Hausmann (1979, 1984) proposes an interesting theory concerning the categorization and the internal analysis of collocations. What could seem less clear is the practical importance of this theory for the treatment of collocations in dictionaries. In this paper, Hausmann's theory will be discussed and tested in an experiment where learners of French and Dutch were asked to indicate where they would look in the dictionary whenever they did not know the French equivalent of a series of Dutch collocations.

Reference to a well-known proverb or phrase by altering one of its components is a widespread phenomenon in the British and American press. Since such modifications can impede a non-native speaker's understanding of newspaper or magazine articles, a system that could identify them and refer learners of English as a second language to the original wording of such expressions might be useful in the conception of an on-line comprehension assistant. Using a data base of 10 500 titles from an American news magazine, we analyze the various types of modifications that come into play in the use of shared cultural references. Through the comparison of our data base with 800 English proverbs, we test various ways in which such modifications can be automatically detected.

n this paper, we examine the "Dictionnaire Explicatif et Combinatoire" developed by I. Mel’cuk's team in the perspective of NLP. We deal here with collocations (e.g. 'heavy smoker', 'to take a walk') which are considered as restricted cooccurrences. We first present a few characteristics of these lexical associations and the way they are encoded in the DEC by means of syntagmatic lexical functions. We then examine syntactic properties hypothesizing that these properties are not fully idiosyncratic but that a large number of generalizations can be performed within a collocative entry. Lastly, focusing on a subset of emotion nouns, we investigate the feasibility of this proposal by proposing an encoding accounting for the generalizations.