Phraseology lecture 13 phraseology and phraseological units

FREE-WORD GROUPS vs PHRASEOLOGICAL UNITS

• The border-line between free or variable word-groups and phraseological units is not clearly defined.
• The free word-groups are only relatively free as collocability of their member-words is fundamentally delimited by their lexical and syntactic valency.
• Phraseological units are comparatively stable and semantically inseparable.
• Between the extremes of complete motivation and variability of member-words and lack of motivation combined with complete stability of the lexical components and grammatical structure there are innumerable border-line cases.