Rhapsodie: a Prosodic-Syntactic Treebank for Spoken French

International audienceThe main objective of the Rhapsodie project (ANR Rhapsodie 07 Corp-030-01) was to define rich, explicit, and reproducible schemes for the annotation of prosody and syntax in different genres (± spontaneous, ± planned, face-to-face interviews vs. broadcast, etc.), in order to study the prosody/syntax/discourse interface in spoken French, and their roles in the segmentation of speech into discourse units (Lacheret, Kahane, & Pietrandrea forthcoming). We here describe the deliverable, a syntactic and prosodic treebank of spoken French, composed of 57 short samples of spoken French (5 minutes long on average, amounting to 3 hours of speech and 33000 words), orthographically and phonetically transcribed. The transcriptions and the annotations are all aligned on the speech signal: phonemes, syllables, words, speakers, overlaps. This resource is freely available at www.projet-rhapsodie.fr. The sound samples (wav/mp3), the acoustic analysis (original F0 curve manually corrected and automatic stylized F0, pitch format), the orthographic transcriptions (txt), the microsyntactic annotations (tabular format), the macrosyntactic annotations (txt, tabular format), the prosodic annotations (xml, textgrid, tabular format), and the metadata (xml and html) can be freely downloaded under the terms of the Creative Commons licence Attribution - Noncommercial - Share Alike 3.0 France. The metadata are encoded in the IMDI-CMFI format and can be parsed on line

The syntactic and discursive status of c’est comme ça que (this is how) in spoken and written French

International audienceThe syntactic and discursive status of c'est comme ça que (this is how) in spoken and written French Abstract Several recent studies devoted to French clefts involving a pronominal/adverbial morpheme such as pour ça (for that), là (there), ainsi (like this), alors (then) and comme ça (like this) demonstrate that these are likely to behave in two distinct ways, one of them being somewhat "non-prototypical" in comparison with the most commonly described narrow focus clefts. The subject of our article is to deepen the examination of the specific c'est comme ça que sequences (lit: it is like this that, "this is how"), since they have not yet received detailed attention as to their use in modern French. The 8.600.000 word corpus which was used indicates that such forms are considerably more frequent in spoken than in written data. After recalling some of the major syntactic characteristics of clefts, we will suggest that two distinct types of c'est comme ça que sequences must be identified: the first type corresponds to the most prototypical clefts endowed with a "contrastive" effect related to the expression of manner; the second type, which will be described in greater detail, cannot be viewed as a cleft but rather as a specific discourse connector, which speakers mostly use in narrative texts, in order to introduce a consequence of the set of facts previously mentioned

Proceedings of the VIIth GSCP International Conference

The 7th International Conference of the Gruppo di Studi sulla Comunicazione Parlata, dedicated to the memory of Claire Blanche-Benveniste, chose as its main theme Speech and Corpora. The wide international origin of the 235 authors from 21 countries and 95 institutions led to papers on many different languages. The 89 papers of this volume reflect the themes of the conference: spoken corpora compilation and annotation, with the technological connected fields; the relation between prosody and pragmatics; speech pathologies; and different papers on phonetics, speech and linguistic analysis, pragmatics and sociolinguistics. Many papers are also dedicated to speech and second language studies. The online publication with FUP allows direct access to sound and video linked to papers (when downloaded)

Truth and Terror: a Text-Oriented Analysis of Daniel 8:9-14

Daniel 8:9-14 constitutes the climax of the vision report in Dan 8, and is arguably one of the most difficult Danielic passages. This dissertation investigates the Masoretic Text of Dan 8:9-14 by means of a detailed and comprehensive text-oriented analysis that utilizes linguistic, literary, and intertextual procedures. In chapter 1, an overview of modern text-oriented approaches and the review of recent literature on Dan 8 pave the way for a description of this study\u27s methodology, which consists of a combination of linguistic (syntax, semantics, and text-grammar), literary (style and structure), and intertextual approaches (textual relations within the book of Daniel), using them as a threefold avenue to the understanding of the text, while at the same time demonstrating their interdependence. The linguistic analysis in chapter 2 analyzes the syntactic and semantic features of each clause, as well as significant terms and expressions in Dan 8:9-14. A text-grammatical analysis identifies the interclausal relations in the passage. The literary analysis in chapter 3 examines the rhetorical and stylistic devices and their function in Dan 8:9-14, and describes the literary structure and dynamics of the passage. Stylistic and structural devices include poetic-like language in vs. 11, verbal gender shifts in vss. 9-12, the use of the key word gadel in a hubris-fall pattern, and spatial imagery. The investigation of terminological fields and their distribution observes the interplay of military, royal, cultic, creation, and judgment terminology, showing how these themes characterize the role of the horn figure and convey the text\u27s theological message. The intertextual analysis in chapter 4 explores the lexical and thematic links of Dan 8:9-14 with other texts in the book of Daniel---particularly with 8:23-25 and chaps. 7, 9, and 10--12---and how these texts contribute to the interpretation of Dan 8:9-14. The summary and conclusions in chapter 5 highlight the results of each of the three avenues of the text-oriented approach to Dan 8:9-14. The climax of the vision report with its accompanying audition, against the general opinion, is linguistically well-composed and an extremely artistic literary piece that combines significant theological themes. The Day of Atonement serves as a macrotheme and typifies the divine reaction to the cosmic challenge created by the cultic war of the horn. By its complex textual relations, Dan 8:9-14 constitutes a central passage in the book of Daniel

Greening the Maple

Ecocriticism can be described in very general terms as the investigation of the many ways in which culture and the environment are interrelated and conceptualized. Ecocriticism aspires to understand and often to celebrate the natural world, yet it does so indirectly by focusing primarily on written texts. Hailed as one of the most timely and provocative developments in literary and cultural studies of recent decades, it has also been greeted with bewilderment or scepticism by those for whom its aims and methods are unclear. This book seeks to bring into view the development of ecocriticism in the context of Canadian literary studies. Selections include work by Margaret Atwood, Northrop Frye, Sherrill Grace, and Rosemary Sullivan