Korean morphological collocations: Theoretical and descriptive implications

Abstract

Phrasemes are often characterized as constrained multiword expressions, like spill the beans (idiom) or black coffee (collocation), and the very term phraseology seems to imply that this phenomenon is restricted to phrases only. Consequently, morphological compounds, like highbrow or bookstore, are usually excluded from the scope of phraseological studies. Phrasemes, however, are not necessarily phrases (syntactically connected wordforms). In Korean, in particular, many compounds have to be analyzed and modeled as phrasemes. Like their phrasal counterparts, Korean compound phrasemes can be either semantically compositional or non-compositional. This paper deals with the first class of such compounds, which we term morphological collocations. It begins with a presentation of basic phraseological notions (Sect. 1). Then, Korean morphological collocations are introduced (Sect. 2), followed by descriptive repercussions exemplified with the lexicographic modeling of the phraseology of Korean nouns denoting body elements (Sect. 3). The conclusion summarizes theoretical and practical implications of this study (Sect. 4).