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Some quantitative aspects of written and spoken French based on syntactically annotated corpora

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 February 2020

Rafaël Poiret  and
Haitao Liu Open the ORCID record for Haitao Liu [Opens in a new window]
Rafaël Poiret
Affiliation:
Zhejiang University
Haitao Liu*
Affiliation:
Zhejiang University Beijing Language and Culture University Guangdong University of Foreign Studies
*
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Based on two syntactically annotated corpora, and within the theoretical tradition of dependency grammar, the current study investigates the quantitative differences and similarities between written and spoken French. Our findings support the assumption that spoken and written French are two realizations of one language that do not differ in the syntactic categories, but in the frequency of these categories, and also in their organization in sentence. The subjects in spoken French are mostly pronouns, whereas in written French the subjects are mostly nouns and pronouns. Spoken and written French share many syntactic relations, but with different frequencies. For instance, dislocations are more diverse and frequent in spoken French. Spoken French and written French differ in the word order of vocative nominal phrases. Finally, written French is slightly more difficult to process than spoken French.

Keywords

Frenchwritten and spoken languagesquantitative aspectsdependency grammartreebanksPOSword orderdependency distance
Type
Article
Information
Journal of French Language Studies , Volume 30 , Issue 3 , November 2020 , pp. 355 - 380
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Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2020

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