Unfrozenness of collocations as a stylistic resource

© 2013. Classiques Garnier, Paris. In this paper we suggest to apply the formalism of Lexical Functions to label a corpus of "unfrozen" collocations in poetry. We show that Lexical Functions allow to describe in a very precise way a wide variety of stylistic manipulations that poets use in their works. This labeling is much finer that the mere mention of some figures of speech and covers a significantly larger range of linguistic phenomena. This paper is organized in four sections. Section 1 deals with Adjectival & Adverbial Lexical Functions; section 2 studies Nominal Lexical Functions; section 3 considers Verbal Lexical Function and, finally, section 4 introduces Non Standard Lexical Functions. We advance the hypothesis that a large poetic corpus where the stylistic manipulation of collocations were systematically described in terms of Lexical Functions could be extremely interesting for both linguistic and literary studies.