Linguistic Context : Oral French

Which linguistic phenomena have been marked up and why?

In terms of research on the linguistic structure of oral French, a number of syntactic and stylistic phenomena have emerged as particularly fertile ground for corpus-based analyses. This project has selected four such phenomena for markup, each of which is the subject of extensive current research in Linguistics:

  • patterns of speech and thought presentation (STP): this involves markup of the different forms that speech and thought presentation can take, such as whether the storyteller is speaking as the narrator, or whether s/he is representing a character's speech or thought through phenomena such as direct discourse, indirect discourse and free indirect discourse. To find out about more about how speech and thought presentation has been encoded in this project, click here;
  • syntactic detachment: this involves markup of the factors at play in cases where an element (e.g. a noun, a pronoun) is detached to the left or the right of the main clause and usually replaced within the clause by a corresponding pronoun (e.g. 'le vin français je l'aime beaucoup', where 'le vin français' is detached to the left and replaced within the clause by the direct object pronoun 'le'). To find out about more about how detachment has been encoded in this project, click here;
  • subject-verb inversion in declaratives: this involves markup of the different factors at play in contexts of inversion, such as whether there is an adverbial at the head of the phrase (e.g. 'ainsi a-t-il compris que...'), or whether we are dealing with verbs of speech (e.g. 'dit-il'). To find out about more about how inversion has been encoded in this project, click here;
  • retention or loss of negative 'ne' in negation: this involves markup of the various factors at play in contexts where the pre-verbal 'ne' element of the negative construction in French is dropped (leaving only the post-verbal element such as 'pas', 'rien', 'jamais', e.g. 'il a pas compris'), and in contexts where the 'ne' is not dropped. To find out about more about how negation has been encoded in this project, click here.

In each case, a wide range of linguistic factors has been identified by recent and current research as influential in terms of patterns observed; these include syntactic, lexical and phonetic factors which have been used as the basis for the markup tagset for this corpus, so that qualitative and quantitative analysis can be carried out. With all four phenomena, questions around medium and discourse type are also of central importance. It is well established, for example, that loss of negative 'ne' is strongly associated with lower register speech, that detachment is strongly associated with spontaneous oral discourse and that subject-verb inversion is now relatively rare and very restricted in oral declaratives. Yet the vast bulk of research on oral syntax has been carried out on one particular discourse type, i.e. conversational discourse. Little research has been done on the analysis of these structures in varieties of oral discourse where questions around medium and discourse type are very different to the conversational context. One of the key purposes of this corpus is to facilitate analysis of linguistic phenomena in a discourse type which is distinctly oral, but where, given the written sources of many stories, the relationship between oral and written is complex.

The fact that the discourse is 'narrative' is of particular significance because oral narrative has been the locus for much linguistic research in the last twenty years or so. The most widely researched linguistic phenomenon by far is tense usage, but there are many publications on relations between clauses (parataxis versus hypotaxis), temporal framing (use of temporal adverbials which are detached at the head of the clause), and speech and thought presentation. Much of the published literature draws connections between these phenomena. Strong links have also been made between the patterns found for these phenomena in medieval 'oral' narratives and those found in contemporary conversational narratives (Fleischman, 1990).

To find out more about the rationale behind the tagset for these phenomena, click here.