From Words to Lexical Units: A Corpus-Driven Account of Collocation and Idiomatic Patterning in English and English-Spanish

This book tackles the problem of ascertaining what is a lexical item. Based on extensive corpus evidence, the author queries the role of words as fundamental units of semantic analysis. Notions such as - word sense, - polysemy and - disambiguation are called into question. It is argued that mainstream phraseology has provided an insufficient account of the realm of multi-word choices. Accordingly, the ideas of - idiom and - collocation undergo revision in this work. The author comes up with an alternative proposal about what constitutes a unit of meaning and how the vocabulary is organized.