Collocations as a language resource : a functional and cognitive study in English phraseology Are collocations problems or solutions to problems If you take the perspective of the foreign learner as in traditional phraseology they are certainly challenging and they have therefore been categorized as arbitrary or even defective deviations from an assumed norm of full compositionality. This is a paradox because their ubiquity in language and their importance for language proficiency are undisputed. The book provides a critical review of the traditional phraseological approach to collocations with its classical categories and its roots in structural and generative linguistics as well as traditional Russian phraseology. Instead it proposes a theory of collocations as an independent functional domain no longer characterized as odd comings together of words that are neither fully compositional nor fully idiomatic. It fills a research gap and should appeal to phraseologists and cognitive linguists as well as psycholinguists neurolinguists corpus linguists PhD students and other advanced students of linguistics who are interested in exploring collocations as a language resource and may be interested in contributing to it