La notion de collocation fondamentale : une étude de corpus

The present study investigates “core collocations,” i.e. frequent or available (i.e. essential for accomplishing basic communicative tasks) word combinations consisting of two lexemes which yield a significant (collocational) relation and which represent the most basic co-occurrences of a word. We extracted from the web-crawled French-language corpus frWaC (Baroni et al. 2010) a sample of around 20 000 collocations, using frequency and associative measures. Then we selected the top 400 collocations by frequency and/or associative measures and asked 90 native speakers to indicate which ones they considered to be more essential. The purpose of the study was twofold: a) developing a valid method to automatically extract core collocations; and b) determining, by means of a comparison between native intuition and statistical data, the validity of the sample we automatically compiled and the reason why some combinations were regarded as more central by the subjects. The study showed that what is core is not only a matter of frequency, but it also depends on units’ fixedness. Our findings support Gougenheim’s intuition that coreness depends on frequency and/or communicative usefulness.