Getting to grips with English Lexical Phraseology

This text is an introduction (for undergraduate language students) to the lexical phraseology of English, that is, to those phraseological phenomena which are more part of lexical description than grammatical. A broad range of phrasal types are discussed, both lexical and collocational in nature, including what are (typically) both sentence-level and sub-sentence-level items. Description relates to both form and meaning, and considers phrases from both a holistic and a compositional perspective. Different types of phrasal variation are discussed and aspects of interlingual comparison are also introduced. The presentation of phraseology in learner’s dictionaries is also dealt with, as is the contribution, quantitatively speaking, which phraseology makes to English text. Contextualized examples are provided for many of the phenomena discussed; such examples have either been taken directly from a corpus, or come from corpus-based dictionaries, or are presented within text extracts.