Interpreting collocations: An analysis of collocation dictionaries of: English, German and Russian

Abstract Unless online collocation tools have not become common yet, printed collocation dictionaries are still one of the few sources of checking collocative possibilities of a lexical unit. The aim of this paper is to analyse one printed collocation dictionary in each of the 3 languages: English, German and Russian and see which interpretation of collocation was focused on and what user groups were targeted. Also, it was attempted to see whether the morphological specificity of the languages was taken consideration of as compared to the structure of these dictionaries, and further determine whether inclusion or exclusion of certain language-specific information aims at a particular group of target users.