  We report experiments about the syntactic variations of support verb
constructions, a special type of multiword expressions (MWEs) containing
predicative nouns. In these expressions, the noun can occur with or without the
verb, with no clear-cut semantic difference. We extracted from a large French
corpus a set of examples of the two situations and derived statistical results
from these data. The extraction involved large-coverage language resources and
finite-state techniques. The results show that, most frequently, predicative
nouns occur without a support verb. This fact has consequences on methods of
extracting or recognising MWEs.
