Building a database of French frozen adverbial phrases

The present paper gives an account of the approach we have led so far to build a database of frozen units. Although it has long been absent from linguistic studies and grammatical tradition, linguistic frozenness is currently a major research issue for linguistic studies, as frozen markers ensure the economy of the language system. The objective of our study is twofold: we first aim to build a comprehensive database of completely frozen units for the French language – what is traditionally called absolute or total frozenness. We started the project with the description of adverbial units – in the long term, we will also naturally describe adjectival, verbal and nominal phrases – and we will first present the database we have developed so far. This first objective is necessarily followed by the second one, which aims to assess the frozenness degree of the other units (i.e. relative frozenness). In this perspective, we resorted to two sets of methods: linguistic tests and statistical methods processed on two corpora (political and scientific discourse).