Averbal interactional prefabricated sentences and constructions: looking for variability and frozenness in a constructicon for French

This article analyzes the variability and the frozenness of averbal speech formulas in French, such as bonne soirée / journée (lit. ‘nice evening / day’; ‘have a nice evening / day’), à demain / bientôt (lit. ‘to tomorrow / soon’;‘see you tomorrow / soon’); au travail / au lit (lit. ‘to work / bed’; ‘let’s go to work / to bed’). A corpus study is conducted and the properties associated with lexical variability, syntactic variation, and genres are examined. Observations show that numerous common properties can be associated with the patterns we examined, that can be analyzed as constructional phrasemes, defined as associations of syntactic structures defined as structure-meaning associations including fixed and variable elements. A model of constructional phrasemes is then outlined in the framework of the Prefab project, which aims to identify the most productive constructional phrasemes for speech formulae in French. The analysis carried out shows that a degree of frozenness can be associated with the structure of constructional phrasemes themselves (for example, use as a greeting formula of [Adjbon Npériode]), whereas a certain degree of variability can be observed at the lexical level and in terms of gender and register.