Corpus Taurinense (CT) is the POS tagged version of ItalAnt Corpus, an electronic corpus of Old Italian texts (between 1251 and 1300). In this article we aim to describe the approach followed in CT for the annotation of multiword units (MWU). MWU in our work is a set of two or more graphic words which receive (also) an overall POS tagging because this set of words is in paradigmatic relation with one word lexical unit with the same POS.Our POS tagging confirms that most of the Modern Italian compound conjunctions at that time were not lexicalised. The order of the components is already the Modern Italian order but they can still be interrupted by occasional elements.

This article aims to investigate experimentally the links between prosody and the various domains of linguistics (syntax, semantics, pragmatics). Since the function of prosody is to convey the interpretation of the meaning the speaker wants to give to his utterance, the method that is proposed is to define linguistic models that can be quantified in such a way as to both yield an interpretive strategy of the linguistic contents and to predict a melodic structuring of the lexical framework. Experimental evidence shows links between on the one hand constraints related to the text and the context, and on the other the distribution of models and melodical indices, and allows us to define prosody and more in particular melody, as a subjective locus, where whatever belongs to the linguistic realm enters the realm of pragmatics.

The article presents dictionaries of words associations (also called ‘lexical’ or ‘verbal’ associations). Firstly used in psychological experiments, these dictionaries were mainly developed in Russia from the 1980s where a new linguistic discipline appeared, the ‘associative linguistics’. We present the results obtained for French language due to the creation of two dictionaries and their possible exploitations, in particular in semantics.

In this paper, we propose a first step leading to the description of the lexicon of scientific language by identifying a transdisciplinary scientific lexicon (TSL). The TSL is domain independent and forms a central lexical core of all domains; it is at the center of argumentation we find in scientific discourse as well as its structuring. In order to gather the transdisciplinary lexicon, we use natural language processing (NLP) tools and statistical techniques; central to our method is the calcul des spécificités (specificity measure) put forward by Lafon (1980). By using NLP tools, we want to verify if it is possible to quickly and simply complement existing lexical resources without much manual intervention. We conclude our study by exploring an observation made by Phal (1971) about collocations and scientific discourse. We focus here on V-N collocations revolving around nouns taken from our TSL.

Is there a correlation between the grammatical developmental level and the lexical developmental level in the written production of learners of French as a foreign language ? We have applied a number of quantitative lexical and grammatical measures to 40 texts in French written by two groups of Swedish adults with different proficiency levels. All analyses were carried out using different software (among them a system wear developed by ourselves) in an attempt to demonstrate the possibilities of current automatic analyses. The results show that, even if several measures discriminate between the two independently established groups, there is no simple correlation of correlation between them. The measure of lexical sophistication was the only one showing a significant correlation with the grammatical measure used.

While the study of vocabulary knowledge has been for a long time the domain of psychologists and psycholinguists, the eighties have seen a growing interest for word knowledge and word learning.. In this paper, I review shortly some results from psycholinguistic research on the mental lexicon that are relevant for applied linguistics. I further discuss a series of publications concerning factors that influence success in word learning. Finally, I report on a recent study done at the University of Amsterdam on the relative role of sound, image and context in word learning.

The Thesaurus occitan (THESOC) is a multimedia database that aims at assembling all the dialectal data gathered in an oral form throughout the occitan-speaking region. It has two parts:  one deals with the lexicon, and the other, composed of sentences, is devoted to syntax.  Different tools and functionalities are associated with the data in order to allow researchers to constitute bodies of work and to formulate and verify hypotheses. This article presents the most recently upgraded form of the THESOC, its modalities of construction, and its methods of consultation.

The free and online encyclopaedia project Wikipedia has become in less than six years one of the most prominent commons-based peer-production example. The way the project works and evolves is now at stake for academics eager to explore auto-organized structures. Although many studies have been led on the connections between contributors, the linguistic properties of Wikipedia productions remain almost unexplored. In this article, we focus on the way sciences are represented within the project and examine the general and epistemic lexical characteristics of the articles thanks to the comparison of a set of corpora extracted from Wikipedia’s category system.

Verbal lexicon has key functions at textual level. Competence in second language - and specially narrative competence, with which we are dealing here - can be influenced by lack of verbal lexicon, by partial acquisition or idiosyncratic acquisition of it. A textual and conceptual approach of some narrative productions in French and Spanish as first and second languages (FLM, ELM, FLE and ELE) will allow us to compare both cases in these two languages in order to make clear how oral narratives are built up at propositional level (mainly, the explicit reference to processes, space and temporality) and at suprapropositional level (cohesion and coherence). Finally, we will study the influence of real oral input in the learners' oral productions.

Unlike two-word collocations, multi-word discourse markers have until recently suffered comparative neglect in lexicology and lexicography. The present article aims to remedy this deficiency for French. After giving an operational definition of the lexical items in question, the author proceeds to classify them by functional criteria. He concludes his article with a detailed survey of suggestors. The great frequency of this type of marker would seem to belie the assumption that academic language is free of subjectivity.

Spoken word recognition involves automatic activation of lexical candidates compatible with the perceived input. In running speech, words abut one another without intervening gaps, and syllable boundaries can mismatch with word boundaries. For instance, liaison in 'petit agneau' creates a syllable beginning with a consonant although 'agneau' begins with a vowel. In two cross-modal priming experiments we investigate how French listeners recognise words in liaison environments. These results suggest that the resolution of liaison in part depends on acoustic cues which distinguish liaison from non-liaison consonants, and in part on the availability of lexical support for a liaison interpretation.

Following an empirical study, this article deals with a specific type of errors in vocabulary acquisition of French as a second language: intralingual lexical confusion. 480 English and Greek speaking learners (beginners, intermediates and advanced) of French were given a L2-L1 translation task of French words. A large number of errors revealed confusions due to formal and/or semantic similarity between the target words and other French words known by the learners. The formal and/or semantic comparison between error and target word allowed a narrower description of intralingual lexical confusion highlighting some precise sub-categories of what the author calls "lexical confusibles".