FRENCH LINGUISTICS RESOURCES
For information about Dictionaries, Grammars, etc.: French Language Resources
For information about : Historical French Dictionaries
For information about Linguistics in general: Linguistics LibGuide
French Linguistics
In this Guide you will find Resources for the linguistic analysis of Modern French that will help to understand how the French language works.
We compile resources to cover different aspects:
- the phonology (different patterns of sounds)
- phonetics (production of speech sounds by humans)
- the morphology (internal structure of words)
- the syntax (ordering of elements within the phrase)
- the lexis (vocabulary)
- foreign language pedagogy (second language acquisition)
- sociolinguistics, history of the french and language contact (Louisiana French, Welsh, Breton, etc)
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History of the French language:
- 5th-8th centuries.Gallo-Romance, which is a combination of Vulgar Latin and Gaulish
- 9th-13th centuries. Old French, springing from the Northern Gaul dialects. It became a distinct language with its own grammar. The Strasbourg Oaths are a great example of Old French (Francien).
- 14th-15th centuries. This is the period of Middle French, where the changes in grammar and pronunciation occurred. Middle French evolved from the French dialect spoken in the Île de France area.
- 16th century. This is a period of development of Early Modern French. Users were trying to raise the language to the same level as Latin for literary pursuits. This is also the period where French became the official language of the government.
- 17th-18th centuries. In this period, called the era of Classical Modern French, they fixed the key grammar conventions leading to modern French. It’s the time when French was an international language due to the country’s expansion of its colonies.
- From the 19th century. The period of Contemporary Modern French was the time for fixing the pronunciation we know today. They declared standardized French as the official language of France, as well as the colonized regions in Africa and Belgium.
- International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (2nd ed. 2015) [eBook]editor-in-chief: James D. Wright. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2015. 1 online resource (26 vol. (23185 pages)). ISBN: 9780080970875
Main Databases:
- Linguistics & Language Behavior AbstractsSearch for journal articles on all aspects of the nature and use of language. Includes book reviews. Updated monthly.
- CAIRN RevueThe most comprehensive collection of French-language journals in the humanities and social sciences available online. Full text to more than 500 peer-reviewed academic French and Belgian journals, as well as citations for open-access journals, in the humanities and social sciences. [2001 – present]
- MLA International Bibliography.Classified listing and subject index of scholarly books and articles on modern languages, literatures, folklore, and linguistics which has been compiled by the Modern Language Association of America since 1926
- PERSEE - Portail de revues scientifiques en sciences humaines et socialesMakes available online runs of referenced, French-language journals in the field of the social and human sciences. Launched in 2004, the initiative is overseen by the Ministry of National Education, Higher Education and Research.
- Érudit (Quebec)Gateway to North American French-language research outputs in Social Sciences and Humanities.
- Communication & Mass Media CompleteCommunication & Mass Media Complete provides coverage of journals in communication, mass media, and other closely-related fields of study. It provides indexing and abstracts for more than 570 journals, and selected coverage of nearly 200 more, for a combined coverage of more than 770 titles. Furthermore, this database includes full text for over 450 journals.
- Anthropology Plus (1890-present)Find articles, reports, and other materials on social, cultural, physical, biological and linguistic anthropology, ethnology, archaeology, folklore, material culture and interdisciplinary studies. Combines Anthropological Literature from Harvard's Tozzer Library and Anthropological Index from the Royal Anthropological Institute.
More General Databases:
- Academic Search CompleteA multidisciplinary database that indexes over 10,000 publications, with the complete text of over 5,500 periodicals, including a mix of peer-reviewed journals, magazines, and newspapers. 5% of material in French language
- Web of KnowledgeGives access to multiple databases that reference cross-disciplinary research, which allows for in-depth exploration of specialized sub-fields within an academic or scientific discipline. Around 20 % of the material in french language.
- JSTORFull-text backfiles of many important scholarly journals in the areas of anthropology, Asian studies, ecology, economics, education, finance, history, literature, mathematics, philosophy, political science, population studies, sociology, and statistics.
- Project MUSESearchable full text of nearly 600 scholarly journals in the humanities, social sciences, and mathematics, mostly from North American university presses. Older volumes are often available from JSTOR.
- Google Scholar (Google Académico)Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes most peer-reviewed online academic journals and books, conference papers, theses and dissertations, preprints, abstracts, technical reports, and other scholarly literature, including court opinions and patents.
Databases for related Subjects:
- ERIC (Education)You can search this database using different interfaces:
ERIC (Ebsco) or ERIC (U.S. Department of Education)
ERIC provides access to more than 1.4 million bibliographic records of journal articles, most of which are peer-reviewed, and other education-related materials, with hundreds of new records added multiple times per week. If available, links to full text are included.
- Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collectionprovides full access to literature in emotional and behavioral characteristics, psychiatry and psychology, mental processes, anthropology and observational and/or experimental methods.
- Virgo
The Online catalog of University of Virginia Library
- WorldCat (OCLC)
WorldCat is a union catalog that itemizes the collections of 72,000 libraries in 170 countries and territories that participate in the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) global cooperative.
- Center for Research Libraries (CRL)
CRL primary purpose is to collect research materials not targeted by North American research institutions. The Center collects heavily in the following materials: archival materials, newspapers and periodicals (foreign & domestic, specialized), foreign doctoral dissertations, U.S. state documents, US and foreign academic publications. University of Virginia is a full member, which allows UVA patrons to borrow CRL material via interlibrary loan for extended periods
Consult this guide to find more local, national and international library catalogs ____________________________________________________________________________________________;
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Corpus Linguistics:
The term corpus linguistics refers to corpus-based linguistic studies in general. Archetypical corpus work existed well before the modern digital era, as exemplified by the early attempts of word indexing and concordancing of the Christian Bible in the thirteenth century. However, the emergence of corpus linguistics as an academic discipline is closely linked to the availability of digital tools to record, store, and examine corpora, heralded by the rapid development of computational technology as well as the increasing availability of digital content since the second half of the twentieth century. ". {Corpus Linguistics by Chu-Ren Huang, Yao Yao, In International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (Second Edition), 2015]
- Traitement de Corpus Oraux en Français (TCOF)
Le projet « Traitement de Corpus Oraux en Français » (TCOF) est né de la volonté de conserver des corpus oraux constitués dans les années 80-90 à des fins de recherches personnelles. L’équipe constituée au sein du laboratoire ATILF (UMR CNRS 7118) a élaboré l’architecture d’une première base de données de corpus alignés texte/son avec Transcriber. Celle-ci s’est progressivement enrichie à partir des années 2000 grâce à la collaboration d’autres (enseignants-)chercheurs, d’ITA et d’étudiants en Sciences du langage de l’université de Nancy. Aujourd'hui, l’équipe met à disposition de la communauté scientifique une partie de ses ressources.
- COllections de COrpus Oraux Numériques (COCOON)
CoCoON pour « COllections de COrpus Oraux Numériques » est une plateforme technique qui accompagne les producteurs de ressources orales, à créer, structurer et archiver leurs corpus ; un corpus pouvant se composer d'enregistrements (en général audio) accompagnés éventuellement d'annotations de ces enregistrements.
Les ressources déposées sont dans un premier temps cataloguées et stockées, puis, dans un deuxième temps archivées dans l'archive de l'IR* Huma-Num. L'auteur et son institution restent responsables des documents déposés et peuvent bénéficier d'un accès restreint et sécurisé à leurs données, pendant une période définie, si le contenu de l'information est considéré sensible. - ARTFL-FRANTEXT
ARTFL-FRANTEXT is the main ARTFL Database, comprising more than 3,600 French-language texts, 215 million words and 675,000 unique word forms. The corpus contains texts ranging from classic works of French literature to various kinds of non-fiction prose and technical writing.
The eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries are about equally represented, with a smaller selection of seventeenth century texts as well as some medieval and Renaissance texts. Genres include novels, verse, theater, journalism, essays, correspondence, and treatises. Subjects include literary criticism, biology, history, economics, and philosophy. In most cases standard scholarly editions were used in converting the text into machine-readable form, and the data contain page references to these editions.
The ARTFL-FRANTEXT corpus is regularly updated as new high-quality digital texts become available (current version - 08/2022). - French text corpora {Sketch Engine}
French is one of the many languages whose text corpora are included in Sketch Engine, a tool for discovering how language works. Sketch Engine is designed for linguists, lexicologists, lexicographers, researchers, translators, terminologists, teachers and students working with French to easily discover what is typical and frequent in the language and to notice phenomena which would go unnoticed without a large sample of French text.
Sketch Engine has tools to identify and analyse collocations, synonyms and antonyms, examples of use in context, keywords or terms. Frequency word lists of French single-word or multi-word expressions of various types can be generated. Even users without any technical knowledge can create their own French corpus using the Sketch Engine's intuitive built-in tool.
Cultural Databases:
- eHRAF World Cultures
Searchable, full-text collection of ethnographic and other texts on cultures and societies around the world.
- Ethnologue -[web]
Ethnologue: Languages of the World is a comprehensive reference work cataloging all of the world’s known living languages. Since 1951, the Ethnologue has been an active research project involving hundreds of linguists and other researchers around the world. It is widely regarded to be the most comprehensive source of information of its kind.
Linguistic tools:
- ORTOLANG -[web]
Platform of linguistic tools and resources for an optimized treatment of the French language
UVA COLLECTION ON LINGUISTICS
Useful information for discovering material on French linguistics in our library.
Call numbers & Subject Areas (LC Classification Number)
Our library classifies all material according to the Library of Congress classification system. Here we include a guide for Linguistics to browse our collection either in person or electronically.
Subclass P: Philology. Linguistics
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P1-1091 |
Philology. Linguistics |
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P1-85 |
General |
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P87-96 |
Communication. Mass media |
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P94.7 |
Interpersonal communication |
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P95-95.6 |
Oral communication. Speech |
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P98-98.5 |
Computational linguistics. Natural language processing |
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P99-99.4 |
Semiotics. Signs and symbols |
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P99.5-99.6 |
Nonverbal communication |
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P101-410 |
Language. Linguistic theory. Comparative grammar |
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P118-118.75 |
Language acquisition |
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P121-149 |
Science of language (Linguistics) |
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P201-299 |
Comparative grammar |
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P301-301.5 |
Style. Composition. Rhetoric |
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P302-302.87 |
Discourse analysis |
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P306-310 |
Translating and interpreting |
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P321-324.5 |
Etymology |
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P325-325.5 |
Semantics |
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P326-326.5 |
Lexicology |
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P327-327.5 |
Lexicography |
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P375-381 |
Linguistic geography |
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P501-769 |
Indo-European (Indo-Germanic) philology |
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P901-1091 |
Extinct ancient or medieval languages |
Selective list of books on French linguistics present in our library
Here we provide you with a selective list of material found in our library. In order to discover all material on French Linguistics, you will have to carry out broader searches on our library catalog: Virgo..
If you want to discover books published but not present in our library, you can perform searches in Worldcat using the same subjects included here.
List of Library of Congress related subjects:
- Linguistique, lexicographie, langue
- Classiques de l'argot et du jargon (10 tiles)
- Descriptions et théories de la langue française (7 tiles)
- Domaines linguistiques (23 titles)
- Études et textes occitans (8 titles)
- Histoire et évolution du français (7 titles)
- Investigations stylistiques (15 tiles)
- L'Univers rhétorique (11 titles)
- Linguistique variationnelle (4 titles)
- Translatio (15 titles)
- Travaux de lexicographie (2 titles)
- Versification, métrique et formes de la poésie (1 title)