palmer 1933: 1) which is comprehensive and universally applicable at the same time. Consequently, Palmer’s work did not only inspire scholars like Hornby3 and Cowie4 to enhance the lexicographical description of phraseological language in general and collocations in particular, but also lay the ground for further research on collocational phenomena within modern language teaching and language acquisition research (Ellis/Simpson-Vlach/Maynard 2008; Jehle 2007; de Cock 2003; Bahns 1997; Howarth 1996)

A.P. Cowie shares Palmer’s concern that a broad definition of partly fixed and opaque language could again lead to an unnecessary workload for language learners (Cowie 2012: 390). Therefore, he proposes a more clear-cut definition of the combinations within the spectrum of idioms, collocations, and free combinations. Leaving Palmer’s more formalistic approach behind, he regards compositionality and variability as the two defining criteria of composite units (table 2.3). According to this classification, the common denominator for collocations is a certain level of variability with a distinction between open and restricted collocations on the compositionality level.

Table 2.3: Categorisation of lexical word combinations according to Cowie (1983: xii-xiii) with examples from Howarth (1996:15–16)

Blow a trumpet, for example, would be regarded as an open collocation because trumpet as well as blow occur in their literal sense (compositional) and are at the same time exchangeable with other lexemes within the same paradigm like horn or play (variable). Blow a fuse, on the other hand, also shows a certain degree of variability. While, admittedly, blow is relatively fixed, top or stack could also be used to express the concept of “to get very angry” (OALD 7: blow a fuse). In all cases, however, its meaning lies beyond the prototypical sense of the verb blow and the respective nouns. Only via a chain of metaphorical extensions, for example, “ANGER IS THE HEAT OF A FLUID IN A CONTAINER” (Lakoff 1990: 383), could one construe a link between the literal meaning of this collocation and its figurative sense. This restriction makes blow a fuse less clear and comprehensible for the learner and, therefore, needs to be part of a comprehensive learner’s dictionary. For open collocations such as blow a trumpet, no further explanation is necessary, at least from a decoding point of view.

But in many cases, the concept of (non-)compositionality at this stage is not very clear and precise. Blow a fuse, for example, could also be used in a more literal sense of ‘causing a fuse to melt’. Here the most opaque element is blow. This might suggest more compositionality and, therefore, would put blow a fuse under the category of open collocation, yet there are not many other items which can be destroyed through “blowing”, like gasket or cover, which then again would yield an analysis as a figurative idiom. Thus, as for statistically significant collocations, the question arises whether the limited variability of blow a fuse is due to linguistic restriction or rather because it belongs to a special vocabulary on a pragmatic basis which is restricted to the fields of electricity and insulation (Herbst 1996: 386–389; > 2.1). Furthermore, it is also interesting to note that the use of blow a fuse in its “enragement” sense is probably a metaphorical extension of its use to describe the destruction of a piece of wire or rubber. This concept of a mutual influence of meanings mirrors to a certain degree what construction grammar has termed inheritance relations within an inventory of constructions (Fischer/Stefanowitsch 2006: 4–5; Fried/Östmann 2004: 23–14), which today is regarded as a basic principle within language acquisition by most proponents of these linguistic approaches.

To refine his typology of composite units, Cowie, in a later publication with Peter Howarth, adds two more features to his characterisation of collocations and idioms (Cowie/Howarth 1995: 82), namely that phraseological units, independent from their variability and semantic opaqueness, are institutionalised and memorised. They conclude that “[i]t is best to think of a collocation as a familiar (or institutionalized), stored (or memorized) word-combination with limited and arbitrary variation.” (Cowie/Howarth 1995: 82). Similar to usage-based theories, this stresses the fact that collocations need to be repeatedly encountered and learned, an observation which has also been made by Pawley and Syder (1983):

Indeed, we believe that memorized sentences and phrases are the normal building blocks of fluent spoken discourse, and at the same time, that they provide models for the creation of many (partly) new sequences which are memorable and in their turn enter the stock of familiar usages. (Pawley/Syder 1983: 208)

Moving away from a clear categorisation based on semantic opaqueness in favour of the extent of limited choice and the number of choices a language user has within a collocation, this distinction is in fact very similar to Sinclair's notion of casual and statistically significant collocations. Yet, the source of this significance is, of course, different from a frequency-oriented approach, since compositionality, in Cowie’s terminology, still lies in the eye of the (native speaker) beholder. With this definition, lexicographers and EFL teachers can of course fairly easily account for a certain feel of collocability, which might not be analysed as statistically significant but nevertheless seems to be an important contribution to a language learner’s lexicon. On the other hand, introspection and personal judgment still play a fairly important role in this definition, which makes it difficult to justify any classification on more general grounds.

Table 2.4: Categorisation of open collocations (Cowie/Howarth 1995: 83)

Again, Humpty Dumpty and his phraseology shall be used to exemplify this. In their study Cowie and Howarth explicitly focus on open collocation and claim that these phraseological units are most fitting for the investigation of proficiency levels amongst native and non-native speakers of English. They introduce four subcategories for collocation (Cowie/Howarth 1995: 83). At first glance, the attempt to assign scornful tone, do work, make a remark and neither more nor less to these categories seems to work quite well (table 2.4), until one considers closely related collocations, like make an answer and utter a remark. Here, the limited interchangeability, for example with utter an answer or also pursue work, would then put make a remark and do work into category d) and water down the precision of this classification. In fact, this applies to most members of b) and c), which is probably due to the fact that, whenever one allows for variability, a certain degree of overlap is one of its potential consequences. Thus, this typology seems to demonstrate the variability-side of collocations quite well and also accounts for more than one slot within a collocation. But it struggles to provide a clear definition or explanation for restrictions, which then makes it seem rather arbitrary and vague. Cowie and Howarth’s subcategories are nevertheless remarkable, since, even though ”invariable collocations” seem to resemble in fact what used to be called idioms, Cowie and Howarth’s typology now looks strikingly similar to semi-lexical constructions, with one or more open slots and fixed lexical items in between (> 4).

At the same time as Cowie developed his first framework on collocations, Russian linguists like Igor Mel’čuk studied collocational phenomena in a more formalistic way. Here the focus does not lie on the language learner him/herself. Mel’čuk sees his approach rather as a comprehensive and structured way to describe phraseological phenomena in order to obtain thoroughly processed data for the compilation of a dictionary or computational linguistic purposes. Therefore, the native speaker’s viewpoint stands at the centre of his conception of text production (Mel’čuk 1995: 25–24). In general, Mel’čuk assumes that whenever a (native) speaker wants to express a certain concept (ConceptR), s/he needs a phonetic representation (PhonR) from a language (L) in order to realize a semantic representation (SemR). Lexical functions (LF) are then part of a comprehensive inventory of semantic representation (SemR) (figure 2.1); a conception which in fact looks rather similar to de Saussure’s (1916/1967: 76–79) notion of the linguistic sign and therefore also to any constructions.

Figure 2.1: Mel’čuk’s (1989, 1995) process of text production compared to de Saussure’s (1916/1967: 76–79) linguistic sign

Based on this concept, Mel’čuk’s idea was to describe lexical units like set phrases and collocations on the basis of a general underlying meaning (Mel’čuk 1995: 186). Since collocations, as Mel’čuk claims, “make up the lion’s share or the phraseme inventory […]” (Mel’čuk 1998: 24) and almost all collocations are covered by syntagmatic lexical functions, it seems useful to have a closer look at some examples of lexical functions. Box 2.2 shows the respective LFs for the set phrases cleanly shaven, lend support or pass an exam, as well as scornful look, make a remark, do work and neither more nor less:

Box 2.2: Lexical functions of phraseological phenomena according to Mel’čuk (1995: 186)

Like a linguistic sign or a construction, these functions consist of a semantic component, which gives the general purpose of an expression like Magn, which expresses the meaning of intensification such as “intense(ly)” or “very”, Oper, for support verbs for performing or doing something, or Real, to add the meaning component of “realise” or “fulfil”. The form or phonological realisation is then the result of a lexical unit (argument) which selects based on lexical function a number of lexical expressions in order to form a phrase. Since neither more nor less is similar in meaning to exactly, it might be regarded as a kind of synonym or Syn-function according to Mel’čuk’s terminology (Mel’čuk 1998: 32–33). Similar to Cowie and Howarth’s “collocations with limited choice”, lexical functions are a more operationalised way of expressing an underlying level of meaning. At the same time, this concept also suggests that there could be two levels of meaning, or function, at work: one coming from the word meaning of the constituents themselves, the other from the more abstract combination of a specific item with a certain semantic representation. Just like in construction grammar, where, based on the assumption of inheritance relations, the general function of an argument structure construction influences the interpretation of individual constituents, such as the verb (Goldberg 2006: 19–44).

While Cowie and Howarth also explored the diagnostic potential of collocational proficiency and Mel’čuk focused on a more or less meta-lexicographic analysis, Franz-Josef Hausmann’s approach towards the co-occurrence of lexical items is more concerned with an adequate and comprehensive lexicographic description from an EFL point of view. With frequent learner mistakes and translational problems in mind, he regards institutionalisation and unpredictability as the central aspects of collocation. This emphasises a contrastive aspect and explicitly takes the native language of a learner into consideration. Accordingly, he defines collocations as “semi-preconstructed items within language, which are not a speaker’s ad hoc creation but retrieved from memory as a whole unit; the hearer would presumably perceive these as familiar.”5 (Hausmann 1984: 398–399). To Hausmann, these “typical, specific and characteristic relations between two words”6 (Hausmann 1985: 118) need to be given special attention within an EFL teaching context, since they enable the learner to communicate more fluently and in a natural, native-like way.

Figure 2.2: Typology of word combinations (based on Hausmann 1984 and Bartsch 2004: 38)

As can be seen in figure 2.2, Hausmann further distinguishes affine combinations from free combinations. However, to him these co-creations are less interesting within an EFL context, for they are built spontaneously and based on extralinguistic meaning restrictions: they are, so to say, unrestricted combinations of ordinary words. Counter-creations, on the other hand, stand at the most creative end of the spectrum of non-fixed word combinations. Since combinations like racy tone are, according to Hausmann, predominantly part of a certain more or less idiolectic style of an author. (Hausmann 1984: 399)

So again, do work and make a remark for Hausmann would qualify as collocations, since, to learners of English, there seems to be no concept-inherent reason why it should not be *make work7 or *do a remark. On the contrary, in German for example Arbeit machen (lit.: make work) would be as accepted as Arbeit tun (lit: do work). As a result, this might cause confusion and represent a potential source of mistakes when transferring this concept from a German L1 to an English L2 context. Neither more nor less on the other hand consists of more than two words and would, therefore, be rejected on formal grounds, as within Hausmann’s framework there is only room for two constituents, a freely chosen base and its semantically dependent collocator. Both are linked via an arbitrary restriction on lexical choice. Other than word combinations, however, collocator and base, according to Hausmann, remain semantically independent (Hausmann 1984: 400–401). Scornful tone, on the other hand, might instead be considered a case of co-creation, since it could be well expected from an extralinguistic perspective that a concept like tone can be combined with the concept of a negative connotation, like scornful, but also (near)synonyms like condescending or dismissive are equally likely and possible. A combination like racy or Mozartean tone8, however, could be regarded as a counter-creation, since the constituents’ co-occurrence cannot be predicted based on either extralinguistic experience or linguistic institutionalisation. Interestingly enough, Hausmann seems to presuppose that a certain degree of selectional restrictions exists even within counter-creations, since amongst all the examples he gives, there are none which are not decodable or which seem to be absolutely wrong or gibberish. This raises the question of where to draw the line, not only between collocation and creative counter-creation but also regarding the point where a word combination should be regarded as wrong, rather than creative.

Unfortunately, despite a clear notion of the elements which constitute a collocation, Hausmann’s concept as such remains rather vague. He does not explore the source of unpredictability, which might not only vary depending on the native language of a learner but also on very individual aspects like linguistic proficiency. This makes base and collocator useful terms for lexicographic purposes, but when it comes to learner-oriented cognitive aspects within the concept of collocation, the question remains whether it is indeed the collocator which needs to be remembered and therefore stored with the, rather free, base, or if it might be possible that the collocator as well contributes a kind of additional, more independent meaning perspective to the overall collocational meaning. Admittedly, Hausmann does not reject the idea of a kind of reverse analysis – from collocator to base – completely. However, he regards this as a linguistic research question, which lacks a sense of the learner’s reality (Hausmann 2007: 218). But as table 2.5 shows, knowing about meaning restrictions which are caused by the collocator can just as well prevent learners from non-native like utterances.

Table 2.5: List of noun collocates for scornful according to the BNC

[scornful+N] for example, as in scornful tone, seems to combine with a semantically rather limited set of bases. Table 2.5 shows a list of all nouns which occur, with a span of four, more than three times within the BNC and have scornful as a premodification. All of them express either visual or auditory means of perception. Hence, there might be a kind of semantic pre-selection for the N-slot in [scornful+N] which makes a combination like scornful smell seem more unusual and creative than scornful eyebrow (BNC_{AL0 233}) or scornful accusation (BNC_{AAL 822}), even though, through metaphorical extension, both could be expressed via either eyes or voice. For a cognitive account of the word combination scornful tone this could indicate that, even if there seems to be a free co-creation at first glance, there are certain restrictions on the combinatorial potential of these word combinations which might be cognitively stored in a native speaker's mind, which any learner needs to be explicitly or implicitly aware of in order to use a language in as native-like9 a way as possible. An underlying relationship like this resembles to some extent, Sinclair’s concept of semantic prosody (> 2.1; 3.2). However, a new aspect would be that a collocation can be analysed as a potentially bi-directional concept.

One of the first authors within collocational research to explicitly advocate for this mutual influence between the constituents of a collocation is Dirk Siepmann (2005: 427). In his evaluation of linguistic co-occurrences, he not only takes into account that a word might be interrelated with a more abstract semantic concept but also that semantic concepts as such could frequently be observed together. He comes to the conclusion that “[…] collocational phenomena span the entire range of morphosyntactic constructions. The terms ‘collocation’ and ‘construction’ turn out to be almost synonymous, a clear indication of the fact that phraseology is at the centre of language rather than at the periphery.” (Siepmann 2005: 430). Taking into account that Firth (> 2.1) and Palmer (> 2.2) also more or less implicitly considered collocations as a pairing of selectional restrictions of form and meaning, this is a rather obvious conclusion to make. What is innovative here are the grounds on which a constructional meaning can be based. Collocations with semantically rather vague words like do or make as in do work or make a remark are particularly difficult to grasp, even if it is possible to find a definition for the meaning of the [NP] in [do+NP] this is often hard to maintain throughout all instances of a corpus let alone native speakers’ performances (Faulhaber 2011: 304–309). Any semantic explanation of a slot within a construction in general and collocations, in particular, can therefore only be a prototypical approximation. Nevertheless, knowing about these potential restrictions comes naturally to a native speaker and is valuable information for the L2 learner, or as Siepmann stresses “[h]owever, although semantic relationships can only be discerned post hoc, we should not forget that they may lighten the language learner’s task.” (Spiemann 2005: 432)

Thus, the basic assumptions of significance-oriented approaches can be seen as follows: overall, these approaches revolve around the question of the reasons why a combination of words should be regarded as a collocation. They therefore, operate on a syntagmatic as well as a paradigmatic level but focus on a collocation’s restrictions as far as these two dimensions are concerned. Syntagmatic restrictions often come in the shape of a more confined meaning of the collocation itself, since in most cases it is rather specific and does not encompass the full semantic and/or functional spectrum of the individual lexical items, which constitute this co-occurrence. This has been accounted for as (non)compositionality or semantic opaqueness. Paradigmatic restrictions, on the other hand, are combinatorial restrictions. They describe the fact that constituents of a collocation cannot be exchanged deliberately, even if they are substituted by close synonyms. The actual degree of these constraints can vary considerably, and often results in a vague and, at times, subjective subdivision of the continuum between compound, collocation and free combination. In significance-oriented publications, these restrictions have been labelled variability or unpredictability. Furthermore, collocations can be subdivided into fully lexicalized and partly delexicalised structures. The latter are clustered, based on the identification of a joint underlying meaning and/or function dimension. They are multi-directional, which means that each part could be regarded as an influencing factor for the other. The issue of the syntagmatic and paradigmatic restrictedness of a collocation in partticular poses problems for any kind of contrastive application, such as translation or foreign language learning.