phraseology

Phraseology is a branch of linguistics that studies multiword units that function as single units of meaning. It encompasses idioms, collocations, fixed expressions, and other formulaic sequences. The field emphasizes how these units contribute to meaning beyond the sum of their parts and how they shape fluency and style.

Core components include idioms (figurative meanings not deducible from individual words), collocations (typical word pairings like strong tea), fixed expressions (set phrases such as in the end), and lexical bundles (recurrent word strings). The study also covers discourse markers and pragmatically oriented phrases that organize talk.

In practice, phraseology affects interpretation, translation, and language learning. Learners often struggle with idioms and collocations because their meaning is not predictable from component words. Phraseological knowledge informs teaching, lexicography, and natural language processing, enabling more natural parsing and generation of multiword units.

The field has roots in traditional lexicography and gained prominence with corpus linguistics. It highlights the distinction between phraseological knowledge and general grammar or isolated vocabulary, and it stresses cultural and pragmatic factors.

Applications include language teaching, dictionary compilation, and computational modeling of language. Ongoing research uses large corpora to extract and classify multiword units, study crosslinguistic differences, and investigate how phraseology contributes to discourse coherence.