This study addresses prosodic evolution in the French news announcer style, based on acoustic analysis of French audiovisual archives. A 10-hour corpus covering six decades of broadcast news is investigated automatically, focusing on word-initial stress, which may give an impression of emphatic style. Objective measurements suggest that the following features have decreased since the forties: mean pitch, pitch rise associated with initial stress, and vowel duration characterising an emphatic initial stress. The onsets of stressed initial syllables have become longer while speech rate (measured at the phonemic level) has not changed. This puzzling outcome raises interesting questions for research on French prosody, suggesting that the durational correlates of word-initial stress have changed over time, in the French news announcer style.

Terminology has conventionally been biased in favour of synchrony and most studies carried out in the field have remained fixed on specialised language at a point in time. After having listed the possible reasons for the lack in the production of diachronic accounts of specialised languages, we shall discuss new developments, in the theory as well as in the methodology, of what may be called “modern” terminology. We will then show that the use of corpus linguistics and computer science has undoubtedly helped “modern” terminology to focus more on corpus provision and study in diachrony. We will finally show that a lot remains to be done for diachrony to join synchrony as a major interest of study in terminology, making it an area ripe for growth.

Two approaches to the development of medieval text corpora can be distinguished among the projects carried out since a few decades. The first one consists of digitizing modern critical editions, and the second one is concerned with the production of precise diplomatic transcriptions of manuscripts, often directly linked to the photographs of the originals. These approaches are in fact complementary rather than contradictory, as they make it possible for scholars to choose between the quantity (representativeness) and the quality (accuracy and richness) of the data depending on the goals of their research. For both types of corpora, the challenges of their XML-TEI encoding related to the tools of their processing and analyzing are considered. Many methodological problems which arise from creating and processing medieval text corpora also concern other types of linguistic corpora.