In this paper, we address two main problems raised by the classical definitions of restricted lexical collocations: 1) the binary status of collocations; 2) the problem of function words which are often implicitly excluded from the definition of collocations
We show that collocations are fundamentally argument-predicate structures and that most ternary collocations can be considered as combinations of binary collocations. We think that content grammatical words should be considered as parts of collocations, while pure functional words are not central elements of the collocations.