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When I use a word, 'Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.' 'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.' […] 'When I make a word do a lot of work like that,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'I always pay it extra.' 'Oh!' said Alice. She was too much puzzled to make any other remark.

(Carroll 1871/2001: 224–225)1

The debate about the defining properties of collocations seems to be as old as research within the field of lexical co-occurrences itself. Partly because studies on the character and value of collocations have been conducted for various reasons and purposes; the areas of research range from a very applied EFL context (de Cock 1999; Bahns 1997; Howarth 1996; Cowie/Howarth 1995; Hausmann 1984) to lexicography (Cowie 2012; Mel’cuk 1998; Benson/Benson/Ilson 1997; Bahns 1996; Hausmann 1985) and more theoretical, general linguistic description (Coseriu 1967; Firth 1951/1964, 1957/1968). However, a duality in conception might also have developed from the fact that interest in these special cases of lexical co-occurrence arose roughly at the same time within different schools of linguistics. British Contextualism, with its most prominent representative J.R. Firth at its centre, is frequently quoted as the cradle of the modern concept of collocation (Barnbrook/Mason/Krishnamurthy 2013: 36; Bartsch 2004: 30; Lehr 1996: 7), but also within lexicography authors like Palmer (1933), Hausmann (1984) or more recently Siepmann (2005) concerned themselves with lexical co-occurrences. Their focus still tends to lie more on the properties of collocations than on their contribution to the human linguistic system. Hence today, the field of collocational research seems to be split into contextual-oriented approaches and significance-oriented approaches2 (Granger/Paquot 2008; Siepmann 2005; Herbst 1996). Based on John Sinclair’s research (Sinclair 1991, 1966; Sinclair/Jones/Daley 1970/2005) on lexical frequency, contextual-oriented approaches nowadays mostly come in the shape of corpus-based, frequency-oriented research, while representatives of the significance-oriented approach focus on typological aspects relevant for the non-native language learner, such as (non-)compositionality and variability. Today, however, both sides seem to have reached a point where they realise that they have more in common than they disagree on.

Constructions, on the other hand, are in their broadest sense defined as “form and meaning pairings” (Goldberg 2006: 3). So, with the literal translation of collocation as a certain kind of “placing together” (Palmer 1933: 7), the term as such might suggest that the phenomenon of collocation is predominantly regarded as a formal or structural one, lacking an overall meaning dimension, which would be crucial for any kind of construction (> 4). But, as the following chapters will show, even very early accounts of collocation consider not only syntagmatic relations for the constituents of a collocation, but also discuss implications for meaning which stem from a contextual or paradigmatic level within an analysis. This suggests that collocations might be more than just formal, item-specific restrictions on word co-occurrences and that there is an inherent meaning dimension, which makes it possible to regard collocations as a form of construction in a construction grammar sense.

Following this idea, this chapter will use a selection of prominent approaches towards collocations from both camps and investigate their understanding of lexical co-occurrences to shed some light on their potential constructional character. Chapters 2.1 and 2.2 will, therefore, outline the two basic views on collocation and highlight potential connections to a modern construction grammar approach. Chapter 2.3 then concludes this section, suggesting a working definition and addressing some critical issues which need to be dealt with once a study assumes cognitive features to be part of collocational phenomena.