The main goal of this work is to provide operational criteria forcharacterizing nouns in Noun - Adjective combinations, in which the nounoccurs in an analogous way to so called light verbs or support verbs, widelystudied in recent years in both Linguistics and Natural Language Processing.In the work, linguistic, lexicographic and computational studies converge inorder to explore the potential for automatic analysis of corpora, whose aimis to provide quantitative tools and methods which would lead to a moreobjective way of establishing concepts which underlie linguistic analysis.The work unites corpus-based research with traditional lexicography inorder to elicit the main properties of the N-Adj combinations occurringwith denominal adjectives. The lexicographic and contextual data revealthe existence of a set of nouns that occur in the studied constructionsin a way similar to light verbs in V-Noun phrasal combinations. Anautomatic method for recognizing support nouns in texts is developed, whichwill provide language specialists with an instrument capable of bringingsolid evidence to add to intuitive judgments in the task of justifying thedelimitation of expressions that are apparently irregular