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In comparison, context- as well as significance-oriented approaches share the view of a collocation being formed by syntagmatic and paradigmatic levels of meaning. This links in with construction grammar, which assumes that any (recurrent) structure within a linguistic system consists of a level of form but also a designated meaning perspective (> 4). Therefore, it will be argued here that collocations, like morphemes or words, are in fact form and meaning pairings and as such constructions in a construction grammar sense.

To favour an approach from chapters 2.1 or 2.2 for a working definition, however, does not seem possible, since neither statistically-oriented methodology nor a lexicographic list of a word combination’s restrictions are, at this point, able to provide a comprehensive definition of collocational phenomena. As chapter 2.2 has shown, paradigmatic restrictions are particularly difficult to explain, since whenever there is a definition which seems to have grasped the exact nature of limited variability, an example can be found which proves the previous interpretation to be a misconception. Take, for instance, the often quoted word combination commit a crime. In terms of a limitation of interchangeability, commit as a collocate can be found with noun phrases such as adultery, burglary, crime, deed, error, impropriety, indiscretion, mistake, murder, offence, robbery, sin or suicide (OCD 2: commit). Semantically, all these potential collocates seem to have in common that they roughly-speaking refer to an offence for which one can or will be held accountable by some kind of authority. Yet, lie, which is semantically close to nouns mentioned above such as perjury, does not occur with commit either within the BoE or the BNC. Furthermore, even native speakers of English seem to reject the combination commit a lie as being wrong (Klotz 1998: 93–95). Examples like this have often lead to an understanding of collocations as an idiosyncratic and more or less item-specific combination of lexical items (Herbst 1996; Hausmann 1984). But since collocations are regarded as constructions here, a construction grammar approach with the concept of inheritance relations at its centre might help us to understand this problem. Commit a lie, for example, is not completely non-existent within the English language. It can be found whenever a text or, to be more precise, its author, thinks that lying is not just something one does on a regular basis, but is in fact a kind of crime, which consequently will be judged by a moral authority. This is often the case in religious discourse, and therefore it seems that [commit+NP] does actually maintain its basic meaning. Of course, commit a lie and the more accepted commit perjury are far from being synonymous. Even though both express an act of not telling the truth, perjury is restricted to the language of the law. So, if commit perjury is more likely to be found in a corpus, this might be due to the fact that in a rather secular world, a legally “proper” crime like perjury is much more noteworthy than an ordinary lie, but not because commit a lie is not a possible combination.

The potentially underlying meaning of “an offence, for which one can or will be held accountable by some kind of authority” becomes even stronger after a closer look at collocations like commit an impropriety or commit a mistake. At first glance, it seems that neither the aspect of “offence” nor the feature of “accountability” are particularly strong within these word combinations. Under closer examination, however, it becomes apparent from examples (9) to (11) that, on the contrary, each impropriety or mistake is a somewhat euphemistic expression for a serious offence if it co-occurs with the verb commit. The printers in (9), for example, were severely punished by King Charles I for their seemingly blasphemous behaviour, while the mistakes in (10) are nothing less than kidnapping and charges for acting as an accessory to assault1. Finally, the impropriety in example (11) is in legal terms a serious offence which usually is brought in front of a High Court and is therefore anything but a minor procedural lapse.

(9)	BNC CCB 1053	His Majesties Printers, at or about this time, had committed a scandalous mistake in our English Bibles by leaving out the word NOT in the Seventh Commandment.
(10)	BNC HSL 1335	Under these circumstances she was left open and vulnerable to committing mistakes which the enemy exploited.
(11)	BNC EVK 1630	This enables the Court to review the decisions of government ministers, inferior courts, tribunals and other administrative bodies to ensure that they do not act illegally, irrationally, or commit some procedural impropriety (per Lord Diplock in C.C.S.U. v. The Minister for the Civil Service (H.L., 1984)

Furthermore, sentences (12) and (13) below show how English native speakers use this additional meaning dimension of “offence” almost consciously. In (12) for example, the sentence describes a bill for a change in legislature, according to which a served penalty would be erased from a former convict’s record after a certain period. These words come from a supporter, and it is thus very likely that he purposely chose the much less alarming word indiscretion instead of crime to create the impression that these offences were excusable banalities and nothing to worry about. A similar case is slight indiscretion in sentence (13). It occurs as part of a statement within a crime novel and sounds rather cynical, given the fact that the referent here is the abuse of a girl, which in Oxford’s more conservative circles seems to be regarded less severely than a homosexual relationship.

(12)	BNC HJ7 116	[…] If a man has committed an indiscretion that brings him before the courts and results in his being convicted and penalized, it must be right that after he has served the penalty and lived it down by a substantial period of good conduct thereafter, it should be without meaning for most people of good will.'
(13)	BNC HTR 343	He came out of it as someone who might have committed a slight indiscretion, no more, and a heterosexual one at that.

These examples show that there are cases of paradigmatic restriction or supposed item-specificity which can be explained against a context-oriented background. For a construction-oriented perspective, this suggests that it is not enough to look at the individual constituents, which make a collocation or the overall rather delexicalised construction such as for example [Adj+N], but that there is an additional layer of meaning. This additional, semi-lexical construction then influences the dimension of lexical constructions, such as individual words. Thus it either restricts – as in commit a lie – or modifies, like in commit a mistake or commit an indiscretion, the interpretation of the whole word combination through inheritance relation (> 4). Moreover, it can be assumed that these semi-lexical constructions work multi-directionally, which means, every constituent is part of a semi-fixed construction and influences the selection and interpretation of all other elements involved. At the same time, it is crucial to note that a semi-lexical construction does not coincide with the function or meaning dimension of the lexical item as such. Other instances of commit follow a different set of interpretations and are not at all influenced by any aspects of meaning like “offence” or “accountable”. Hence, semi-lexical constructions can instead be described as the necessary circumstances which need to be available once a lexical item occurs within a certain overall construction, like, for example, scornful in [Adj+N]. Figure 2.3 illustrates the different levels of constructions which might be at work in a word combination.

Figure 2.3: Form and function levels of collocational construction, taking scornful tone as an example

An intermediate semi-lexical level is however not to be regarded as some kind of distributional rule, since the meaning dimension in a construction is rather something which is always there and applies to a certain extent. Without any further influence from other lexical items, the negative aspect in [Adj+tone] dominates even a quite neutral combination like conversational tone, as can be seen in sentence (14). Yet, with a modification such as pleasant, as in (15), the feature of “deviating negatively from the norm in terms of volume or emotion” fades into the background until a closer look at the context reveals that the message conveys rather sombre information, namely the possibility of someone dying, which again fits the negative aspect of [Adj+tone].

(14)	BNC AEA 1218	Elisabeth smiled, hoping to lighten the conversational tone and distract the Colonel from his purpose.
(15)	BNC A7J 858	‘I suppose Mike out there will be the next to go,’ he said in a pleasant conversational tone.

With an additional dimension of form and function, variability ceases in most cases to be unpredictable or inexplicable, which is in itself not a very remarkable observation. In his book Semantics Frank Palmer had already noticed: “[…] one can, with varying degrees of plausibility, provide a semantic explanation for even the more restricted collocations, by assigning very particular meanings to the individual words.” (Palmer ²1981: 77) A constructional perspective on this matter is, however, different for two reasons: Firstly, within this approach, each lexical item retains its own meaning and/or function. It is simply influenced by an inherited meaning from a more general construction, which, unlike Palmer suggests, does not result in an infinite number of more or less arbitrary word meanings but rather adds another construction to the mental lexicon, which then contributes the same, stable meaning dimension to any context it is used in. Another point is that a level of semi-lexical constructions within collocations seems to fit seamlessly into the usage-based approaches which claim that constructions develop through a constant analysis of lexical chunks based on the principles of analogy and similarity (Bybee 2010: 57–58). This would make an intermediate constructional dimension for collocations a useful unit, not only from a descriptive construction grammar point of view but also for language acquisition research. For, if semi-lexical constructions develop gradually, they could be useful indicators for various stages within the language acquisition process. Furthermore, foreign language learners would benefit from a more accurate description of collocations and their various dimensions of function and meaning, since it would not only enable them to produce more native-like language but also to better understand elements of irony, euphemism or sarcasm within a text. In the long run, this might also lead to a more profound understanding of the foreign language itself, as deliberate analysis of levels of meaning within an EFL classroom could help students to understand language as a system and free themselves from a superficial slot-filler perspective. A working definition based on construction grammar assumptions, therefore, could read as follows (based on Goldberg 2006; Siepmann 2005):

A collocation is a construction, which consists of a lexical form and a functional or semantic meaning. The lexical form of a collocation can be rather fixed – and therefore closely related to a compound – semi-fixed or delexicalised. Semi-fixed collocational constructions open up one or more slots, which through inheritance relations influence the meaning of any constituent chosen to be used in this particular slot. The constituents of a collocation are interdependent; each can be regarded as a fixed point or an exemplary item within a slot. Depending on the number of constituents of a collocation, they are at least bi-directional.

This conception of a collocation’s form and meaning dimension amount to the following hypotheses

1 Depending on the functional and semantic properties of this constituent and the slot it is used in, the actual manifestation of a collocation can be regarded as usual (total fit), creative (only the major definition elements fit) or inappropriate (one or more defining elements contradict each other).

2 Evaluation and understanding of a collocational construction are the results of a usage-based acquisitional process and, therefore, depends on linguistic experience and proficiency.

Picking up on Siepmann’s caveat that “[…] semantic relationships can only be discerned post hoc […]” (Siepmann 2005: 432), this approach towards collocations, of course needs to address the general question whether a semi-lexical constructional level of collocations is cognitive reality in the first place or rather an additional descriptive dimension for lexicographic purposes. Admittedly, the close interdependence of constructions makes it difficult to examine each and every level of an utterance separately, especially when the object under investigation is neither purely functional nor a simple sum of individual word meanings. Since lexical variability is by definition the heart of any semi-lexical constructions, it might, however, make sense to keep the investigated items constant and vary the cognitive reality. In other words: if speakers of a language with a similar cognitive background are clearly influenced by the meaning of a semi-lexical construction while others are not, this might suggest that this additional dimension of meaning is cognitively real, at least for a certain group of speakers. In this context a comparison between native speakers of English and speakers of English with a non-native language background seems to be the obvious choice, but differences between the perception of children and adults or between non-native speakers of English with different learning experiences might also provide useful insights into the mental mechanisms which are at work once someone processes a collocation. This preliminary working definition of collocation presupposes that all collocational combinations share the same constructional nature. It furthermore defines creativity as a natural aspect of human cognition. Yet, the degree to which creative readings are supported by a potential constructional meaning needs further clarification, as does whether contextual factors play a role in the perception of collocational combinations. Thus, to create a comprehensive model of collocations which accounts for creativity within collocations in general as well as potentially different levels of creative alternations, the cognitive dimension of creativity and its consequences for the concept of collocation need to be discussed in more detail (> 3). Chapter 4 will then combine these implications with more general thoughts on language acquisition, in order to form a comprehensive model, which then will be put to the test in subsequent chapters (> 6; 7).