Syntagmatic dependencies and translation

Abstract EN

This paper attempts to study 'meaning' from the angle of the habitual syntagmatic dependencies between the 'roots' of lexical items.

Such syntagmatic dependencies are technically known as collocations.

They are lexical associations relating to the underlying forms of the lexical items concerned.

In this paper, collocations are discussed in relation to translation.

In the course of the discussion, some distinctions of collocations in English and Arabic are emphasized and highlighted.

In addition, the paper draws a distinction between the concept of collocation and the transformationlist concept of selectional restrictions and concludes that the latter (i.

e.

selectional restrictions) are more general than the former.

Acceptable collocations always satisfy the rules of selectional restrictions, but the reverse may not be true.