Codings

  • Jacques DURAND (Toulouse)
    Phonology of Contemporary English: usage, varieties and structures
    2012, 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.


  • Julien EYCHENNE (Groningue, Pays-Bas)
    The Phonology of Contemporary French program: results and perspective
    2012, 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.


  • Françoise GADET (Paris Ouest)
    A large corpus of spoken French : CIEL-F. Epistemological choices and empirical outcome
    2012, 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.