Collocations as basic-level categories elaborating slots in semantic frames: A usage-based approach

I claim that it is the variability of collocations rather than their restrictedness that makes it a challenge for foreign learners to acquire them and for researchers to categorize them (1.1.) and argue that a usage-based approach drawing on notions from functional and cognitive linguistics makes it possible to account for collocations as a dynamic and flexible language resource. The functional and cognitive framework that I propose for the categorization of collocations is one of several lines of investigation within Usage-based linguistics, an approach evolving since the 1980s as a challenge to the top-down approach of structuralist and generative linguists who study the language system separately from language use (Langacker [2000: 91-93], Herbst, Schmid & Faulhaber [2014], Diessel [2017: 1]). I use corpus data in a qualitative approach based on the theory and methodology developed in Poulsen [2022]. Frequency, which is a complex phenomenon (Geeraerts [2017: 158]), is part of the description of the data while function is considered more important for analysis. In the introduction to the first part of this paper, I give a brief example of the usage-based framework that I intend to introduce before giving an overview of previous approaches that include insights converging on a usage-based approach. In the second part, an alternative functional and cognitive approach is outlined, which is subsequently tested, in the third part, by means of an exemplary study of the noun joke. Using examples from the study of joke, I argue that verbs in conventional and entrenched collocations make up a functional domain and can be construed as a lexicogrammatical prototype category of support verbs.