The present paper gives an account of the approach we have led so far to build a database of frozen units. Although it has long been absent from linguistic studies and grammatical tradition, linguistic frozenness is currently a major research issue for linguistic studies, as frozen markers ensure the economy of the language system. The objective of our study is twofold: we first aim to build a comprehensive database of completely frozen units for the French language ― what is traditionally called absolute or total frozenness. We started the project with the description of adverbial units ― in the long term, we will also naturally describe adjectival, verbal and nominal phrases ― and we will first present the database we have developed so far. This first objective is necessarily followed by the second one, which aims to assess the frozenness degree of the other units (i.e. relative frozenness). In this perspective, we resorted to two sets of methods: linguistic tests and statistical methods processed on two corpora (political and scientific discourse).

Machine Translation is increasingly being taught within non scientific subject areas at French universities, which involves instructors solving educational and scientific problems caused by the lack of training of these students in computer science. Most of these students are being taught MT within the framework of language and linguistic courses. As MT instructors in both Departments of Foreign Language and Linguistics at Orléans, we will report on our experience of teaching. Besides setting up the technological environment, we also had to consider the courses from two different angles. First of all, we can state that MT tools enable future users to enhance their skills in Machine-Assisted Translation, and secondly they introduce potential future system designers to computational linguistics issues.