1 Complex words vs. phrases: the case of causative verbs in French Georgette DAL, U.M.R. « SILEX », Université de Lille 3 & CNRS and

Key words: French causatives; blocking; syntax vs morphology; large scale corpora, automatic morphology processing The goal of our research is to observe, in context, a corpus of linguistic units for which a comparison between morphology and syntax is valid, in order to determine whether the principle known as “blocking ” operates between complex words and phrases. We have chosen to look at causative French verbs, because this semantic type of verbs can be produced through derivational or syntactic operations. After having defined what we mean by “causative verbs ” in §1. and exposed what “blocking ” is in §2., we will go on with the above-mentioned comparison in §3. The related experiment, carried out on a textual base of nearly 200 million words, shows that, in terms of blocking, anything and everything can be said in the case of causatives. 1. Causative verb