Questioning the definition of the notion "collocation" in Russian and occidental linguistic traditions

Purpose: As the title implies the article describes various approaches to the definition of the notion «collocations» in Russian and Occidental linguistic traditions. This concept is pivotal not only for modern lexicology, lexicography and phraseology but also is the main object of scientific interest of applied and computational linguistics. In broad terms, collocation is an affinity between two or more words that appear often, or even always, in the same contexts, for example, laugh … joke, blade … sharp, ill … doctor. In a narrow sense, it is a link between two linguistic units entering into a syntactic relationship and characterized by a special lexical combinability: semantically major component is used in its direct meaning and dictates the choice of the dependent element to express a precise sense. For example, peur bleue, literal.ʻblue fearʼ ⇒ ʻterrible fearʼ, faim de loup, literal. ʻwolf’s hungerʼ ⇒ ʻstrong hungerʼ, célibataire endurci, ʻingrained bachelorʼ ⇒ ʻconfirmed bachelorʼ in French; жгучий брюнет, literal.ʻburning brunetʼ ⇒ ʻsearing brunetʼ, закадычный друг ⇒ʻbosom friendʼ, проливной дождь ⇒ ʻtorrential rainʼ in Russian. Currently, the linguists prefer the narrow interpretation of this term. Results: Traditionally, the study of lexical associations is based on the existence of two opposed principles: the combinatorial liberty and the fixedness. Collocations take an intermediate position between free word combinations and idioms. It is a well-known fact that the general meaning of idioms is not limited to the semantic interpretation of the individual components and their automatic addition, they are completely fixed. Unlike interpretation of idioms, the decryption of semantic content of collocations is not that complicated, it can be derived from the meaning of the components. From this point of view, it makes collocations closer to the free word combinations, but they have an important functional feature: these stereotypical language units demand memorizing. For example, if in Russian we say приниматьрешение, in English and in French we use other verbs: to make/ to take a decision, prendre une decision. Thus, the choice of the verb may be obvious to a native speaker but difficult for people learning a foreign language. Сonclusion: Since it is often defined vaguely, the collocations raise the problem of the non-coincidence of Russian and Occidental linguistic terminologies and, therefore, of their typologies. If these two traditions of the study of lexical co-occurrence have a common base - the ideas set out in 1909 in Traité de stylistique française of Charles Bally - they were, however, developed differently. In Russia, following the work of V. V. Vinogradov in the 1940s, we were the witnesses of the birth of phraseology as an independent linguistic discipline. He has proposed a classification of phraseologisms, based on the conception of Ch. Bally, and pointed out «phraseological combinations» - the prototypes of collocations. Within groups of phraseologismes, the evolution of the concept of «collocation» is particularly interesting. In fact, in case this problem is closely related to the theory «Meaning ⇔ Text» of I. A. Mel’čuk developed in the USSR in the 1960s, then most linguists who have adopted these ideas and use the term «collocation» are Occidentals (for example, A. Tutin and F. Grossmann, J. Sinclair, G. Williams). Thus, the major interest of the current article is to highlight the key distinctions around this theme (in this topic).