The paper shows that the extraction of nominal syntagms offers a number of candidates the status of collocation. Syntactically, these structures are compatible with Mel'čuk's definition of base and collocate, if one of the elements has a governing role. Semantically and pragmatically, the status of collocation must be validated by a form of relevance. However, this relevance is completely dependent on the task to be realized. We evaluated this assumption on corpora of different natures and different styles.