Qu'elles étaient vertes nos années...

This paper monitors neologisms in contemporary French in the domains of ecology and the environment (Galazzi Jullion 2008): a corpus of traditional French newspaper texts and an electronic corpus taken from Google are explored with the aim of extracting contemporary usage of of the adjective green, whose polysemy continues to multiply. According to our corpus, the semantic extension of vert (green) has now reached the domains of ecology, politics, the environment, economics, architecture, health, employment and leisure, as seen by the examples of allusions, un-fixed expressions, homophonic puns, portmanteau words, compound words and collocations of various degrees of transparency.