International audience This paper aims firstly to describe the linguistic change that affects the four units built with the French verbs donner/apporter/fournir/offrir and the French noun feu, and, secondly, to identify the factors which have contributed to change their meaning. The data come from two tagged corpora of French texts: a literary corpus (Frantext) and a journalistic corpus (EmoBase). Our hypothesis is that these units remain stable or disappear according to the semantic change of feu which is due to cultural and societal phenomena. Our methodology is based on a multi-level functional analysis of linguistic facts and describes each of the four collocations using syntactic, semantic and textual profiles. The two corpora on the contemporary period complement one another and thus allow for a detailed description of linguistic phenomena in synchrony before considering them in a diachronic perspective.