Acknowledgments

This book has been born in a long and difficult labor. The work started with Mel’čuk 1960, and since then, it continued, more or less uninterruptedly, until today, some milestones being Mel’čuk 1995, 2012–2015, 2012a, 2015 and 2020.

First and foremost, during all this time, Lidija Iordanskaja – as always – was going through my texts, several times: from rough sketches to final versions.

Jasmina Milićević read the typescript of the whole volume and generously shared with me her doubts, considerations and constructive proposals.

Different parts of the monograph were read (at different times) and criticized by Margarita Alonso Ramos, Wiesław Banyś, Xavier Blanco Escoda, Igor Boguslavskij, Martin Everaert, Leonid Iomdin, Sylvain Kahane, Aleksandr Kibrik, Mixail Kopotev, Aleksandr Letučij, François Louis, Ian Mackenzie, Jasmina Milićević, Olʹga Pekelis, Svetlana Pereverzeva, Nikolaj Pertsov, Alain Polguère, Elena Savvina, and André Schenk, as well as two John Benjamins Publisher’s anonymous reviewers.

Last, but not least, my heavily Russian-tainted English has been cleaned and ironed out by Assya Knox.

Without these people the monograph General Phraseology: Theory and Practice would not exist. To use nice phrasemes, I owe them a huge debt of gratitude [a collocation with an idiom inside] and I ask them to kindly receive my heartfelt appreciation [a series of collocations].