Holding a post and filling the job: English collocations in English-Italian, Italian-English Dictionaries

The lerm 'collocation' has been used in different ways since il was defined by Firth as a «mode ofmeaning» (1957), and has been referred lo various types ofword combina­ tions, showing and evidencing different levels of stability and fixedness, different de­ grees ofsemanlic transparency, different discourse functions. The frequency ofco-occurrencc of the elements of a given expression, which determines its diachronic institutionalization, and their syntagmatic and paradigmatic reslrictedness are the main criteria to establish how stable and how fixed an expression is; the retrievability of the •iteral meaning of an expression and of its parts from possible figurative and/or meta­ phorical uses, or, on the other hand, the lexica! ization of the latter to the (partial) ex­ clusion of the former, testify to its degree of transparency; the acknowledged labelling ofa given expression as a lexical collocation, or a grammatical collocation, or a routine lormula, etc., also points lo the linguistic and pragmatic function it performs, from lhe designative one, in Zgusta's terms (1971), to the purely communicative one. A further subdivision of collocations into open and restricted ones is based, according to Aisenstadt (1979,1981), on the commutabilily of their constituents and according to Cowie ei ul (1983), on the figurative use ofonc oflheir elements. Restricted collocations, though this expression is never used by Zgusta (1971), could be considered as hyponyms of the term 'multiword lexical units', as used by Zgusta (ibid), since they meet Zgusta's two most important criteria (with a partial flouting of the first one) to detect a multiword lexical unit, namely the first, i.e. impossibility of substitution of any of its constituent parts, and lhe ninth, i.e. its functioning, syntactically and onomasiologically, as if it were a more simple unit, which usually corresponds to a word. On the other hand, colloca­ tions and restricted collocations do not comply with the third criterion, i.e. the opaque­ ness of the expression as a whole as opposed to the sum of the meanings of its consti­ tuents, a criterion which qualifies idioms as multiword lexical units, but does not apply to transparent and semi-transparent fixed expressions, which constitute the great ma­ jority ofcollocations. According lo Mitchell (1971) collocations are not idioms, but, like idioms, are 'composite elements'. Idioms and collocations have been analysed, from different standpoints and with different objectives, by mani lexicologists and lexico­ graphers (for instance Mitchell, 1971; Jones and Sinclair, 1973; Mackin, 1978; Aisenstadt, 1979,1981; Hausmann, 1979; Fernando and Flavell, 1981; Cowie, 1981; and forth­ coming, Benson, Benson and llson, 1986; Sinclair, 1987; Benson, 1989) both in general, theoretical terms and in view of, or on the basis of, their lexicographic treatment. It has been suggested (cf. Fernando and Flavell, 1981; Nuccorini, 1988a and 1990, Cowie forthcoming) that they are related along a continuum going from free, completely transparent word combinations to fixed, completely opaque expressions, taking into consideration «different degrees of setness, different degrees of restrictions» (Zgusta, 1971: 154-155) alongside different degrees of opaqueness, figurativity and metaphorization.