Today’s Ada@Home cartoon by Rob Harrell exemplifies the restriction of lexical items to specific collocations:
(Hat tip to reader Verdant on my Twitter account.)
From NOAD:
verb stub: [with object] 1 accidentally strike (one’s toe) against something: I stubbed my toe, swore, and tripped. …
Here the collocational restriction of stub is indicated by (one’s toe): stub is restricted to combining with an object referring to this specific bodypart; it doesn’t combine with just any object, in particular it doesn’t combine with objects in the same semantic domain as toe (*I stubbed my finger / foot).
An entertaining example using the mildly off-color slang noun wazoo, treated in my 9/29/20 posting “wazoo”:
wazoo, on its own, has no parts, so it can’t literally be an idiom. However, it’s restricted in its collocations — [it’s] formally non-compositional
… [Although NOAD glosses wazoo as ‘the anus’,] it’s far from having the full syntax of ass ‘anus, asshole’ [ — this point is then made at some length]
(The Wikipedia entry on collocational restriction doesn’t concern itself with such cases at all, but deals instead with a different phenomenon, lexical items that have specialized semantics in some two-word combinations — for example, the adjective dry having the meaning ‘not sweet’ only in combination with the noun wine.)