Syntactic Reference Corpus of Medieval French - SRCMF

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Achim Stein
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: from 2009 to 2012
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 93574386

• Final Report Year: 2013

Final Report Abstract

In this project, a German-French workgroup has built the first dependency treebank for Old French, the Syntactic Reference Corpus of Medieval French (SRCMF). A treebank is a text corpus which includes the annotation of a syntactic structure for each sentence. For SRCMF, a dependency grammar was used. Fifteen texts covering the Old French period from 842 to the end of the 13th century and containing about 280 000 words were annotated manually and published along with the tools and documentation on a dedicated website. The work group delivered the following results and resources: (a) a dependency grammar model for the annotation of these corpora; (b) a detailed documentation of the syntactic categories of the grammar model, as well as annotation guidelines; (c) the tool NotaBene for manual syntactic annotation and comparison of annotated corpora; (d) a double-checked, high quality annotation of about 280 000 words of Old French texts (as of March 2012); (e) interfaces to export the annotation to TigerXML (allowing to use the TigerSearch tool) and to the CoNLL shared task format (allowing to train dependency parsers). (f) an graphic syntactic query interface prototype based on TigerSearch for the on-line version of the TXM platform, developed at the ENS de Lyon. All the resources created in the project are available on the website http://srcmf.org.

Publications

• (2009): Parataxe et Subordination en Ancien Français. Diss. Paris, Potsdam: Université Paris Ouest Nanterre/Universität Potsdam
  Glikman, Julie
  
• (2009): Topicalisation, focalisation et constructions syntaxiques en français médiéval : des relations complexes. – D. Apothéloz, B. Combettes et F. Neveu (ed.): Les linguistiques du détachement, actes du colloque international de Nancy , Bern: Peter Lang, 427-439
  Prévost, Sophie
  
• (2010): Évolution de la position du sujet pronominal en français médiéval: une approche sémantico-pragmatique. – Neveu, Franck et al. (ed.): Congrès Mondial de Linguistique Française - CMLF 2010, Paris: Institut de Linguistique Française
  Prévost, Sophie
  
• (2011): Coordination of verbal dependents in Old French: Coordination as a specified juxtaposition or apposition. – Gerdes, Kim; Hajicová, Eva; Wanner, Leo (ed.): Proceedings of DepLing, 5-7 septembre 2011, 28-37
  Mazziotta, Nicolas
  
• (2011): Représentation de l’oral et structures syntaxiques dans la prose de la Queste del saint Graal. Sens linguistique V, 25-27 Mai 2011, Chambéry, Chambéry: Éditions de l’Université de Savoie
  Glikman, Julie; Mazziotta, Nicolas
  
• (2011): Syntactic reference corpus of medieval French. – Zakharov, V. (ed.): Proceedings of of the International Conference ’Corpus Linguistics’ , St. Petersbourg, 27-29 juin 2011, St. Petersbourg: SPBU
  Lavrentiev, Alexei
  
• (2012): Diachronic aspects of borrowing aspect: the role of Old French in the development of the ’be going to+INF’ construction. Actes du 3e Congrès Mondial de Linguistique Française (CMLF), Lyon, 4-7 Juillet 2012, Paris: Institut de Linguistique française, 227-246
  Stein, Achim; Trips, Carola
  
• (2013): Syntactic annotation of medieval texts: the Syntactic Reference Corpus of Medieval French (SRCMF). – Bennett, Paul; Durrell, Martin; Scheible, Silke; Whitt, Richard (ed.):New Methods in Historical Corpus Linguistics , Tübingen: Narr, 275-282
  Stein, Achim; Prévost, Sophie
  
• Syntactic Reference Corpus of Medieval French. Lyon/Stuttgart: ENS de Lyon; Lattice, Paris; Universität Stuttgart
  Sophie Prévost; Achim Stein