[Lexicog] preposition-focused collocations dictionaries

[Mike Maxwell]

Wayne Leman wrote:
> I would want to be able to quickly locate combinations such as:

yourdictionary.com lists a bunch of English dictionaries, but none that
would be obvious choices.  www.goenglish.com allows this sort of search,
but it seems limited to what the compiler considered to be idioms (and a
limited selection of those).  For instance, lookup on 'up' returns "a
toss-Up", "barking up the wrong tree", "get up on the wrong side of the
bed", "up for grabs", and "with your back up against the wall".

To take your examples, "at" returns three idioms, but not "at risk";
"under" returns three, but again not your "under indictment"; "over"
returns half a dozen, but not "over the hill"; etc.

To be sure, there's a broad range of things in this world, ranging from
compounds to idioms to collocations, and it's unfair to expect a dictionary
to catalog all of them.

Ah, here's an interesting one: www.onelook.com.  Enter "up", and down near
the bottom of the search page is a box that says "Phrases that include
_up_".  Clicking on the "more..." link gives a page with 100 hits (most of
which I've never heard of), and links to more.  That should satisfy you!
Same with "over"--I found "over the hill", but not "over (his) cold",
though, even when I restricted the hits to those relating to illness.
--
	Mike Maxwell
	Linguistic Data Consortium
	maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu


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