COLLOCATIONS IN THE CROATIAN AND GERMAN LANGUAGE – THEORETICAL ASPECTS AND PRACTICAL APPLICATION

Abstract

Collocations have in the past years increasingly received attention as the subject of linguistic research, especially in English and German scientific literature. Croatian linguistics begins to show interest for this kind of word connection in the late 20th century by contrasting collocations in Croatian and English. Since then, and especially in the past few years, Croatian linguists have payed more and more attention to this topic by mostly using examples from English. This paper will deal with problems connected with this topic from a theoretical aspect, the criteria of separating collocations from similar word connections such as idioms and free phrases, and all the possible types of collocational word connections in Croatian. The paper will also encompass the possibility of a practial application of the theory of collocations by showing their idiosyncratic nature through the comparison of German and Croatian collocations.