The Collocational Potential of Verbal Prepositional Phrases in Croatian

Prepositions have traditionally been associated with nouns in a particular case, forming with them a grammatical entity, ie a prepositional-case phrase (Matas Ivankovie 2009; Buie et al. 1997). The intention here is to point out, from a lexicological point of view, the semantic relations between verbs and prepositions, which, on the one hand, arises from the valence strength of verbs to open the place of prepositional case complements, and on the other, from the possibility of prepositions to determine more closely the semantic potential of the verb in a particular communication context. Analyzing examples taken from the Croatian Collocation Database of the Institute of Croatian Language and Linguistics (http://ihjj.hr/kolokacije), collocation features of verbal prepositional phrases are described following the criteria by which such structures can be considered collocations. In grammatical descriptions of Croatian, the prepositional case phrases along with the verbs are generally defined as complements, while at the lexicological level, they are not systematically described as a type of fixed phrases. The analysis includes the following: 1. which verbs are, by their primary meanings, the bearers of these phrases, 2. what are prepositions of the most common components of these phrases, 3. the division of verbal prepositional collocations in Croatian.