Although a number of dictionaries of collocations have appeared in recent years —mostly in languages other than French —the notion of ‘collocation’ remains somewhat fuzzy around the edges. A collocation is generally under-stood to be a combination of two lexemes that are semantically independent but which are linked together by a strong, restrictive association. Neverthe-less it is not always easy to determine the boundaries of this type of affinity. Between the extremes of completely free word combinations and completely frozen idioms, collocations (as defined above) clearly occupy an intermediate portion of the spectrum. At each edge of this middle ground, however, there are grey areas where one finds word combinations which might or might not be classed as collocations. After first demonstrating that associative word combinations do indeed form a continuum of this kind, we propose some parameters to help delimit the scope of collocations in everyday contemporary French.
