This book tackles the problem of ascertaining what is a lexical item. Based on extensive corpus evidence, the author queries the role of words as fundamental units of semantic analysis. Notions such as -word sense-, -polysemy- and -disambiguation- are called into question. It is argued that mainstream phraseology has provided an insufficient account of the realm of multi-word choices. Accordingly, the ideas of -idiom- and -collocation- undergo revision in this work. The author comes up with an alternative proposal about what constitutes a unit of meaning and how the vocabulary is organized."