Do the major tendencies of phonological systems of languages depend on constraints of production and perception ? This problem has been studied in the framework of "substance oriented" linguistics, which was introduced simultaneously by Lindblom and Stevens in 1972. Various universal tendencies of phonological systems that might be explained by the characteristics of the sound structures and could be looked upon from an ontogenetical perspective, will be presented and discussed here. The characteristics and the predictability of vocalic and syllabic systems seem to be eminently suited for the study of this question on the basis of research carried out at the ICP.

The dictionary evolved from medieval glosses that explained fragments of discourse in their contexts. Those fragments were later collected, then classified and reduced to their simplest forms, ie words. The most important aspect of that evolution from the gloss to the dictionary is that the fragment to be explained was decontextualized, extracted from discourse. The main objective of the dictionary is to give an image of the system. It is now possible to improve the dictionary in its role as a tool for explaining discourse. It cannot provide explanations that would be adapted to every single context, but it can give to the user a huge quantity of discourse, and provide explanations that would be more closely adapted to every occurrence or type of occurrence. Lexicographers would be well advised to investigate those new possibilities.

The first part of this article explains which methodological issues need to be examined in order to establish and transcribe a large corpus of texts written by pupils, along with their school context. The second part of the article states the various lines of epistemological questioning which led to a second research project, i.e. questions about how to define types of school writing as well as a corpus and context, and about the necessary links between those three elements. A variety of software programs was used to analyse corpora which were not in conformity with orthographical and stylistical standards. Such a use seems possible, joined with qualitative analysis.

In the past decade, technology has had a major impact on the activities of the Institute for Dutch Lexicology (INL). The results include three electronic dictionaries, covering the period from 1200 up to 1976, and some linguistically annotated text corpora of historical and present-day Dutch. Three present-day corpora have been widely used not only for lexicography but also for many other purposes, since becoming accessible over the Internet in 1994. Advanced technology will have even more importance for a project recently started, the Integrated Language Database of 8th-21st Century Dutch, in which the dictionaries, lexica and a diachronic text corpus will be linked in a meaningful way. Parts of the database will be linked with comparable data collections at other institutes, thus creating a supra-institutional research instrument which will provide new opportunities for innovative research.

The ACADEMIE project aims at building an electronic database on the eight editions of the Dictionnaire de l'Académie française (DAF). As these eight editions cover the period from 1694 to 1932-35, this corpus presents interesting problems of diachrony and synchrony, and touches also on issues related to literature and culture. This way the DAF database is enriched by a whole range of hypertext links, allowing a dynamic dialogue between specialists and readers/consultants.

This paper presents CreolData, a multilingual lexical database concerning the Portuguese-based Creole Languages of Africa. In section 2, we describe the goals of the project. Section 3 is devoted to a short description of the languages of the database. We then give an overview of XML and the standards for electronic dictionarie, and focus on the macrostructure the microstructure (sections 4, 5 and 6) Finally, we give an outlook for future developments of this project (section 7).

The setting-up of a database from which a corpus and associated information (whether syntactic or semantic, etc.) are derived is not a natural undertaking in non-computational linguistics. This article sets out to present how such a technique can be exploited within the context of a research project focussing on the French preposition dans dans.

The search for universal tendencies in the languages of the world is undoubtedly a necessary axis for any theoretical perspective in linguistics. We present here UPSID (UCLA Phonological Segment Inventory Database, Maddieson, 1986 ; Maddieson & Precoda, 1990). This database contains phonological data which are genetically balanced and the description of which is harmonized. We implemented it in ICP to enrich typological researches on vowels, diphthongs and consonants. We have analysed UPSID with the help of an original methodology which not only confirm or make more precise some regularities already stressed on, but also brings up new data.