Lexical collocations in bilingual dictionaries

Elusive yet intuitive at the same time, the concept of collocation has attracted the attention of different branches of linguistics for many a year, owing to the proven pervasiveness of such combinations in languages. Although a universally accepted definition of collocation has not been reached as each attempted description is inextricably related to the linguist’s standpoint, the development of a series of very workable ideas on the nature of these combinations has led to the production of worthy linguistic commodities. While English lexicography has kept pace with the development in lexicology and corpus linguistics, Italian lexicography has only recently started to look in that direction. The author investigates the treatment of lexical collocations in the major bilingual English-Italian dictionaries, looking closely at the lexicographers’ choices while keeping the end users and their heuristics in mind.