Idiomen, kollokationerna och lexikonet

Against the background of the extensive use of language corpora in the dictionary-making industri of today, the paper stresses the importance of including set phrases in future lexicographic undertakings. A distinction is made between idioms and collocations, and it is argued that while the significance of the former category has long been recognised, the latter has only recently come to attract the attention of lexicographers. To gauge the relative importance of the two categories in modern English, a few experiments were undertaken, the results of which indicated clearly that collocations are greatly superior to idioms in frequency and can be said to make up the backbone of language. Consequently a plea is finally made for the inclusion of larger quantities of collocations in dictionaries of the future

Lars Törnqvist, Engelsk-svensk namnordbok. Lund: Studentlitteratur 1996.

Anmeldt værk:Lars Törnqvist, Engelsk-svensk namnordbok. Lund: Studentlitteratur 1996

A modal ambiguity in for-infinitival relative clauses

This squib presents two puzzles related to an ambiguity found in for-infinitival relative clauses (FIRs). FIRs invariably receive a modal interpretation even in the absence of any overt modal verb. The modal interpretation seems to come in two distinct types, which can be paraphrased by finite relative clauses employing the modal auxiliaries should and could. The two puzzles presented here arise because the availability of the two readings is constrained by factors that are not otherwise known to affect the interpretation of a relative clause. Specifically, we show, first, that “strong” determiners require the FIR to be interpreted as a SHOULD-relative while “weak” determiners allow both interpretations (the Determiner-Modal Generalization). Secondly, we observe that the COULD-interpretation requires a raising (internally headed) structure for the FIR, while the SHOULD-interpretation is compatible with either a raising or a more standard matching (externally headed) structure (the Raising/Matching Generalization)

On the Awkward Polysemy of the Verb 'risk'

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