Comparing morphological and syntactic variations of support verb constructions and verbal full phrasemes in French: a corpus based study

Abstract

International audienceThis paper deals with syntactic and morphological variations of verbal MWEs in French. Our objective was to check against corpus evidence some assumptions of the literature concerning MWEs, and more precisely verbal MWEs, which are often said to be quite variable (e.g. Nunberg et al. 1994; Moon 1998). We wanted to check to what extent this claim was proved to be true in a corpus study for 30 frequent verbal MWEs in French, by comparing the syntactic and morpho-logical variations between non compositional MWEs and verbal collocations, particularly support verb constructions (hereafter SVCs), which are very frequent in French