NOUN PREP NOUN collocations in French: the case of scientific lexicon
Résumé
In line with Explanatory and Combinatorial Lexicology (Mel’čuk, 1998), and with continental European tradition (Hausmann, 1989; Grossmann & Tutin, 2003; Tutin, 2013), we posit that collocations are recurrent binary associations of meaningful words, which have a syntactic and a semantic relation. They include two dissymmetric components (Hausmann 1989): the base (e.g. attention in pay attention) which works in an autosemantic way (the semantic meaning can be interpreted in isolation) and the collocate (e.g. pay in pay attention) which works in a synsemantic way (the semantic meaning is constructed in cooccurrence with the base). However, sometimes, it is not easy to draw the line between collocations and “full phrasemes”: it is the case for constructions such as Noun PREP Noun (e.g. cuiller à soupe, ‘tablespoon’). Due to their varying semantic and syntactic properties, these constructions constitute in the French language a real challenge for analysis, both in the field of general and specialized discourse. We focus here on cross-disciplinary scientific lexicon, i.e. lexicon dealing with methods, arguments, opinions and metadiscourse in scientific writing (e.g. hypothèse de travail ‘work hypothesis’ or cadre d’interprétation, ‘interpretative framework’), analyzed on the basis of a large corpus of scientific papers. The study examines in detail the criteria used to decide whether a Noun Prep Noun construction is or is not a collocation by carrying out a case study on nominal collocates associated with prototypical nouns in scientific lexicon. Candidate collocations were extracted from our corpora and the list of co-occurrences examined in order to classify them into different types on the basis of a combination of semantic and syntactic criteria: the semantic status of Noun 1 or Noun 2, the presence or absence of a PP argument and the syntactic status of Noun 2, the role played by the preposition, the determiners, and the grammatical number specification. By crosschecking the different criteria, our study allows five types to be distinguished: a) objective genitive constructions, b) subjective genitive constructions, c) predicative structures, d) specification structures, and e) classification structures. The results seem to indicate that predicative and specification structures establish particularly favourable conditions for the emergence of collocations, although other factors – lexical or pragmatic – may also be involved.