An ontology for collocations, formulaic sequences, multiword expressions, compounds, phrasal verbs, idioms and proverbs

This article proposes an ontology (set of entities and explicit statement of the relations between them) for word-sequences (whether continuous or discontinuous) whose unifying feature is the co-occurrence within them of one or more of their words at greater frequency than would be predicted by their overall frequency of occurrence within the language. More precisely, the article proposes a number of possible ontologies, since, for some entities, it presents alternative possible definitions, discussing their merits and demerits. The article focuses almost entirely on English. It begins with a statement of general methodological principles. It argues we should not be attempting to discover what the true meaning of terms is, but to produce ‘serviceable definitions’ of terms which are at least relatively compatible with those produced by other writers and which can be coherently and explicitly related to other terms within the ontology. What I mean by a ‘serviceable definition’ is one which is of can be successfully used by researchers for the practical analysis of collocations and the other phenomena considered in this article. Whether the definitions proposed here are therefore ‘serviceable’ can only properly be judged by their successful deployment in future research. The article then considers the following: collocations (Section 2), formulaic sequences (Section 3), multiword expressions (Section 4), compounds (sections 5- 5.3), phrasal verbs (Section 6), idioms (Section 7) and proverbs (Section 8). Beyond these basic notions, the article considers other possible types of multiword expression (Section 9), further categories deriving from collocation, formulaic sequence and multiword expression (Section 10), semantic correlates of syntactic relationships in multiword expressions (Section 10), notions having fuzzy and discrete boundaries (Section 11), and universal and language-specific categories in the ontology (Section 12). Section 13 is a conclusion.