Free word groups and phraseological units

1.2.Phraseology and other linguistic sciences

Nowadays phraseology plays a central role in a wide range of linguistic disciplines such as lexicography, contrastive linguistics, psycholinguistics, foreign language learning and teaching and natural language processing.

Phraseology is an intermediary field, being close, in the reference literature, both to vocabulary studies, since it studies fixed word combinations, characterized by a unitary meaning, as well as to syntax, since phraseologic phenomena are defined by syntactic relations of various kinds, which are realized on a syntagmatic axis. Given the expressive nature of phraseologic phenomena, these have also been associated to stylistics. Taking into consideration the possibility of differentiating styles and functional variants of a language by analysing phraseologic units, it has been particularly drawn closer to functional stylistics. But beyond the closeness to different linguistic disciplines, phraseology tends to be regarded as an autonomous discipline, with its own object and methods of investigation.
A word-group is the largest two-faced lexical unit comprising more than one word but expressing one global concept. The lexical meaning of the word groups is the combined lexical meaning of the component words. The meaning of the word groups is motivated by the meanings of the component members and is supported by the structural pattern. But it’s not a mere sum total of all these meanings! Polysemantic words are used in word groups only in one of their meanings. These meanings of the component words in such word groups are mutually interdependent and inseparable (blind man – «a human being unable to see», blind type – «the copy isn’t readable).
Word groups possess not only the lexical meaning, but also the meaning conveyed mainly by the pattern of arrangement of their constituents. The structural pattern of word groups is the carrier of a certain semantic component not necessarily dependent on the actual lexical meaning of its members (school grammar – «grammar which is taught in school», grammar school – «a type of school»). We have to distinguish between the structural meaning of a given type of word groups as such and the lexical meaning of its constituents.
The degree of structural and semantic cohesion of word-groups may vary. Some word-groups, e.g. at least, point of view, by means, to take place, etc. seem to be functionally and semantically inseparable. They are usually described as set phrases, word-equivalents or phraseological units and are studied by the branch of lexicology which is known as phraseology.
The so-called free word-groups are only relatively free as collocability of their member-words is fundamentally delimited by their lexical and grammatical valency which makes at least some of them very close to set-phrases. Let’s outline the features common to various word-groups irrespective of the degree of structural and semantic cohesion of the component-words.