The main goal of this work is to provide operational criteria for characterizing nouns in Noun - Adjective combinations, in which the noun occurs in an analogous way to so called light verbs or support verbs, widely studied in recent years in both Linguistics and Natural Language Processing. In the work, linguistic, lexicographic and computational studies converge in order to explore the potential for automatic analysis of corpora, whose aim is to provide quantitative tools and methods which would lead to a more objective way of establishing concepts which underlie linguistic analysis. The work unites corpus-based research with traditional lexicography in order to elicit the main properties of the N-Adj combinations occurring with denominal adjectives. The lexicographic and contextual data reveal the existence of a set of nouns that occur in the studied constructions in a way similar to light verbs in V-Noun phrasal combinations. An automatic method for recognizing support nouns in texts is developed, which will provide language specialists with an instrument capable of bringing solid evidence to add to intuitive judgments in the task of justifying the delimitation of expressions that are apparently irregular