Phraseology, the study of set phrases in general, clearly interacts with the culture and traditions of a language community. Finding hard evidence for this in linguistic material, however, is not an easy task, especially if we consider European languages that have been in contact with each other for a long time, such as French, Dutch and English. On scientific grounds, it is necessary for contrastive phraseology to derive large collections of data from linguistic material. This contribution explores a few similarities and differences between collocations containing sea terms in French, Dutch and English.

The automatic extraction of collocations from lare corpora has so far been restricted to binary structures (bigrams). This is mainly due to statistical issues, as it is not easy to extend the traditional scores (dice, log-likelihood, z-score, t-score, mutual information, etc.) to higher grams. There has also been criticism on the great variation in the results obtained by these scores. This paper proposes an alternative approach to the automatic extraction of collocations from corpora, that can be applied to higher grams and is based on the average proximity between the grams.