The study presented here is being carried out within the framework of teaching French as a foreign language on academic goals, a field where the issue of learning "abstract" lexicon is still unexplored. It deals with French verbs referring to the various phases of existence (emergence, continuation, disappearance) of an object, a process, a situation or time period expressed by a noun. It provides steps to identify the semantic relationships between V and N in context. The study led to the publication in September 2020 of a handbook by the two authors, helping foreign students to master the distributional constraints on Verb-Noun collocations.