Language Periphery

Book excerpt: A full-length study of monocollocable words, i.e. words whose usage is severely restricted to one or a few combinations only (such as English ado in without much/further ado), that brings together corpus-based data from the four languages along with studies analysing, along both general and language-specific lines, monocollocable words in terms of their frequency, lexical as well as morphosyntactic behaviour, and various facets of their peripheral status. Each of the four langauges covered, namely, English, Italian, German and Czech also offers a short introduction of the respective languages written in English, Italian, German and Czech. A rare contribution to our knowledge of an as yet little studied field, the book will attract the attention of, and stimulate a new interest in, all who are ready to acknowledge that collocation is a core phenomenon of language – lexicologists, lexicographers with a focus on phraseology, language typologists, linguists with a contrastive and historical agenda, and language teachers alike.