Lexical collocations and the learning of Spanish as a foreign language

This chapter deals with the definition of collocation in books used for the teaching of Spanish as a foreign language (SFL). Different definitions of this concept are revised, and its characteristics are deeply discussed in order to distinguish them from free combinations and compounds. Throughout history, the semantic approach has prevailed over the statistic approach. On the one hand, not every recurring combination forms A collocation, and only certain kinds of combinations are considered collocations, as has been pointed out in the two typologies proposed by Corpas (1996) and Koike (2001). On the other hand, the idea of arbitrariness of collocations should be replaced by the concept of lexical selection. This concept determines which lexical classes select predicates, as was done in the Redes dictionary. Keywords: collocations; compounds; dictionaries; Teaching of Spanish as a Foreign Languages