Defective verbs. Collocation. The Frantext corpus. The Araneum Francogallicum Maius (French, 15.03) corpus. Czech National Corpus (CNC). Stability.

Le verbe défectif attraire dont le paradigme de conjugaison reste incomplet en français contemporain maintient une combinabilité plus large que ne l?attestent les travaux lexicographiques de référence faisant autorité (le Petit Robert, Larousse, TLF). Les exemplifications trouvées dans deux corpus électroniques (Frantext et Araneum Francogallicum Maius (French, 15.03)) servent de preuve de la persistance de l?emploi de ce verbe dans la langue française et de sa capacité combinatoire vivante pour former non seulement des groupements de mots usités ou figés, mais également de nouvelles séquences pourvues de statuts de cooccurrences néologiques.

The French defective verb attraire, i. e. the verb which does not display all the properties of its grammatical class by having an incomplete conjugation, has shown a significant frequency in contemporary texts. Apart from its habitual co-occurrence in collocations codified in the dictionaries such as TLF, Le Petit Robert and Larousse, the Frantext corpus and the Araneum Francogallicum Maius (French, 15.03) offer a relatively high number of novel and fresh collocates which testify to the verb?s original collocability. Taking into account the fact that the occurrences are found in the texts published from the year 2000 onwards, it is possible to treat the intransitive verb attraire as part of the contemporary French word-stock within which the verb enters both usual and innovative collocates (neologisms).