Leader : Stéphanie Gobet

Team A of FoReLLIS brings together linguists from the UFR Lettres et Langues (Faculty of Literature and Languages) and INSPE (National Institute of Higher Education and Teacher Training). Their activity is structured around the concept of corpora and is developed over four research areas, each representing the strong fields that give the team its identity.

• Area 1 : Contrastive linguistics and cross-linguistic studies
• Area 2 : Variation (diachronic, synchronic and diatopic)
• Area 3 : Discourse, speech and multimodal studies
• Area 4 : Language teaching and didactics : acquisition, contexts, tools

Members of Team A develop cross-thematic projects on Discourse & Cognition and Reported Discourse  with Team B, and also collaborate with other laboratories of the University of Poitiers in some of the specific research fields developed within the MSHS.

Team A’s research in the general linguistic and applied linguistic domain can be characterized by : 

‣ The diversity of analysed units, ranging from sound or grapheme to text ;

‣ The diversity of languages, whether written or spoken, in synchrony or diachrony: French and French as a foreign language, regional languages – Occitan, Poitevin-Saintongeais, French Sign Language (LSF), English, German, Spanish, Romanian, Greek, etc... ;

‣ The cross-referencing of theoretical approaches : structuralism, functionalism, generative linguistics, theory of predicative and enunciative operations (TOPE), speech analysis, cognitive linguistics, etc…

The relation with the UFR Lettres & Langues and INSPE provides scope for practical applications of this research, for example in lexicography and translation, with a strong anchor point in language teaching (French as a foreign or second language – FLE or Fls – and French as a native – FLM).

Collective and individual research may cover :

• Language features (markers such as here you go, OK, we, perfect aspect, relative sentences)
• Discursive phenomena (agreement/ disagreement, expression of feelings, constructing and maintaining reference, coherence and cohesion)
• Epistemological issues raised by a theoretical context (analysis of speech and critical gesture) or by working from language evidence (issues of corpus building, notation and annotation of data for research)
• The status of languages as a cultural and linguistic heritage (regional languages, varieties of French), or as an issue in the context of teaching (French as a foreign or native language, less widely used and less widely taught languages)

Corpora

Corpora are central to the scholars’ research, both with respect to the methodological reflection on data and to their compilation, their enrichment and their use.

The wide array of available data is a reflection of the diversity of research interests and manifests itself through various channels (written, spoken, multimodal), periods (synchrony and diachrony), genres (journalistic, literary, academic, legal), the geographical diversity of languages (French, English, Spanish, Romanian, Greek, German), the diversity of language status (natives vs learners, regional languages, less widely used languages, widely spoken languages) Corpora directory

• Written corpora : corpora of 16th and 17th century language (including English and French), multilingual, journalistic, literary, academic and legal corpora, regional variety corpora and learner corpora
• Spoken corpora : mostly French and English for lexical, syntactic, textual and prosodic analysis as well as the study of variation

Areas of research

The members’ activities and their projects come within the scope of four areas of research. These enable them to carry out their own research while bringing their interests together around thematics, projects and specific operations that structure each area’s activity. This also encourages collaborations with other scholars within the laboratory (Team B), in the University of Poitiers (MSHS, other laboratories) or nationally and internationally with research centres in France and abroad, the common objective being to produce scientific results.

• Area “Contrastive linguistics and cross-linguistics studies”
• Area “Variation (diachronic, synchronic and diatopic)”
• Area “Discourse, speech and multimodal studies”
• Area “Language teaching and didactics : acquisition, contexts, tools”

Collaborative projects

Team A sets up unifying projects involving all the researchers and mobilizing various approaches and language data. These projects are the objects of seminars, workshops and conferences, organized around the use of corpora and give rise to publications. 

2021-2025 period :

Following on from previous thematics, Team A initiated two collaborative projects : 

• pursuing the study of linguistic phenomena reflecting internal and external interactions in text and discourse – Hesitation and Adjustment
• continuing to work on data access and accessibility – Dynamic corpora

2015-2020 period : 

Team A worked on 3 unifying projects :

• Constructing and maintaining reference
• Textual coherence and cohesion
• Corpus compilation and tools : notation/annotation ; variation and norm

The first two explored the textual uses of markers and the adjustment of the latters’ role in the transition from text to discourse. In the third, aiming to move from “collected data” (digitized books, vocal and multimodal recordings) to “research data”, work was carried out on transcription and notation (raw corpora) as well as annotation techniques with a view to exploiting the data (enriched corpora). 

Membres permanents

Doctorants

Membres associés