This paper intends to analyze the use of a special type of phraseological unit - collocations formed by the lexeme Sanktion in plural and by a collocator in the modern German. For that purpose, some introductory remarks will first be given regarding the eurysemantic character and the origin of the lexeme Sanktion . Since this is a corpus-based study, details on the compilation of the digitized corpus will be outlined, and it will be shown which collocational potential Sanktion has developed in the German political discource. In the meaning of "veto, restriction" the lexeme acts as a part of collocations. Collocations have an asymmetrical syntactic structure: the basis in collocations is the lexeme Sanktion , the collocators are adjective and genitive attribute, prepositional groups, comparison words etc. The main task of the study is to examine the development of the collocation potential of Sanktion using examples from the modern German DWDS corpus, using the corpus parameter LogDice and the frequency measure. The combinations of frequency measure and LogDice allow to present collocations as formulaic patterns in political language.