Words traditionally collocated in speech tend to make up so called cliches or traditional word combinations.
In traditional combinations words retain their full semantic independence although they are limited in their combinative power (e.g.: to wage a war, to render a service, to make friends).
Words in traditional combinations are combined according to the patterns of grammatical structure of the given language.
WORD COMBINATION
it should be pointed out that the syntactic terminology varies from author to author. Thus, Professor Illiysh operates with the term “phrase”. The definition given by the scholar to the phrase (“every combination of two or more words which is a grammatical unit but is not an analytical form of some word”) leaves no doubt as to its equivalence to the term “word combination”.
The word combination, along with the sentence, is the main syntactic unit. The smallest word combination consists of two members, whereas the largest word combination may theoretically be indefinitely large though this issue has not yet been studied properly.
WORD COMBINATION
Despite its cornerstone status for the syntactic theory, the generally recognized definition of the word combination has not been agreed upon: it receives contradictory interpretations both from different linguists.
The traditional point of view, dating back to Prof. Vinogradov’s works (i.e. to the middle of the 20th century), interprets the word combination exclusively as subordinate unit. Meanwhile, many linguists tend to treat any syntactically organized group of words as word combination regardless the type of relationship between its elements.
Free and bound (phraseological) word combinations
Another definition of word combination says that..
A Word combination (phrase ) is a non-predicative unit of speech which is, semantically, both global and articulated.
In grammar, it is seen as a group of words that functions as a single unit in the syntax of a sentence. It is an intermediate unit between a word and a sentence.
The main function of a word combination is polinomination (it describes an object, phenomenon or action and its attributes and properties at the same time).
There are two types of word combinations (also known as set-expressions, set-phrases, phrases, fixed word-groups, etc.):
