Terminology, Phraseology, and Lexicography

This paper explores two aspects of word use and word meaning in terms of Sinclair's (1991, 1998) distinction between the open-choice principle (or terminological tendency) and the idiom principle (or phraseological tendency). Technical terms such as strobilation are rare, highly domain-specific, and of little phraseological interest, although the texts in which such word occur do tend to contain interesting clusters of domain-specific terminology. At the other extreme, it is impossible to know the meaning of ordinary common words such as the verb blow without knowing the phraseological context in which the word is used. Many words have both a terminological tendency and a phraseological tendency. In some cases the two tendencies are in harmony; in other cases there is tension between them. The relationship between these two tendencies is investigated, using examples from the British National Corpus.