Collecting collocations from general and specialised corpora

Collocations are increasingly taken into account in general and specialised repositories and methodologies to collect them are heavily based on corpora. However, lexicographers and terminologists use different kinds of corpora in which combinations are likely to behave according to specific rules and/or patterns. This contribution presents a comparative analysis of the collocational behaviour of 15 lexical items found in a general language corpus and a specialised corpus on the theme of the environment. We automatically extracted large sets of collocates (three lists of 50 collocates) for each lexical item and from each corpus and analyse different facets of collocational behaviour: polysemy of lexical items, characteristics of collocates (overlap, rank and semantic classes of collocates, etc.). Our aim is to draw the attention of terminologists and lexicographers to some specific factors affecting the behaviour of collocations in specialized and general corpora.