Introduction

Henry Tyne (1) , Virginie André (2, 3) , Alex Boulton (2, 3) , Christophe Benzitoun (3) , Yan Greub (3)

1 VECT-Mare Nostrum - VECT-Mare Nostrum
2 CRAPEL - Centre de Recherches et d'Applications Pédagogiques en Langues
3 ATILF - Analyse et Traitement Informatique de la Langue Française

This book looks at the French language through corpora, and comprises four parts dealing respectively with diachrony, syntax, sociolinguistics and issues arising in the learning and teaching of French. Each part is headed by a chapter that provides an overview of the given field in relation to the themes running through the book. Other than contributing to our general understanding of the French language today, this book specifically addresses the use of corpora for the study of language and the links between tools, methods and analyses. How do we use corpora? What are the underlying theoretical and/or methodological considerations? How have these changed our way of formulating linguistic descriptions? What are the implications for descriptive accounts of French? What are the applications of corpus studies? Each chapter focuses on specific aspects of French and addresses (often indirectly) issues such as the ways in which researchers use existing resources, the reasons for producing new resources, or questions arising from different types of data use. One aim is to challenge or complete existing work, not least in relation to the possibilities that are now made available through corpus use. Corpora provide data , and a common theme throughout the book is one of empiricism. A distinction is sometimes drawn between corpus-based and corpus-driven approaches, and this is apparent here: a corpus-based study looks to gather findings that test a certain idea or model, whatever its scope or ambition; a corpus-driven study is more ecological insofar as it aims to build conclusions on the sole basis of the findings (Tognini-Bonelli 2001). These are perhaps two ends of a continuum, and in many cases there will be a continuous interaction between data consultation and the questions one has, each influencing the other at all stages, from corpus compilation through to final outcomes. But in all cases it is important not to lose sight of the fact that language is not just a neutral collection of data, hence the inclusion of the concept ecology in the title. Ecology has become something of a buzz-word of late in many spheres. The rationale for the ecological leitmotif here derives from a shared interest in language and environment: ecology is to do with understanding language not as an abstract system but as an integral part of human existence (Haugen 1972). Ecology also refers to the authentic nature of the data and issues to do with their collection, transcription and editing, markup and tagging, or any other treatment resulting from human intervention whether deliberate or not.

Domaines: Linguistique

Henry Tyne, Virginie André, Alex Boulton, Christophe Benzitoun, Yan Greub. Introduction. Henry Tyne; Virginie André; Alex Boulton; Christophe Benzitoun; Yan Greub. French through Corpora: Ecological and data-driven perspectives in French language studies. Introduction., Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp.341, 2014. ⟨hal-00940071⟩