19. Dictionaries and collocation

This chapter discusses the treatment of phraseology in dictionaries: its specific focus is on collocation and on English. It first describes the collocational behaviour of three words (river, rivet, riven), as observed in a large corpus of current English. It then considers the ways in which their collocates and patterning are represented in monolingual dictionaries for native speakers and for EFL/ESL learners, followed by bilingual French-English dictionaries and dictionaries of English collocations, assessing how far these dictionaries provide reasonable accounts of collocational phenomena.