Government and paraphrase: lexicographic treatment of noun-verb collocations

The Meaning-Text Theory (MTT) has incorporated collocations in its special lexicographic model due to a mechanism called lexical functions, a formal language that systematically collects, in a particular section of a word's entry, all collocations whereby the semantic nucleus corresponds to this word. However, lexical functions do not provide information regarding a complete behaviour description of collocations. In fact, a complete description of this behaviour is included for all words with a lexicographic entry and therefore, lexical functions limited informativeness can be conceived as a consequence of the ambiguous status of collocations between full-lexical units and free-syntactic combinatory. The problem is that, frequently, their combinatorial behaviour cannot be predicted from regular combinatorial procedures. In a lexicographic work that attempts to describe the complete behaviour of a language, such as the one used in the MTT, this information is fundamental not only for text production and processing (the main target of the MTT), but also for paraphrasing (the other strength of the model). The present paper aims to provide diverse ideas regarding this issue. In order to do this it works with a group of nounverb collocations belonging to two semantic fields with a very uneven behaviour: 'kicks' and 'feelings'. Following the linguistic model of the MTT, the rection of noun-verb collocations and that of their equivalent full-verb is syntactically and semantically analysed. Subsequently, in order to assure the highest fidelity in the paraphrasing process, both behaviours are compared. Finally, the work includes several possible lexicographic instruments, corresponding with the structure of the dictionary that intend to describe the particular data analysed. There are also suggested mechanisms that communicate different lexicographic sections. In combination, these mixed devices would allow a precise description of noun-verb collocations, without a particularized treatment of each term, as if they were full-lexical units.