Les adjectifs primaires et la collocation

Basic adjectives are generally considered as semantic prototypes of the adjective category. As they are very common and vague, one would not expect them to occur in collocations: they can indeed qualify almost any noun and, at first sight, it may be difficult to find statistically significant expressions following the adj. + noun / noun + adj. pattern. A closer look, however, shows that basic adjectives also occur in a lot of atypical adj. + N / N + adj. constructions; are there any collocations among them? Part of the answer depends on the definition we give to that notion. The definition of a collocation however varies with the adopted perspective (computational linguistics, semantics). In the first part of this article we try to give statistic, syntactic and semantic criteria for the identification of collocations, and to give a definition applicable to the adj. + N / N + adj. pattern that would enable us to draw the fine line between collocations and fixed expressions. The second part is devoted to the identification of collocations containing basic adjectives.