Corpus-based studies have brought fresh insights into the role of collocability and lexico-grammatical patterning as core aspects of language permeating its structure and use. Facets of Prefabrication builds upon these findings and provides further impetus in the direction of large-scale explorations of phraseology. lt introduces a dependency- based method of detecting potential phraseological units to increase the coverage of prefabricated structures in automatic combinatorial dictionaries which have so far been mainly restricted to binary collocations. Various sources of evidence are used to evaluate this approach and assess its relevance to phraseological theories, including word recall experiments and phraseological markers analyses. These investigations open new perspectives on the interplay of novelty vs. formulaicity in naturally-occurring language and increase our recognition of seemingly subtle, but nevertheless ubiquitous aspects of phraseological prefabrication.

1. From novelty to prefabrication 9 Compositionality and novelty in language 9 Memory and prefabrication 14 Recognition of prefabrication 16 Facets of prefabrication 19 2. Defining collocability 23 Incidence of prefabricated language 24 What are collocations? 28 Collocations as phraseological units 29 Identifying phraseological units 31 Properties of collocations 35 A review of definitions 38 Recurrence, recall and recomposition 47 Stereotyped recurrence 51 Summary 59 3. Insights from phraseology extraction 61 Phraseology extraction 62 Positional models 62 Relational models 66 Automatic Combinatorial Dictionaries 67 The structure and functions of ACDs 72 Which reference corpora? 74 Phraseological units as dependency trees 76 Idioms as catenae 77 Dependency and collocability 90 Collocational catenae 94 Incidence of first-order collocational catenae in the BNC 104 Recurrence of binary collocational chains 107 Evaluation of binary ACDs 111 Extracting higher-order catenae 117 Subsumption 120 Catena-based ACD structure 123 Data-driven extraction 132 The effect of corpus composition 134 Grouping variants 136 Example application of phraseology detection 137 Conclusions 141 4. Recall of collocational chains 143 Validation of automatic combinatorial dictionaries 143 Combining ‘in vivo’ and ‘in vitro’ data 148 The rigidity of collocational catenae 151 Recall in open-ended contexts 157 Draw vs. take a deep breath 158 Receive vs. get federal funds 163 Gain vs. win international fame 166 Cause significant vs. severe damage 169 Read the small vs. fine print 172 Walk a thin vs. fine line 175 Tell a white vs. little lie 177 Solve a difficult vs. complex problem 179 Play a key vs. important role 181 Get vs. gain a better understanding 184 Conduct comprehensive vs. do a quick survey 186 Do much vs. file necessary paperwork 189 Binary choice questions 191 Win a decisive vs. overwhelming victory 192 Sway vs. shape public opinion 195 Make a convincing vs. compelling argument 199 Draw vs. reach the same conclusion 202 Give the same vs. equal opportunity 204 A model 206 Conclusions 209 5. Phraseology markers 213 The proverbial N 214 Syntactic patterns 219 Examples of other markers 224 Non-figurative phraseology 227 Proverbial as iconic 229 Derivations 235 Conclusions 237 6. Conclusions 241 Bibliography 247 Index 261 Tables and Figures 263