This paper explores the determinants of adjective-noun plausibility by using correlation analysis to compare judgements elicited from human subjects with five corpus-based variables: co-occurrence frequency of the adjective-noun pair, noun frequency, conditional probability of the noun given the adjective, the log-likelihood ratio, and Resnik's (1993) selectional association measure. The highest correlation is obtained with the co-occurrence frequency, which points to the strongly lexicalist and collocational nature of adjective-noun combinations. Murphy (1990) has shown that typical adjectivenoun phrases (., salty olives) are easier to interpret in comparison to atypical ones (., sweet olives). .
