Les noms collectifs en français : une vue d’ensemble

This article is an overview of semantic questions about French collective nouns (Ncoll). These nouns present a singular form conveying plurality. This characteristic is expressed in some of their semantic and distributional routines that we deal with in the first part: semantic plurality, double level for the whole and its elements and the relations between the two levels. In the second part, we propose some criteria (ontology, ways of gathering, similarity) in order to classify the Ncoll and we present some cases of semantic derivation based on metonymy and synecdoche that give rise to collective meaning. To conclude, we establish a parallel between semantic attributes of Ncoll on the one hand and sense effects and rhetorical uses they can induce on the other hand.