Choosing Between Lexeme vs. Token in Russian Collocations

ABSTRACT

The distribution of different grammatical forms of collocations in real usage and its comparison to a pattern of the headword is a useful basis for thorough collocational analysis, which until now has lacked proper attention. In this article, we set out to investigate the relation between lexeme and token collocations, i.e., collocations that either follow the grammatical profile of their headword or differ from it significantly. Based on the [Adjective + Noun] collocations in Russian, we attempt to determine the most suitable way to describe collocations. The goal is twofold. First, we wish to prove that distinction between these two types makes sense in terms of their different distributional preferences across the corpus. Second, we offer a plausible method for differentiating between the two types based on corpus data about the collocations’ usage. The justification for this research is the lack of a single prevalent practice as far as the choice of representation of study object for empirical collocational analysis is concerned.

KEYWORDS:

• lexeme collocations
• token collocations
• grammatical profiles
• corpus linguistics
• Russian language

ORCID

Daria Kormacheva http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5323-5271

Notes

1 This work was supported by a grant from the Research Foundation of the University of Helsinki.

2 The large number of homonymous grammatical forms of Russian nouns does not allow us to use a larger, yet non-disambiguated corpus, since the correct grammatical description of collocations is crucial in this research.