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Abstract

The objective of this thesis is to investigate collocations (like hard work) from the lexicographical and lexicological perspectives. In the lexicographical study the general role of collocations in dictionaries is discussed, followed by an analysis of the description of collocations in The Swedish Academy Dictionary (SAOB 1893–). The study shows among else that 80% of the collocations investigated (about 80 in number) are accounted for in the SAOB. It is however evident that different types of collocations are given varying degrees of attention. The lexicological study consists of corpus investigations of Swedish collocations in which an adjective or adverb is used to intensify the meaning of its headword. Important questions are: 1) to what extent can the choice of an intensifier be explained by its primary meaning and the semantic qualities of the headword and to what extent can it be regarded as an unpredictable lexical convention? and 2) to what extent does the adverbial usage of an intensifier correspond to its usage as an adjective? In the first part of the lexicological study the collocation patterns of five intensifying adjectives (also used as adverbs) are investigated in a corpus. Changes in the combinatorics of the five intensifiers from the year 1521 onwards are also examined. An analytical model based on semantic fields is employed to facilitate discussion of the respective usages of the intensifiers and compare them with each other. It is evident from the results that each intensifier has an individual pattern when it comes to semantic fields. Adverbs also have their own specific patterns, which only partly coincide with the patterns of the corresponding adjectives. In the second part of the lexicological study the aim is to elucidate how the intensifying function is generally expressed in Swedish with respect to each of the semantic fields and each of the grammatical construction types addressed in the study. The results show that lexical conventions can only partly be explained by the semantic contents of the constituents of the collocations.