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...