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The first formulation on restrictions on lexical insertion is to be found in generative grammar's Standard Theory (1965). However, as then understood, restrictions had a basically extralinguistic value (concerning notions such as 'animate', 'human, 'thing', 'instrument', etc.). This paper shows how the traditional concept of selection has been enhanced by the incorporation of new features, whether semantic of categorical, from the Hispanic research tradition on the field of lexical syntax. Particularly worthy of mentioning to this respect are two onomasiological dictionaries of contemporary Spanish, which differ from one another by the directionality of lexical selection. Additionally, an analysis of selectional restriction observed in the 'entourage' of lexical definitions from current semsiological Spanish dictionaries. Such analysis shows that the collocations do not differ in their syntactic-semantic behavior from the rest of language, inasmuch as the process of selection between the allocated seems to respond to the predicate > argument orientation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]