Notes sur les collocations: rôle et implications

It is now a notorious fact that the impossibility of circumscribing the phenomenon of collocation2 and of giving it an exact definition since it has interested practitioners more than the language theorists. The collocations represent in fact an invisible person, even a phantom, often mentioned, but which only appears once in flesh and bone. As the character of Alphonse Daudet, collocations are at the center of a lexical intrigue: they appear at the moment when one asks the question about their nature, their functioning and their use. Everyone uses them, but no one knows them truly: they hide under different denominations. Collocation is therefore a phenomenon with fuzzy outlines and the existence of a set of criteria, imposed by the various theories, is an attempt to define it formally. The purpose of our article is to introduce a new terminology concerning collocations.