Beyond base and collocate

Abstract Support verb constructions figure among the most frequently investigated topics in the literature on collocation. So far, most studies of this kind have focused on bipartite structures, consisting of a verbal collocate and a nominal base. Accordingly, the analysis of how support verbs are distributed has concentrated almost exclusively on the lexical control exerted by the base. In this article, we draw attention towards the influence exerted by the participation of verb and noun in more complex patterns of lexical co-occurrence. We contend that the distribution of the support verb collocate is contingent not only on the base noun but also on other elements of the lexical context. This highlights the need to enrich the theoretical framework of collocation analysis with the additional descriptive category of ‘second-order collocate’. The proposal is illustrated with two case studies using a large-scale web corpus of English.