Dictionary entries and collocations

An important point implicit in the preceding paragraph is that the status of phrases as complement or adjunct varies from verb to verb. This point is worth emphasizing here because it is part of the larger question of the relationship between grammar and dictionary that will be discussed. It also introduces a third property of complements. English possesses (as do other languages) combinations of verb and object in which the actual lexical items that can occur are severely limited. In English (at least in the UK) you can toast bread, toast marshmallows or even toast your toes. You do not grill bread, in spite of the fact that the processes of toasting and grilling are similar (if you choose not to use the toaster). Similarly, we talk of braising meat (but not usually other items of food). Other areas than cooking offer examples of particular verbs typically combining with particular nouns; people lay tables, chop or split logs and kindling (even in these days of almost ubiquitous central heating), make beds and vire money or funds (if you are a civil servant or university administrator)

These regular fixed combinations of verbs and nouns are called collocations, and they involve heads and complements. Fixed combinations of verb and adjective are also found – prove useless, prove necessary – and a good number of verbs require particular prepositions. Blame someone for something and blame something on someone are set expressions in which only the prepositions for or on can occur; this is information that must be stated in the dictionary entry for blame. It must be made clear that these collocations are not proposed as a criterion for recognizing complements. The central criteria are whether or not a particular phrase is obligatory with a particular verb, as with shot and into the kitchen in (7), or whether a particular type of phrase has to be mentioned in the dictionary entry for a particular verb. The collocational facts constitute interesting extra information but, and this is the difficulty, are not confined to verbs and their complement nouns; they apply to adjectives and nouns – heavy smoker, heavy drinker, staple diet, staple crop, staple industry – and to combinations of adjective and another word, for example, brand new, wide awake, rock solid, frozen hard. On the main criterion for complements, being obligatory, brand, wide, rock and hard are not complements of new, awake, solid and frozen, which is why collocations are not a test for complement status but merely an additional set of interesting facts.