Le Corpus de la sc?ne parisienne

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C’est l’ann?e 1810, et vous vous promenez sur les Grands Boulevards de Paris. Vous avez l’impression que toute la ville, voir m?me toute la France, a eu la m?me id?e, et est venue pour se promener, pour voir les gens et se faire voir. Qu’est-ce que vous entendez?

Vous arrivez ? un th??tre, vous montrez un billet pour une nouvelle pi?ce, et vous entrez. La pi?ce commence. Qu’est-ce que vous entendez de la sc?ne? Quels voix, quel langage?

Le projet du Corpus de la sc?ne parisienne cherche ? r?pondre ? cette derni?re question, avec l’id?e que cela nous informera sur la premi?re question aussi. Il s’appuie sur les travaux du chercheur Beaumont Wicks et des ressources comme Google Books et le projet Gallica de la Biblioth?que Nationale de France pour cr?er un corpus vraiment repr?sentatif du langage du th??tre parisien.

Certains corpus sont construits ? base d’une ?principe d’autorit??, qui tend ? mettre les voix des aristocrates et des grands bourgeois au premier plan. Le Corpus de la Sc?ne Parisienne corrige ce biais par se baser sur une ?chantillon tir?e au sort. En incorporant ainsi le th??tre populaire, le Corpus de la Sc?ne Parisienne permet au langage des classes ouvri?res, dans sa repr?sentation th??trale, de prendre sa place dans le tableau linguistique de cette p?riode.

La premi?re phase de construction, qui couvre les ann?es 1800 ? 1815, a d?j? contribu? ? la d?couverte des r?sultats int?ressants. Par exemple, dans le CSP en 75% des n?gations de phrase on utilise la construction ne ? pas, mais dans les quatre pi?ces de th??tre qui font partie du corpus FRANTEXT de la m?me p?riode, on n’utilise ne ? pas qu’en 49% des n?gations de phrase.

En 2016 j’ai cr?? un d?p?t sur GitHub et commenc? ? y mettre les textes de la premi?re phase en format HTML. Vous pouvez en lire pour vous amuser (Jocrisse-Ma?tre et Jocrisse-Valet en particulier m’a amus?), les mettre sur sc?ne (j’ach?terai des places) ou bien les utiliser pour vos propres recherches. Peut-?tre vous voudriez aussi contribuer au d?p?t, par corriger des erreurs dans les textes, ajouter de nouveaux textes du catalogue, ou convertir les textes en de nouveaux formats, comme TEI ou Markdown.

En janvier 2018 j’ai cr?? le bot spectacles_xix sur Twitter. Chaque jour il diffuse les descriptions des pi?ces qui ont d?but? ce jour-l? il y a exactement deux cents ans.

N’h?sitez pas ? utiliser ce corpus dans vos recherches, mais je vous prie de ne pas oublier de me citer, ou m?me me contacter pour discuter des collaborations ?ventuelles!

Deaf scholar Ben Bahan gives a lecture about Deaf architecture

Teaching sign linguistics in introductory classes

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Language is not just spoken and written, and even though I’ve been working mostly on spoken languages for the past fifteen years, my understanding of language has been tremendously deepened by my study of sign languages. At the beginning of the semester I always asked my students what languages they had studied and what aspects of language they wanted to know more about, and they were always very interested in sign language. Since they had a professor with training and experience in sign linguistics it seemed natural to spend some time on it in class.

Our primary textbook, by George Yule,contains a decent brief overview of sign languages. The Language Files integrates sign language examples throughout and has a large section on sign phonetics. I added a lecture on the history of sign languages in Europe and North America, largely based on Lane, Hoffmeister and Bahan’s Journey Into the Deaf-World (1996), and other information I had learned over the years.

I also felt it was important for my students to actually observe a sign language being used to communicate and to express feeling, so I found an online video of an MIT lecture by psychologist and master storyteller (and co-author of Journey Into the Deaf-World) Ben Bahan. Bahan’s talk does not focus exclusively on language, but demonstrates the use of American Sign Language well, and the English interpretation is well done.

Studying a video lecture is a prime candidate for “flipped classroom” techniques, but I never got around to trying that. We watched the video in class, but before starting the video I assigned my students a simple observation task: could they find examples of the four phonological subsystems of American Sign Language – lexical signs, fingerspelling, depicting signs and nonmanual gestures?

Some of the students were completely overwhelmed by the task at first, but I made it clear that this was not a graded assignment, only introductory exploration. Other students had had a semester or more of ASL coursework, and the students with less experience were able to learn from them. Bahan, being Ben Bahan, produces many witty, thought-provoking examples of all four subsystems over the course of the lecture.

The phonological subsystems are among the easiest sign language phenomena for a novice to distinguish, but as we watched the video I pointed out other common features of ASL and other sign languages, such as topic-comment structures and stance-shifting.

Later, when I started teaching Introduction to Phonology, we had the opportunity to get deeper into sign language phonology. I’ll cover that in a future post.