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«NOUVEAUX CORPUS DE FRANÇAIS ORAL: MÉTHODES ET PERSPECTIVES» |
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A great number of new corpora of oral French have recently been obtained by a variety of researchers both in French-speaking Europe and in Canada, taking 2000 as a starting point. For example, within the project Phonologie du français contemporain (PFC-www.projet-pfc.net), directed by Jacques Durand, Bernard Laks and Chantal Lyche, a number of phonologists around the world, including Canada, have been collecting oral French data according to a well defined protocol, which allows for extremely rich cross-dialectal comparison. In Canada, sociolinguists working on various French varieties have also recently constituted new corpora. Although their research goals and methodologies are usually not quite as homogeneous as those of PFC, they were collected among the two main families of Canadian French varieties (Laurentian and Acadian) and thus make it possible to investigate patterns of intra and inter-family convergence/divergence. For example, new corpora have been established on the French spoken in Manitoba and Saskatchewan within the ARUC-Ifo project based at the Collège Universitaire de Saint-Boniface (R. Papen, S. Hallion-Bres, M. Nyongwa). In Québec, a new corpus of French (spoken by recent immigrants) has been developed in Montreal (M. Friesner & H. Blondeau). In Ontario too, several corpora have been established, one on Casselman French, a variety which has hitherto not been studied (D. Bigot), and four in, respectively, Hawkesbury, Cornwall, North Bay and Pembroke, replicating corpora studied in the same communities close to thirty years ago (Mougeon, Nadasdi and Rehner). Within the PFC project, new corpora of oral French have also been established in the Province of Québec (Montréal, Québec City, Trois-Rivières, etc.), and more are planned within the coming year (La Pocatière/Rivière-Ouelle, Sainte-Agathe-de-Lotbinière, Gatineau, etc.) (M.-H. Côté et al.). Other new corpora include the Lac-Saint-Jean area of Québec (L. Baronian), Windsor (F. Poiré), Peace-River, Alberta (D. Walker), Hearst (J. Tennant), Maillardville, B.C. (R. Gess), the latter variety long thought to be extinct. New corpora also exist in Acadian French (W. Cichocki, G. Chevalier, S. Kasparian, A. Boudreau), to name but these few. Within PFC, new corpora have been collected in France, Switzerland, Belgium and various French-speaking countries of Africa.
In order to make these corpora better known to the academic community, we are proposing a three-day workshop which will feature three inter-linked sessions.
The first part of the workshop, entitled “Méthodologie(s)” – coordinated by R. Papen and R. Mougeon – would concentrate on the methodological aspects of these new corpora: what specific variety is under study, what specific aspect(s) of the variety is aimed at, where is the variety spoken, what research questions are being asked, what specific methodology/methodologies are used to obtain the data, what type of speakers are being studied, etc. The results of the research themselves would not be the primary goal of the presentations, although preliminary results could be briefly discussed. |
The second part of the workshop – coordinated by J. Durand and C. Lyche – would deal with the project Phonologie du français contemporain: it would focus on the methodology adopted within the project and present current surveys in Canada thus guaranteeing a logical link between the two first two themes adding to the unity of the whole symposium. The annual Summer PFC workshop will take place the day before Methods: it will concentrate on surveys outside of Canada and will devote less attention to methodological issues. |
The third and final section of the worshop will allow for Perspectives which look back on earlier French oral corpora and allow us to view their results through the lens of what we now know from corpora gathered more recently. The rich interaction between newer and older corpora, as well as between Canadian and international French varieties, will allow for a synthetic view of the dynamic situation of the language across space and time. |
This provides the possibility of 24 papers in all for the three sections of the workshop. We have no doubt that we are in a position to receive proposals from at least that many researchers. The papers will primarily be by invitation and be extended to established scholars as well as to PhD students. It would also be perfectly possible to incorporate within this workshop presentations that have been submitted individually to the Methods conference under the condition that they logically fit into the workshop’s goals, and as long as agreement is obtained from the workshop coordinators.
Papers would normally be in French, but English language presentations would also be accepted.
All papers would be vetted by the workshop coordinators as well as by a third evaluator nominated by the Methods conference.
Section 1 «Méthodologie(s)» Section 2 «PFC- Canada» Section 3 «Perspectives»
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