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Guri BORDAL (Oslo, Norvège)The influence of the Sango tonal system on French in the Central African Republic2013, Vol. XVIII-2, pp. 91-102
In this article, I present the tonal system of Central African French (CAF), which is the variety of French spoken in Bangui in the Central African Republic. The study is based on a corpus of recordings of spontaneous speech produced by twelve multilingual speakers, using mainly the African language Sango and French in their every-day communication. I show that the tonal system of CAF is to a great extent influenced by the phonological system of Sango.
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Jacques DURAND (Toulouse)Phonology of Contemporary English: usage, varieties and structures2012, Vol. XVII-1, pp. 25-37
The PAC project (The Phonology of Contemporary English: usage, varieties, structure) aims at giving a better picture of spoken English in its unity and its geographical, social and stylistic diversity. Based on Labovian methods, the project seeks to describe both rhotic and non rhotic accents of English, from traditional standards to more recent postcolonial varieties. This large corpus enables researchers to analyse and compare intervarietal features such as rhoticity as well as more specific phenomena such as vocalic length in Australian English or variable rhoticity in New Zealand English. Today LVTI, a collaborative project aiming at an interdisciplinary sociolinguistic survey of great urban centres such as Manchester and Toulouse is being set up following the PAC/PFC classical protocol.
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Julien EYCHENNE (Groningue, Pays-Bas)The Phonology of Contemporary French program: results and perspective2012, Vol. XVII-1, pp. 7-24
This paper offers an overview of the work that has been done within the Phonologie du français contemporain : usages, variétés, structure (PFC) research programme. We first critically assess the relation between phonological research and data. We then move on to describe PFC's methodology and the coding schemes that have been devised for the analysis of schwa and liaison. We finish off by showing how the PFC programme makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of the phonology of French, by widening the scope and breadth of empirical descriptions and by offering new insights into theoretical problems such as the analysis of liaison or the role of usage frequency in grammar.
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Françoise GADET (Paris Ouest)A large corpus of spoken French : CIEL-F. Epistemological choices and empirical outcome2012, Vol. XVII-1, pp. 39-54
This article presents the structure of the Corpus International Ecologique de la Langue Française, an extensive corpus of spoken French that will soon be available on the Internet, from both an epistemological and empirical perspective. Explanations are given with regard to the ideas that guided the data collection (ecological approach, comparability of the different areas of the Francophonie and communication situations) and to the choices made ("communicative spaces" and "activity types") with a view to relevant analyses in various research fields (variation, interaction, multimodality, French in contact, oral syntax) and an attempt is made to fill existing gaps in the current corpus. The article further addresses the issue of building up a network of experts, problems that had to be solved during fieldwork in the different areas and questions concerning standardisation, archiving and publication of the collected data (audio and video recordings, transcriptions, metadata), whereupon several examples are presented for comparative analyses.
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Adam KILGARRIFF (Brighton, Grande-Bretagne)Corpora and Language Learning with the Sketch Engine and SKELL2015, Vol.XX-1, pp. 61-80
We introduce the idea of using corpora – the linguist’s name for ‟big data” – in language research, and sketch its history, first in linguistics in general, then in language learning and teaching.We then take a careful look at the hazards of using corpora in language learning, and arrive at some maxims for when and how they have a place: firstly,don’t scare the students; then, use the corpus when the dictionary does not tell you enough, and moreover, disguise the corpus as a dictionary.We then introduce Sketch Engine, and show how it implements these ideas through SKELL, its language-learner interface.We show how corpora can be used, both in the classroom, and in the background, for syllabus design, where we have used corpora of learner output to identify patterns of overuse and underuse, with implications for what needs teaching.
Corpora