1. By Ingrid Bello Acuña

2.  It is natural to focus on the word as the primary unit.
 Dictionaries reinforce this idea by representing the
lexicon.
 The lexicon is a series of headwords or individual
lexical items.

3.  Models of language are built on grammatical principles,
with the clause or sentence being the focal unit.
 Connections are the syntactic relationships between
elements in the clause or sentence.
 The contexts is the best way to know the meaning the
word.
 Example: “ You`re barking up the wrong tree if you
think that I will lend you money”

4.  Open choice principle: it is a way of seeing language
text as the result of a very large number of complex
choices. A unit is completed- a word or a phrase or a
clause- a large range of choice opens up. (traditional
approach to language)
 Idiom principle: it is that a language user has available
to him or her a large number of semi- preconstructed
phrases that constitute single choices(it could be
analyse into segments)

5.  “As a syntactic view of language observes rules
undepinning grammatically well-formed utterances, a
collocationist view of language observes the strong
patterning in the co-occurrence of words”.
 “This kind of approach is proposed by
psycholinguistics, which observes how language is
processed and often acquired in chunks or groups of
words, rather than on word-by-word basis”.
 “Vocabulary is not operate as independent and
interchangeable parts of the lexicon, but as parts of a
lexical system”. Peters (1983)
 “Restricted collocations are cases where certain words
occur almost in the co-text of one or two other words, or
of a narrow set of words”.

6.  There are many different forms of multi-word item, and
fields of lexicology and idiomatology have generated an
unruly collections of names for them.
 Multi-word item: it is a vocabulary item which consists
of a sequence of two or more words and also multi-
words items are the result of lexical (and semantic)
processes of fossilisation and word-formation.

7.  Institutionalisation: is the degree to which a multi-word
item is conventionalised in the language.
 Fixedness: is the degree to which a multi-word item is
frozen as a sequence of words.
 Non- compositionality: is the degree to which a multi-
word item cannot be interpreted on a word-by-word
basis, but has a specialised unitary meaning .
 “ the criteria operate together and they are not absolutes
but variables, and they are present in different types of
multi-word item”

8.  Compounds: they may differ from single words only by
being written as two or more orthopraphic words. They
cannot properly be separated out altogether, since variable
hyphenation conventions blur the distinction between
compoun multi-word items and polymorphemic single
words. E.g car park which is spelled carpark and car-
park “ Many open or two-word compounds are nouns” e.g
Prime minister
 Phrasal verbs: are combinations of verbs and adverbial or
prepositional particles. They are typically a phenomenon of
English and a few cognate languages for example
Dutch.Moreover, they have specialised meanings.

9.  Idioms: it is a variety of different meanings. They have
holistic meanings which cannot be retrieved from the
individual meanings of the component words. Idioms are
typically metaphorical in historical or etymological terms.
e.g spill the beans, kick the bucket and so on
 Fixed phrases: they include items such as of course, at
least, in fact, and by far as weell as greetings and phatics
such as good morning, how do you do, excuse me, and
you know.
 Prefabs: they are referred to as “ lexicalised sentence
stems” or “ ready- made units” and call them “ lexical
phrases”. Prefabs are preconstructed phrases,
phraseological chunks, stereotyped collocations, or
semifixed strings which are tied to discoursal siuations and
which form structuring devices.

10.  Semantics- based models are in many respects the
most traditional. They attempt to differentiate between
caterogaries of multi-word items according to degress of
compositionality, and they aim to identify, as it were, the
irreducible semantic building-blocks of the lexicon.
 Syntax- based models take grammatical well-
formedness as their starting-point.
 Multi words items- and in particular idioms and fixed
phrases- are not often non-compositional because they
do not obey rules.

11.  The principal kinds of variation
- British/ American variations: hold the ford (Bre) hold
down the fort ( Ame)
- varying lexical component: burn your boats/bridges
- unstable verbs: show/declare/reveal your true colours
- transformation: break the ice/ice- breaker/ice-breaking
- truncation: silver lining/every cloud has a silver lining

12.  Multi-word items are typically presented as a problem in
teaching and learning a foreign language. Their non-
compositionality, whether syntactic, semantic or
pragmatic in nature, means that they must be
recognised, learned, decoded and encoded as holistic
units.
 Teachers and learners can avoid the problem by
avoiding such items altogether, and in many cases this
can be justified because of the relative infrequency of
ocurrence of many kinds of multi-word item

13.  The most appropiate strategy for teaching them is the
use of short dialogues.At more advanced levels the use
of contextualised examples would show up discoursal
features.
 Irujo suggests that multi- word items to be taught should
be carefully chosen on the basis frequency, need,
transparency and syntactic and semantic simplicity.
 The most innovative pedagogical studies highligh and
focus on the importance of multi-word item as enabling
devices. Improved information about the nature and
function of multi-word items will mean that they are
understood, taugh and produced more competently and
effectively.