Constitution d’un grand corpus d’écrits émergents et novices : principes et méthodes Cette contribution propose une réflexion sur la construction d’un vaste corpus d’écrits qui permet d’approfondir notre compréhension des processus en jeu dans l’accès à la littératie dans sa diversité, au travers de la pluralité des genres et des types discursifs qui la constituent et chez des apprenants de profils divers : enfants/adultes, langue 1 / langue 2, entendants/sourds. La réflexion sur la mise en place de ce (...) corpus s’inscrit dans une perspective fonctionnaliste et énonciative et fait fond sur deux ensembles théoriques complémentaires. Du point de vue de l’acquisition des langues, nous souscrivons à la conception selon laquelle les productions d’apprenants ne constituent pas une déviance par rapport à la norme mais sont des manifestations (idiolectales) de systèmes linguistiques per se dont il s’agit de dégager les normes propres. Du point de vue de la littératie, nous nous inscrivons dans la tradition des travaux, d’inspiration bakhtinienne, qui considèrent l’hétérogénéité comme constitutive de toute production verbale. Ainsi, nous expliquons et justifions nos choix en matière de profils d’apprenants et de tâches rédactionnelles, en relation avec la perspective théorique adoptée, ainsi que les options retenues en matière d’outillage du corpus. (shrink)

L’article présente le projet ORFEO (outils pour l’étude du Français écrit et oral). Ce projet a consisté à rassembler 4M de mots de Français oral et 6M de mots d’écrit à partir de ressources existantes. Les ressources orales ont été unifiées dans un format trs et alignées avec les fichiers sons au phonème. Les corpus sont présentés avec des métadonnées qui permettent de constituer des sous-corpus d’étude. Les données orales ont été segmentées et annotées en POS et relations (...) de dépendance semi automatiquement. La précision des annotations a fait l’objet d’une évaluation. L’ensemble est interrogeable à partir d’une plateforme adaptée du logiciel libre ANNIS. La ressource sera mise à disposition en open source courant 2017. (shrink)

La contribution se propose de mettre en évidence les problèmes épistémologiques et méthodologiques posés par l’annotation discursive de productions écrites d’élèves et les choix techniques qu’implique sa mise en œuvre. Dans un premier temps, l’article montre l’intérêt scientifique de la constitution de « grands » corpus scolaires rassemblant plusieurs centaines de textes d’élèves d’école primaire et de collège de niveaux scolaires différents répondant à une même consigne. L’unicité de la consigne permet de comparer les productions en vue d’élaborer (...) une cartographie des moyens linguistiques choisis par les élèves et de mettre en évidence des indicateurs de progressivité. Dans un second temps, sont présentés les enseignements tirés de l’expérience d’annotation discursive qui a abouti à la création de la ressource ANNODIS, corpus de textes en français écrit standard annoté discursivement. Elle s’interroge sur les adaptations nécessaires pour traiter des textes d’élèves et définit des principes de travail généraux notamment sur le choix de la version de texte à annoter, la définition du modèle d’annotation et les guides d’annotation. Sont ensuite exposés deux chantiers d’annotation portant sur des textes d’élèves de fin d’école primaire en réponse à une consigne mettant en jeu la cohésion textuelle, qui demande d’insérer dans un texte narratif trois phrases comportant des pronoms et des syntagmes nominaux anaphoriques. Les notions sont illustrées par l’analyse de deux textes d’élèves de 5° Primaire. L’annotation des Relations de Discours procède successivement, dans une démarche proche de celle d’Annodis, par segmentation du texte en Unités de Discours Élémentaires, analyse de la cohérence temporelle et annotation des Relations de discours. L’annotation des chaînes de référence dans les textes d’élèves suppose des adaptations plus importantes du guide d’annotation antérieurement élaboré. Les premiers essais permettent ainsi de définir des principes de travail pour l’annotation des textes d’élèves. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.2 (2000) 167-187 [Access article in PDF] Amelot de La Houssaye (1634-1706) Annotates Tacitus Jacob Soll Thousands have worked on Tacitus. Some have translated him, others have commented on him. Some have put his text into paraphrases, because of his obscurity: Some others have sucked out the juice and marrow, which is to say, the Sentences, Aphorismes, Apophtegms, and the Political Axioms, of (...) which he is as fertile, as he is sterile in words. His Translators have made him speak every Language, well or badly, according to what they understood or did not. Of his Commentators, some, as if they were Grammarians, have only picked through his Latin, and his fashions of speaking, which are all extraordinary. The others, like students of Politics, neither stopping to look at his phrases, nor his diction, have studied to penetrate the mysteries, and the secrets of the Art-of-governing, of which he has been the Master, and universal Oracle, for more than five-hundred years. 1Thus wrote Nicolas-Abraham Amelot de La Houssaye in the preface of his book, Tibère: Discours politiques sur Tacite (Paris: chez Frédéric Léonard, 1684). He was describing what has become known as the Tacitist movement of political theory, based on the work of the Roman historian Tacitus, which began in the 1580s and lasted until the French Revolution. 2 The practice of translating, commenting [End Page 167] on, or writing like Tacitus began in earnest in the late sixteenth century. Authoritative Latin editions as well as vernacular translations flourished and great kings turned to these now accessible texts as manuals for ruling. 3 Tacitus provided examples from history which could be used to form the basis of a practical political "science." Alongside Machiavelli, practitioners of reason of state placed the works of Tacitus as the founding stones of their humanist canon of secular political philosophy. 4 Marc-Antoine Muret began teaching Tacitus at the University of Rome in 1580, and at the same time Justus Lipsius and Carolus Paschalius began a Latinist tradition of commenting on Tacitus's works. 5 Lipsius, by far the most influential of the sixteenth-century Tacitists, was not only a philologist interested in reestablishing Tacitus's original text but also a commentator who sought to extract moral and political sententiae from the Roman historian. 6 Thus humanist scholarly practices served as the basis of Tacitean political theory as historical exempla, verified by philology, became useful for practical politics. 7 Scholarship and secular political science were bound for the long journey into the modern age. 8 [End Page 168]If humanist scholarship formed the basis of Tacitean political theory, it is also the key for understanding how it worked. Tacitism was an editorial practice and thus scholarly editors became political theorists. Justus Lipsius did not attempt to write his own version of a Tacitean Annales. Instead, he chopped up Tacitus's text, making a commonplace notebook for absolutist princes with his Politicorum libri sex (Leiden: Plantin, 1589). 9 Understanding the Lipsian tradition--the process by which Tacitus was read, broken down and "represented" by scholarly editors--clarifies an unexplored yet essential element of the evolution of secular political theory from a tool of Absolutism to an arm of revolutionary republicanism. 10The most striking example of the Lipsian tradition can be found in the works of Amelot de La Houssaye, whose vision of Tacitean scholarship we have already seen. Between 1670 and his death in 1706 Amelot was the most prolific translator and commentator of Tacitus in France. Between 1676 and 1808, at least 107 editions of 23 different works by Amelot were published in French, almost all Tacitean in nature. 11 These books were widely read and inspired numerous foreign editions. The unifying thread of this extraordinarily large corpus of works is Amelot de La Houssaye's fascination with Tacitus. He not only translated and commented on Tacitus; he also represented the major works of secular political philosophy of his time as Tacitean in origin. Machiavelli, for example, was "proven... (shrink)

This article aims to describe the construction and annotation of a multimodal and multilingual (French, English, and Mandarin Chinese) corpus for the study of second language acquisition and professional development in language teaching. The corpus was built within a research project whose main objective is to determine which techno-semio-pedagogical competencies are developed informally and which ones require formal training. In this paper, we explain the theoretical framework adopted, characterized by an ecological approach to the interactive environment. (...) We subsequently illustrate the procedures for the collection of audio, video and eye-tracking data. We also provide details of the annotation of raw data to produce a corpus of analysis drawing on different automatic and semi-automatic annotation tools. Finally, we explain how such a corpus enables us to study the development of learners’ multimodal competence and tutors’ techno-pedagogical competence and point to some other possible research questions. (shrink)

The article examines reports of natural disasters in the 18th century Austrian newspaper "Wienerisches Diarium" to gain insights into how people captured the extraordinary sensory experiences of such events in written form. By analysing a digitised corpus of over 300 newspaper issues, the study identifies 302 text passages referring to natural disasters, among them 285 news reports, and explores textual traces of (multi)sensuality present within this material. The close reading and semantic annotation of the textual findings reveals (...) that comparisons to familiar sensations are commonly used to convey the sensory experiences of natural disasters, allowing readers to (better) relate to and understand the extreme events. At the same time, touch and vision constitute the most frequently mentioned senses, while smell and taste only play a minor role in early modern disaster depiction. In addition, the study finds that earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are more likely to include multisensory descriptions compared to other types of disasters. These and further findings shed light on when and how (multi)sensory impressions of disasters were conveyed in written form within early modern news. (shrink)

SummaryThis article looks at the discussions of natural law by the eighteenth-century French materialists Julien Offray de La Mettre, Denis Diderot, Paul Thiry d'Holbach and Claude-Adrien Helvétius. It is particularly concerned with their discussion of moral values and their attempt to find a materialistic basis for them as part of their rejection of religion. The discussion brings out the différences between them and analyses their dialogues on this question, including the other materialists' rejection of La Mettrie's amoralism, which threatened (...) to undermine their attempt to found a natural law taught by experience and based on human nature. Particular attention is paid to Diderot's many writings which grapple with the subject, beginning with his Encyclopédie article droit naturel, probably written in 1754. He discussed the question in many of his later writings, including in his annotations on the works of Helvétius, who based natural law on the general interest. These writings reveal a tension between Diderot's emphasis on the search for individual happiness and the interests of society as he, together with d'Holbach, attempted to provide a natural basis for morality and government from which to criticise existing institutions. (shrink)

Dans le cadre de la construction du corpus PhraseoRoChe, un corpus diachronique rassemblant des romans de chevalerie du 13e au 17e siècle, cet article s’intéresse aux performances de différents analyseurs (étiqueteurs, lemmatiseurs, parseurs en dépendances) entrainés sur des états de langue connexes allant de l’ancien français au moyen français et au français moderne. Nous étudions ainsi la possibilité d’étendre ces analyseurs au-delà des états de langues précis sur lesquels ils ont été entrainés, en s’appuyant notamment sur les divergences (...) entre analyseurs pour identifier les annotations les moins fiables, et ainsi prioriser les interventions manuelles de correction / validation des annotations automatiques. Nous étudions également les possibilités offertes par un traitement superficiel de modernisation graphique pour tirer parti d’un analyseur moderne appliqué à des états de langue anciens. (shrink)

ContextBehavioral observation scales are important for understanding and assessing social skills. In the context of collaborative problem-solving (CPS) skills, considered essential in the 21st century, there are no validated scales in French that can be adapted to different CPS tasks. The aim of this study is to adapt and validate, by annotating a new video corpus of dyadic interactions that we have collected, two observational scales allowing us to qualitatively assess CPS skills: the Social Performance Rating Scale (SPRS) (...) and the Social Skills of Collaboration Scale (SSC).MethodThe construct validity of these two scales was assessed by exploratory factor analysis and inter-item correlations. We also checked inter-judge agreement using inter-class correlation coefficients. Internal consistency was determined using Cronbach’s alpha and convergent and divergent validity by assessing correlations between the two scales and measures of depression and alexithymia. Finally, the discriminative properties of the two scales were analyzed by comparing the scores obtained by a group of anxious individuals and a non-anxious control group.ResultsThe results show that our two scales have excellent inter-item correlations. Internal consistency is excellent (alpha SPRS =0.90; SSC = 0.93). Inter-rater agreement ranged from moderate to high. Finally, convergent validity was significant with the alexithymia scale, as was divergent validity with the depression scale. Anxious individuals had lower scores on both scales than non-anxious individuals.ConclusionBoth scales show good psychometric properties for assessing social skills relevant to different collaborative tasks. They also identify individuals with difficulties in social interaction. Thus, they could allow monitoring the effectiveness of training social skills useful in CPS. (shrink)

Le corpus de littéracie avancée réunit des écrits universitaires et professionnels produits par des étudiants du niveau Licence 1 au Master 2. Il contient actuellement 338 textes (+ d’1 million de mots) et est mis à disposition au format xml, assorti de métadonnées (niveau, discipline, genre, consigne d’écriture etc.). Il est à la fois un aboutissement et un point de départ dans le champ de la littéracie avancée : parce que l’enjeu n’est pas tant de constituer des corpus (...) que de les savoir utilisés et de nourrir les recherches actuelles et futures, il est pensé comme un construit évolutif. L’article expose d’abord les objectifs du corpus : le premier, d’ordre descriptif est de cerner les compétences rédactionnelles et les besoins de formation à un niveau avancé ; le second, d’ordre didactique, est qu’il sert de ressource pour la formation, notamment pour des activités d’observation et de manipulation par les apprenants. Sont ensuite présentées les métadonnées, conçues en phase avec les recommandations de la TEI et dans la perspective d’un outillage des linguistes et des didacticiens dans le champ de la littéracie avancée. Enfin, l’article met en évidence les potentialités du corpus : intégrer des données sur les processus d’écriture et des textes annotés par des relecteurs-correcteurs, élaborer des dispositifs didactiques à l’échelle textuelle. à terme, le corpus gagnera à être associé à des outils de requête et à s’enrichir d’annotations diverses, selon les besoins des chercheurs et des formateurs. (shrink)

David Piché | : Problème majeur dans l’histoire de l’ontologie, la question de la cause de l’individuation se pose, notamment, à tout lecteur de l’Isagoge de Porphyre. En dépit de son importance historique, aucune étude n’a été consacrée spécifiquement au traitement que ce problème a reçu de la part de ceux qui furent à l’avant-garde de la réception du péripatétisme gréco-arabe dans l’Occident latin, à savoir les philosophes qui oeuvrèrent à la Faculté des arts de l’Université de Paris entre 1230 (...) et 1260. Cet article entend remédier à cette lacune en offrant la première traduction en langue moderne — elle-même réalisée principalement à partir des manuscrits des originaux latins — d’extraits pertinents de Commentaires isagogiques émanant de figures significatives de ce milieu. Ces textes traduits et annotés sont précédés d’une étude qui en dégage les thèses essentielles après avoir posé les termes du problème de l’individuation tel qu’il se pose dans le cadre épistémique que dessine l’opuscule de Porphyre. | : A major problem in the history of ontology, the question of the cause of individuation comes across any reader of Porphyry’s Isagoge. Despite its historical importance, no study has been devoted specifically to the treatment that this problem has received on the part of those who were at the forefront of the reception of the Graeco-Arabic Peripatetic Corpus in the Latin West, namely the philosophers who taught at the Parisian Faculty of arts between 1230 and 1260. This article intends to fill this gap by offering the first translation into French — translation made mainly from manuscripts of the original Latin texts — of relevant excerpts from Isagoge Commentaries written by significant masters belonging to that milieu. These translated and annotated texts are preceded by a study that expounds their essential theses after having spelled out the terms of the problem of individuation as it arises within the epistemic framework of Porphyry’s Isagoge. (shrink)

Argument schemes are abstractions substantiating the inferential connection between premise(s) and conclusion in argumentative communication. Identifying such conventional patterns of reasoning is essential to the interpretation and evaluation of argumentation. Whether studying argumentation from a theory-driven or data-driven perspective, insight into the actual use of argumentation in communicative practice is essential. Large and reliably annotated corpora of argumentative discourse to quantitatively provide such insight are few and far between. This is all the more true for argument scheme corpora, which tend (...) to suffer from a combination of limited size, poor validation, and the use of ad hoc restricted typologies. In the current paper, we describe the annotation of schemes on the basis of two distinct classifications: Walton’s taxonomy of argument schemes, and Wagemans’ Periodic Table of Arguments. We describe the annotation procedure for each, and the quantitative characteristics of the resulting annotated text corpora. In doing so, we extend the annotation of the preexisting US2016 corpus of televised election debates, resulting in, to the best of our knowledge, the two largest consistently annotated corpora of schemes in argumentative dialogue publicly available. Based on evaluation in terms of inter-annotator agreement, we propose further improvements to the guidelines for annotating schemes: the argument scheme key, and the Argument Type Identification Procedure. (shrink)

Early Modern Philosophy Reconsidered: Essays in Honor of Paul Hoffman is an international collection of essays from both well-established and younger scholars. In keeping with the example of Hoffman's own work, the essays are written in the spirit of promoting serious philosophical engagement with the historical figures they discuss. Among the philosophers whose views are explored in the collection are Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Berkeley, and Kant."--Publisher's website.

Dans un premier temps, cette contribution fournit une présentation rapide des corpus médiévaux, principalement pour l’anglais et le français, en relation avec des projets d’annotation centrés sur l’annotation syntaxique. La seconde partie traite des aspects spécifiques de l’annotation syntaxique pour les textes d’ancien français et s’intéresse particulièrement aux interactions entre la préannotation automatique et les outils d’annotation manuelle.

Le projet ANR Profiterole avait pour objectifs la constitution de ressources pour le français médiéval (9e-15e s.) : un corpus annoté en (morpho-)syntaxe et des lexiques, la conception d'analyseurs syntaxiques pour le français médiéval, le développement d’outils de diffusion et d’analyse textométrique de l’annotation syntaxique dans le contexte de la plateforme TXM, et, enfin, la modélisation de certains aspects syntaxiques de l’évolution du français. Nous commençons par décrire la constitution du corpus Profiterole en termes de choix de (...) textes, genres et périodes et de types d’annotation. Puis nous présentons les modèles d’analyse syntaxique développés conjointement à la constitution du corpus, ainsi que la manière dont leurs prédictions ont été combinées pour assister la correction manuelle de l’annotation du corpus. Enfin, nous abordons les modalités de diffusion des données et modèles produits dans le cadre du projet avec un accent particulier sur l’intégration du corpus annoté à TXM, tant dans sa version en ligne accessible depuis le portail de la Base de français médiéval (BFM) que dans sa version pour ordinateur personnel, avec des exemples de requêtes CQP et TIGER facilitant l’exploration et l’analyse du corpus. (shrink)

Le corpus PhraséoRoChe se centre sur le roman de chevalerie de langue française écrit en prose. Il rassemble des textes issus d’œuvres produites entre le XIIIe siècle et le XVIIe siècle, période bornée par la naissance et la disparition de ce genre textuel. Pour permettre des interrogations par le lecteur d’aujourd’hui d’un corpus outillé embrassant une diachronie aussi longue, il faut faire des choix concernant l’évolution de la langue, non seulement en traitant le décalage entre le français contemporain (...) et la langue des textes retenus mais aussi en faisant face aux difficultés liées à l’hétérogénéité de l’ancien français, du moyen français et du français préclassique. Quels choix méthodologiques peuvent être pertinents en vue de l’objectif défini, à savoir une exploitation de type linguistique, stylistique ou littéraire? Les collaborateurs du projet se sont heurtés à la triple difficulté de rester fidèles aux textes, d’intégrer la diversité des pratiques éditoriales des chercheurs selon les étapes de l’histoire du français et d’unifier le plus possible les principes de traitement pour faciliter la réception actuelle. Le présent article rend compte des deux volets de l’opération : la sélection et la transcription d’un ensemble de 40 textes, d’abord, et l’annotation au moyen de balises structurelles, d’étiquettes lexicales et d’étiquettes morphosyntaxiques, ensuite. (shrink)

Computational modeling has long been one of the traditional pillars of cognitive science. Unfortunately, the computer models of cognition being developed today have not kept up with the enormous changes that have taken place in computer technology and, especially, in human-computer interfaces. For all intents and purposes, modeling is still done today as it was 25, or even 35, years ago. Everyone still programs in his or her own favorite programming language, source code is rarely made available, accessibility of models (...) to non-programming researchers is essentially non-existent, and even for other modelers, the profusion of source code in a multitude of programming languages, written without programming guidelines, makes it almost impossible to access, check, explore, re-use, or continue to develop. It is high time to change this situation, especially since the tools are now readily available to do so. We propose that the modeling community adopt three simple guidelines that would ensure that computational models would be accessible to the broad range of researchers in cognitive science. We further emphasize the pivotal role that journal editors must play in making computational models accessible to readers of their journals. (shrink)

Designed to fill a large gap in American philosophy scholarship, this bibliography covers the first four decades of the pragmatic movement. It references most of the philosophical works by the twelve major figures of pragmatism: Charles S. Peirce, William James, John Dewey, George H. Mead, F.C.S. Schiller, Giovanni Papini, Giovanni Vailati, Guiseppe Prezzolini, Mario Calderoni, A.W. Moore, John E. Boodin, and C.I. Lewis. It also includes writings of dozens of minor pragmatic writers, along with those by commentators and critics of (...) pragmatism. It encompasses literature not only concerning pragmatism as an alliance of philosophical theories of meaning, inquiry, belief, knowledge, logic, truth, ontology, value, and morality, but also as an intellectual and cultural force impacting art, literature, education, the social and natural sciences, religion, and politics. This bibliography contains 2,794 main entries and more than 2,000 additional references, organized by year of publication. 2,101 of the references include annotation. Its international scope is focused on writings in English, French, German, and Italian, though many other languages are also represented. Peter H. Hare contributed the Guest Preface. The introduction contains an historical orientation to pragmatism and guides to recent studies of pragmatic figures. This work is extensively cross-referenced, and it has exhaustive and lengthy author and subject indexes. (shrink)

La base de données orales de français de Suisse romande (OFROM) contient des transcriptions d’enregistrements auxquels ont participé des locuteurs nés et vivant en Suisse. Elle a été créée par des linguistes soucieux de documenter les usages oraux du français en Suisse romande, et de combler ainsi le retard dans la description des usages oraux de la langue parlée dans cette partie de la francophonie, notamment sur le plan du lexique, de la syntaxe et de la phonologie. La base de (...) données OFROM a été mise en ligne en décembre 2012 ; elle est encore jeune et d’ampleur modeste (65 heures de parole pour près de 410 000 mots transcrits, au moment où nous écrivons), mais il est prévu de l’enrichir et de la diversifier régulièrement au cours des années à venir. La première partie de cet article présente les principes fondamentaux qui ont guidé la constitution de la base (choix des locuteurs, des supports et conventions de transcription, annotations, etc.). La seconde partie contient les résultats obtenus à l’issue d’études en cours ou de sondages prospectifs, portant sur la variation lexicale et la variation syntaxique. Ils permettront d’illustrer quelques-unes des potentialités qu’offrent la base et son moteur de recherche. (shrink)

L’auteur, responsable des aspects informatiques et linguistiques du projet « Manuscrits de Stendhal en ligne », décrit le processus de constitution d’un corpus, au sens linguistique du terme, dans le cadre d’une collaboration fortement interdisciplinaire. Il montre dans quelle mesure ce type de collaboration permet de construire un ensemble documentaire répondant aux besoins des chercheurs en littérature tout en apportant un matériau langagier riche et inédit pour le linguiste. Subséquemment, ce n’est pas l’objet de l’étude qui définit le (...) class='Hi'>corpus à construire, mais à l’inverse, c’est le corpus construit qui limite et contraint les observations, remettant ainsi en question la notion d’analyse de corpus. (shrink)

This bibliography in two volumes, originally published in 1988, lists and describes works by and about Jacques Lacan published in French, English, and seven other languages including Japanese and Russian. It incorporates and corrects where necessary all information from earlier published bibliographies of Lacan’s work. Also included as background works are books and essays that discuss Lacan in the course of a more general study, as well as all relevant items in various bibliographic sources from many fields.

La Base de français médiéval (BFM) fait partie des corpus de français médiéval (9e-15e s.) les plus anciens et les plus utilisés par les linguistes diachroniciens et plus largement par tous ceux qui s’intéressent à l’histoire du français. Elle est le fruit d’une collaboration entre linguistes-philologues et spécialistes de la méthode textométrique implémentée dans la plateforme TXM. L’article présente un état des lieux du corpus BFM2022 focalisé sur la représentativité et l’interopérabilité des données. Il illustre l’apport des outils (...) numériques pour l’équilibrage des données et présente la stratégie de standardisation multi-niveau (structure textuelle, références, métadonnées, annotations) ayant permis à la Base de s’intégrer à des corpus diachroniques plus étendus pour des recherches en diachronie longue. (shrink)

This volume examines some of the most contentious social justice issues present in the corpus of Augustine's writings. Whether one is concerned with human trafficking and the contemporary slave trade, the global economy, or endless wars, these essays further the conversation on social justice as informed by the writings of Augustine of Hippo.

Après avoir fait l’état des lieux de la base de données VALIBEL en la situant dans son contexte institutionnel, nous mettons en exergue dans cet article quelques possibilités d’investigation qu’offre la base en regard de ses évolutions récentes. Une attention particulière est portée à l’outillage des corpus en termes de disfluences (avec le programme DisMo) et à l’étude du vieillissement langagier (liée au corpus Corpage). Nous concluons en montrant en quoi l’enrichissement constant de la base (en outillage et (...) en corpus) permet d’ouvrir de nouvelles pistes de recherches dans des domaines encore peu explorés en linguistique, eu égard à des problématiques sociétales majeures. (shrink)

This bibliography in two volumes, originally published in 1988, lists and describes works by and about Jacques Lacan published in French, English, and seven other languages including Japanese and Russian. It incorporates and corrects where necessary all information from earlier published bibliographies of Lacan’s work. Also included as background works are books and essays that discuss Lacan in the course of a more general study, as well as all relevant items in various bibliographic sources from many fields.

In this article, we make the case for corpus-based metonymy analysis and show that many interesting linguistic and statistical questions can only be answered byworking with real texts. To facilitate such studies, we present a method for annotating metonymies in domain- and genre-independent text. We advocate an annotation scheme that builds on regularities in metonymic usage, that takes underspecification in metonymic reference into account, and that is organized hierarchically. We combine previous metonymy classification proposals with insights from a (...) corpus study to present a fullyworked-out annotation scheme for location names, illustrating the previously mentioned principles.We present several experiments measuring annotation agreement and show that the annotation scheme is reliable and has wide coverage. We also provide a gold standard for annotations of this kind consisting of 2,000 annotated occurrences of country names in the British National Corpus.We use the resulting corpus to study metonymy distributions and the factors that influence the choice of literal versus metonymic readings in real texts. (shrink)

In medieval writers we find a distinction between body as a substance – corpus-substantia – and body as a quantity – corpus-quantitas (or quantum). One of the earliest uses of this distinction is in works written by Robert Grosseteste in the 1220s. In this paper I explore his use and understanding of this distinction. I argue that he understands corpus-substantia as such as a dimensionless composite of a first corporeal form, corporeity, and prime matter. Corporeity itself (...) is an active power for three dimensions. Through its infinite and necessary self-multiplication corporeity extends the prime matter it informs into three dimensions, thereby resulting in corpus-quantum. I explore how Grosseteste’s conception of corporeity, though probably based on ideas found in Avicenna, diverges from different understandings of Avicenna’s conception of corporeity proposed by medieval and modern commentators. (shrink)

Argumentative indicators of discourse relations constitute crucial cues for the mining of arguments. However, a comprehensive lexicon of these linguistic devices is so far lacking due to the scarcity of corpora argumentatively annotated and the absence of an empirically validated analytic methodology. Recent studies have shown that modals, that express that things might be otherwise, and evidentials, that point to the presence of information sources, are good candidates to work as argumentative indicators. On these grounds, we propose a systematic, non-language (...) specific corpus-based procedure to identify indicators of argumentative discourse relations. We test the design of a multi-level annotation through the analysis of the English and Italian epistential adverbs evidently and evidentemente in comparable corpora of newspaper articles. We show that the annotation guidelines achieve consistent analytical results with expert annotators. Data analysis reveals that the two adverbs work as argumentative indicator both at the structural and at the inferential level: besides pointing to the presence of premises-conclusion relations, they recurrently pattern with causal argument schemes from the effect to the cause. The Italian adverb evidentemente is less polysemous and more frequent, thus working as a more reliable indicator. (shrink)

In the field of NLP, “noise” is a notion with many different meanings. This is also true in fields of linguistics in which the analysis of ecological data is central.In studies involving corpus linguistic methods, noise management is an essential process for data collection, data structuration and data analysis. Paradoxically, this step is almost never developed, or completely ignored.In this paper, we propose to focus on the management of noise during the various stages classically defined in the processing of (...) an oral corpus: data structuration (including transcription), data enrichment (including annotation) and data analysis.We show that noise management is a cross-cutting issue: it needs to be taken into account during the phases of structuration, data enrichment and analysis of linguistic corpora. More specifically, the creation of corpora of children’s productions leads us to manage a particular type of noise: the variation regarding the so-called “standard” forms. For noise management, we show that there is no ideal methodology: noise management is specific to each project. Moreover, decisions taken at one stage necessarily influence the others: a noise generated during data structuration may cause a silence during automatic processing; a noise “cleaned up” during the processing phase may generate a silence during analysis. (shrink)

Tomando como ponto de partida o diálogo "Clara", escrito por Schelling, o autor faz da conexão da Natureza com o Espírito o fio condutor da trajetória do pensamento schellinguiano. É, antes de tudo, na disputa com as filosofias de Fichte e Hegel, que se revela a convergência entre a concepção transcendental do Espírito e a filosofia da Natureza, dando-se assim a entender a importância de um conceito especulativo da Natureza como acesso ao mundo real. Taking the dialogue "Clara", written (...) by Schelling, as a starting point, the author uses the conection of Nature with the Spirit as a guiding line for his exposition of Schelling’s thought. It is, above all, the dispute with the philosophies of Fichte e Hegel that reveals the convergence between a transcendental conception of Spirit and the philosophy of Nature. Thus, the author implies the importance of speculative concept of Nature as an access to the real world. (shrink)

Argumentative indicators of discourse relations constitute crucial cues for the mining of arguments. However, a comprehensive lexicon of these linguistic devices is so far lacking due to the scarcity of corpora argumentatively annotated and the absence of an empirically validated analytic methodology. Recent studies have shown that modals, that express that things might be otherwise, and evidentials, that point to the presence of information sources, are good candidates to work as argumentative indicators. On these grounds, we propose a systematic, non-language (...) specific corpus-based procedure to identify indicators of argumentative discourse relations. We test the design of a multi-level annotation through the analysis of the English and Italian epistential adverbs evidently and evidentemente in comparable corpora of newspaper articles. We show that the annotation guidelines achieve consistent analytical results with expert annotators. Data analysis reveals that the two adverbs work as argumentative indicator both at the structural and at the inferential level: besides pointing to the presence of premises-conclusion relations, they recurrently pattern with causal argument schemes from the effect to the cause. The Italian adverb evidentemente is less polysemous and more frequent, thus working as a more reliable indicator. (shrink)

Corpus Paraensis Resumo: A condição de possibilidade primária para a existência de uma filosofia é que os seres humanos pensem e, pensando, transmitam suas memórias e reflexões em escritos, ou seja, que exista uma traditio philosophica – uma herança e uma transmissão – desse pensar. O que identifica, grosso modo, a experiência do pensamento é seu registro na palavra-texto (escrita) e não apenas na palavra-oral (discurso). A condição secundária, portanto, é a existência de textos ou escritos filosóficos e, neste (...) caso, a hipótese a se levantar refere-se aos escritos filosóficos coloniais do Pará, que nomeamos Corpus Paraensis. Provar a existência de uma filosofia colonial brasileira depende, por um lado, de reconhecermos o que resta daquela traditio philosophica colonial e, por outro, da análise desses escritos enquanto exercícios de pensar consignados em textos. Por isso, este artigo não só identificará alguns escritos filosóficos coloniais paraenses quanto exemplificaremos essa herança com a edição de dois inéditos: um texto de caso de consciência (ou filosofia moral) e um de filosofia transnatural ou teodiceia (metafísica teológica). Com isso, convencemo-nos de que existiu uma traditio philosophica colonial brasileira? Palavras-chave: Corpus Paraensis; segunda escolástica; filosofia moral; filosofia transnatural. Corpus Paraensis Abstract: The condition of primary possibility for the existence of a philosophy is that human beings think and, thinking, transmit their memories and reflections in writing, that is, that there is a traditio philosophica – an inheritance and a transmission – of this thinking. What roughly identifies the experience of thought is its registration in the text-word (written) and not just in the oral-word (discourse). The secondary condition, therefore, is the existence of philosophical texts or writings and, in this case, the hypothesis to be raised refers to the colonial philosophical writings of Pará, which we named Corpus Paraensis. Proving the existence of a Brazilian colonial philosophy depends, on the one hand, on recognizing what remains of that colonial traditio philosophica and, on the other, on analyzing these writings as exercises in thinking contained in texts. Therefore, this article will not only identify some colonial philosophical writings from Pará, but we will also exemplify this heritage with the edition of two unpublished papers: a text on a case of conscience (or moral philosophy) and one on transnatural philosophy or theodicy (theological metaphysics). With that, are we convinced that there was a Brazilian colonial traditio philosophica? Key words: Corpus Paraensis; second scholasticism; moral philosophy; transnatural philosophy. Corpus Paraensis Resumen: La condición de posibilidad primaria para la existencia de una filosofía es que el ser humano piense y, pensando, transmita sus recuerdos y reflexiones por escrito, es decir, que haya una traditio philosophica – una herencia y una transmisión – de este pensamiento. Lo que identifica a grandes rasgos la experiencia del pensamiento es su registro en la palabra-texto (escrita) y no solo en la palabra-oral (discurso). La condición secundaria, por tanto, es la existencia de textos o escritos filosóficos y, en este caso, la hipótesis a plantear se refiere a los escritos filosóficos coloniales de Pará, a los que denominamos Corpus Paraensis. Probar la existencia de una filosofía colonial brasileña depende, por un lado, de reconocer lo que queda de esa traditio philosophica colonial y, por otro, de analizar estos escritos como ejercicios de pensamiento contenidos en textos. Por tanto, este artículo no solo identificará algunos escritos filosóficos coloniales de Pará, sino que también ejemplificaremos esta herencia con la edición de dos artículos inéditos: un texto sobre un caso de conciencia (o filosofía moral) y otro sobre filosofía o teodicea transnatural (metafísica teológica). Con eso, ¿estamos convencidos de que hubo una tradicio philosophica colonial brasileña? Palavras clave: Corpus Paraensis; segunda escolasticismo; filosofía moral; filosofía transnatural. Data de registro: 16/09/2021 Data de aceite: 01/12/2021. (shrink)

We provide a new text corpus from the social medium Telegram, which is rich in indirect forms of divisive speech. We scraped all messages from one channel of supporters of Donald Trump, covering a large part of his presidency from late 2016 until January 2021. The discussion among the group members over this long time period includes the spread of disinformation, disparaging of out-group members, and other forms of offensive speech. To encourage research into such practices of poisoning public (...) political discourse, we added automatic annotations of offensive language to all messages. We further added manual annotations of harmful language to a portion of the posts in order to enable the analysis of more implicit forms of online harm. (shrink)

RESUMO Por meio da análise dos estudos desenvolvidos por Mikhail Bakhtin a propósito da obra de Fiódor Dostoiévski e François Rabelais, este artigo visa discutir as fronteiras e a relação entre corpus e objeto. Para tanto, observamos comparativamente duas edições brasileiras das obras bakhtinianas, sendo a pesquisa a respeito do autor francês e da cultura cômica popular cotejada com um conjunto de textos envolvendo o original em russo, textos-moldura, traduções e outros enunciados correlacionados. A reflexão apoia-se em uma perspectiva (...) dialógica, sobretudo na noção de alteridade. Os resultados revelam que, ainda que corpus e objeto se apresentem a priori amalgamados, é a imprescindível relação do autor-pesquisador com esse corpus que vai, gradualmente, destacando o objeto. ABSTRACT Through the analysis of the studies developed by Mikhail Bakhtin regarding the work of Fyodor Dostoevsky and François Rabelais, this article aims to discuss the boundaries and the relationship between corpus and object. Therefore, we compared two Brazilian editions of Bakhtinian works, with the research on the French author and popular comic culture, with a set of texts involving the Russian original, frame-texts, translations, and other correlated utterances. The reflection is based on a dialogical perspective, particularly on the notion of alterity. The results show that, although corpus and object are a priori amalgamated, it is the essential relationship of the author-researcher with this corpus that gradually detached the object. (shrink)

The title led me to expect a somewhat different kind of book. What we are offered is not so much a dossier on Iconoclasm, like André Grabar's, as a dossier on the Dark Age of Byzantium. It falls into two parts: the first and more original is devoted to material culture, while the second is a checklist of written sources, largely overlapping the Prolegomena volume of PmbZ. Aimed at university students, this is essentially a work of reference. A further (...) volume of synthesis is promised. (shrink)

In recent decades, the analysis of phraseology has made use of the exploration of large corpora as a source of quantitative information about language. This paper intends to present the main lines of work in progress based on this empirical approach to linguistic analysis. In particular, we focus our attention on some problems relating to the morpho-syntactic annotation of corpora. The CORIS/CODIS corpus of contemporary written Italian, developed at CILTA – University of Bologna (Rossini Favretti 2000; Rossini (...) Favretti, Tamburini, De Santis in press), is a synchronic 100-million-word corpus and is being lemmatised and annotated with part-of-speech (POS) tags, in order to increase the quantity of information and improve data retrieval procedures (Tamburini 2000). The aim of POS tagging is to assign each lexical unit to the appropriate word class. Usually the set of tags is pre-established by the linguist, who uses his/her competence to identify the different word classes. The very first experiments we made revealed how the traditional part-of-speech distinctions in Italian (generally based on morphological and semantic criteria) are often inadequate to represent the syntactic features of words in context. It is worth noting that the uncertainties in categorisation contained in Italian grammars and dictionaries reflect a growing difficulty as they move from fundamental linguistic classes, such as nouns and verbs, to more complex classes, such as adverbs, pronouns, prepositions and conjunctions. This latter class, that groups together elements traditionally used to express connections between sentences, appears inadequate when describing cohesive relations in Italian. This phenomenon actually seems to involve other elements traditionally assigned to different classes, such as adverbs, pronouns and interjections. Recent studies proposed the class of ‘connectives’, grouping all words that, apart from their traditional word class, have the function of connecting phrases and contributing to textual cohesion. From this point of view, conjunctions can be considered as part of phrasal connectives, that can in turn be included in the wider category of textual connectives. The aim of this study is to identify elements that can be included in the class of phrasal connectives, using quantitative methods. According to Shannon and Weaver’s (1949) observation that words are linked by dependent probabilities, corroborated by Halliday’s (1991) argument that the grammatical “system” (in Firth’s sense of the term) is essentially probabilistic, quantitative data are introduced in order to provide evidence of relative frequencies. Section 2 presents a description of word-class categorisation from the point of view of grammars and dictionaries arguing that the traditional category of conjunctions is inadequate for capturing the notion of phrasal connective. Section 3 examines the notion of ‘connective’ and suggests a truth-function interpretation of connective behaviour. Section 4 describes the quantitative methods proposed for analysing the distributional properties of lexical units, and section 5 comments on the results obtained by applying such methods drawing some provisional conclusions. (shrink)

Online support groups are common sources of both health information and social support. To augment existing qualitative understandings of member roles and identities in OSGs, this article presents a corpus-based investigation of shifts in member lexicogrammatical and discourse-semantic choices in a bipolar disorder OSG. In total, 8.4 million words in 57,000 posts were transformed into a structured, grammatically annotated corpus and investigated using systemic functional linguistics as a theoretical framework, focusing on interpersonal and experiential meanings. The findings of (...) mood and transitivity analyses show marked differences between new and veteran members’ language choices over the course of membership in the OSG: particularly, in how veteran members provide advice, and in how new and veteran members ascribe and attribute bipolar disorder to both the self and others. Discussion addresses the affordances and limitations of corpus linguistics and SFL as strategies for providing quantitative support for key claims of earlier research in this field. (shrink)

Multi-word formation processes in Portuguese comprise root-compounding (e.g., toxicodependente ‘drug addict’, agridoce ‘sour sweet’), word-compounding (e.g., barco-casa ‘houseboat’, guarda-roupa ‘wardrobe’, cantora-atriz ‘singer/actress’), and blending (e.g., cartomente ‘lying fortune teller’ < cartomante ‘fortune teller’ + mente ‘he/she lies’, tristemunho ‘sad testimony’ < triste ‘sad’ + testemunho ‘testimony’, cantautor ‘singer and composer’ < cantor singer + autor ‘composer’). Compound structures have been quite thoroughly described by several authors (e.g., Villalva & Gonçalves 2015), whereas blending has garnered some controversial and even contradictory analyses. (...) Some authors claim that blends and compounds have similar structures, while others consider that they have completely different structures (e.g., Gries 2004b, Minussi & Nóbrega 2014). This paper focuses on the description and analysis of an annotated corpus of Portuguese blends, and on the presentation of experimental evidence that aims to assess the knowledge of these words by native young adult European and Brazilian Portuguese speakers.The first section is devoted to the presentation of Portuguese blends, namely regarding the status of their constituents and their linear relationships, grammatical structure, and the phonetic/prosodic relationship that holds between the blends and their base words. The second section focuses on the description of the Portuguese blend corpus. Although new coinages make this a never-ending work in progress, it is presently formed by (circa) 300 blends, collected in a variety of sources, from literary texts to political and social commenting, advertising, or even individual ad hoc instances. The information gathered in the corpus comprehends all the features considered in the analysis of the blends, presented in section 1, and it also provides data on attestation and frequency. The third section presents an analysis of a sub-corpus (184 forms), related to their linear structure, grammatical and prosodic relationships, and a cross-analysis that suggests that there is a strong link between headedness and cliphood. Finally, the fourth section offers a brief presentation of experimental work that suggests that clips facilitate the processing of blends, since the clipped word is more frequently used in replies to a familiarity test, and the same happens with reaction time values obtained in a lexical decision test. (shrink)

The ARXMLIV corpus is a remarkable collection of text containing scientific mathematical discourse. With more than half a million documents, it is an ambitious target for large scale linguistic and semantic analysis, requiring a generalized and distributed approach. In this paper we implement an architecture which solves and automates the issues of knowledge representation and knowledge management, providing an abstraction layer for distributed development of semantic analysis tools. Furthermore, we enable document interaction and visualization and present current implementations of (...) semantic tools and follow-up applications using this architecture. We identify five different stages, or purposes, which such architecture needs to address, encapsulating each in an independent module. These stages are determined by the different properties of the document formats used, as well as the state of processing and linguistic enrichment introduced so far. We discuss the need of migration between XML representations and the challenges it would pose on our system, revealing the benefits and trade-off of each format we employ. In the heart of the architecture lies the Semantic Blackboard module. The Semantic Blackboard comprises a system based on a centralized RDF database which can facilitate distributed corpus analysis of arbitrary applications, or analysis modules. This is achieved by providing a document abstraction layer and a mechanism for storing, reusing and communicating results via RDF stand-off annotations deposited in the central database. Achieving a properly encapsulated and automated pipeline from the input corpus document to a semantically enriched output in a state-of-the-art representation is the task of the Preprocessing, Semantic Result and Output Generation modules. Each of them addresses the task of format migration and enhances the document for further semantic enrichment or aggregation. The fifth module, targeting Visualization and Feedback, enables user interaction and display of different stages of processing.. (shrink)

Recasting French literary history in terms of the cultures and peoples that interacted within and outside of France's national boundaries, this volume offers a new way of looking at the history of a national literature, along with a truly global and contemporary understanding of language, literature, and culture. The relationship between France's national territory and other regions of the world where French is spoken and written (most of them former colonies) has long been central to discussions of (...) "Francophonie." Boldly expanding such discussions to the whole range of French literature, the essays in this volume explore spaces, mobilities, and multiplicities from the Middle Ages to today. They rethink literary history not in terms of national boundaries, as traditional literary histories have done, but in terms of a global paradigm that emphasizes border crossings and encounters with "others." Contributors offer new ways of reading canonical texts and considering other texts that are not part of the traditional canon. By emphasizing diverse conceptions of language, text, space, and nation, these essays establish a model approach that remains sensitive to the specificities of time and place and to the theoretical concerns informing the study of national literatures in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

Although at times criticized for its philosophical density, French cultural theory remains a flourishing, if highly contested, area of academic study. Four feminist thinkers in this tradition continue to be especially prominent: Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, and Luce Irigaray. This new collection from Routledge gathers together the very best secondary literature on these thinkers to provide an indispensable conspectus of their works. Each of the four thinkers is represented by an individual volume, and each volume includes (...) a newly written introduction to that thinker’s work and her philosophical relevance. (shrink)

Conceptual metaphors have received much attention in research on discourse about infectious diseases in recent years. Most studies found that conceptual metaphors of war dominate media discourse about disease. Similarly, a great deal of research has been undertaken on the new coronavirus, i.e., COVID-19, especially in the English news discourse as opposed to other languages. The present study, in contrast, analyses the conceptual metaphors used in COVID-19 discourse in French-language newspapers. The study explored the linguistic metaphors used in COVID-19 (...) discourse in these newspapers and conceptual metaphors that underlie and motivate them, using a conceptual metaphor theory framework (CMT). Therefore, two North African French-language newspapers, namely Libération, published in Morocco, and La Presse de Tunisie, published in Tunisia, formed the corpus of the current study. The results showed that the most frequent framing of COVID-19 was in terms of WAR, followed by DISASTER and KILLER, respectively. (shrink)

Cet article propose un tour d’horizon de différents types de biais que l’on peut rencontrer dans les études basées sur l’annotation de corpus vidéo de langue des signes. En tâchant de situer objectivement les choix effectués et les biais potentiels à chaque étape, nous décrivons les méthodologies que nous avons mises en place dans trois études, portant respectivement sur la synchronisation des composantes corporelles, le mouvement des sourcils et les clignements des yeux, puis la coarticulation.

"Examine[s] the history of Marxist philosophical issues in particular, dialectical materialism as developed by French Communist Party intellectuals... Remarkably clear, deeply researched, and well-written."- Political Science Quarterly.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.2 (2001) 371-373 [Access article in PDF] Book Review French Fiction in the Mitterrand Years: Memory, Narrative, Desire French Fiction in the Mitterrand Years: Memory, Narrative, Desire, by Colin Davis & Elizabeth Fallaize; 160pp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, $24.95. Like the Mitterrand era itself, Davis and Fallaize's French Fiction in the Mitterrand Years is somewhat uneven. The election of François Mitterrand in (...) 1981 as the President of the Fifth Republic was a milestone in modern French history. After the conservative politics of the 1960s and 70s, the election of a socialist president and legislature seemed to offer the possibility of a new political and intellectual atmosphere. Indeed, the first two years of Mitterrand's presidency brought sweeping reforms. However, several scandals, continued economic problems and later "cohabitation" with a right-wing legislative majority muted the original verve. Mired in partisan politics, the government often appeared ineffectual.As with the political arena, French fiction of the 1980s was produced under the shadow of another long-standing French institution--the nouveau roman. Again we find a new direction, a turning-away from the past during the 1980s. Yet there was no outright refusal. There were no manifestos or polemical articles written by budding novelists, no claim to Literature. As Annie Ernaux describes her work Une Femme (1987): "Mon projet est de nature littéraire [...]. Mais je souhaite rester, d'une certaine façon, au-dessous de la littérature" (My project is of a literary nature [...]. But I wish to remain, in a certain way, beneath literature (p. 144).This lack of pretension is important, for it helps us better understand the writing of the period. As Davis and Fallaize point out, in the fiction of the Mitterrand years we find a return to history, to the subject, and to storytelling, three areas disdained by the new novelists of the 1950s and 60s (pp. 12-15). But at the same time, there is not an elegiac return to the conventions of the past. There are no didactic tales of Lucien de Rubempré's lost illusions. A good example of this is Patrick Roegiers's Beau Regard (1990), the account of a dinner during which hardly anyone speaks, told by a narrator who knows no one else at the table. Davis and Fallaize note: "In these novels the event is merely an incident, the story no more than an anecdote, and the anecdote merely a fait divers" (p. 147). Although not inconsequential, argue Davis and Fallaize, there is an unquestionable modesty to these texts.In the introduction to their work Davis and Fallaize write: "The aim of the current book is to analyze some of the most important and interesting directions in French fiction through detailed discussions of a selection of texts, all published during François Mitterrand's period as President of the Fifth Republic (1981-95)" (p. 1). This is exactly what they accomplish, selecting six novels--Duras's L'Amant (The Lover, 1984), Pennac's Au bonheur des ogres (The Scapegoat, 1985), Semprun's La Montagne blanche (1986), Echenoz's Lac (Lake, 1989), Guilbert's A l'ami qui ne m'a pas sauvé la vie (To the Friend Who Did Not Save [End Page 371] my Life, 1990), and Ernaux's Passion simple (Simple Passion, 1991)--and spending one chapter on each. They also discuss some of the important features of the era's fiction including memory, especially of World War II, contemporary culture and postmodernism, and autofiction.However, the book's limited goal also leads to some of its problems. As a whole, the work lacks cohesion. Chapters often read like individual essays. Moreover, although some chapters are well-grounded critically and contextually, others are not. Finally, the conclusion is too brief to synthesize aptly the various topics discussed in the previous chapters. The reader does not have a solid grasp of the fictional landscape of the Mitterrand years, but rather, as the introduction indicated, knowledge of "some of the [...] interesting directions in French fiction."One of the most illuminating chapters considers Daniel... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Putting French Studies on the MapTom Conley (bio)A good deal of work accomplished in new historicism over the last decade has opened new perspectives on the relations of literature to cartography. If new historicism tends to be affiliated with Shakespearean scholars who reconstruct the world of the Globe Theatre in the context of London and the Elizabethan world picture, it almost goes without saying that cartography, whose mobilization (...) and rapid growth occur from the beginnings of the printing press to the middle of the seventeenth century, plays a significant role in the analysis of print-culture in general. 1 The convergence of the two disciplines has shown that Renaissance authors, obsessed with the beginnings of writing, valorize both its geographical and spatial virtues and the ways that its pictogrammar constitutes “a grid for comprehension of the world” [Martin 14]. Humanists discovered that it simulated divisions of land in transactions devoted to their negotiation. What early archeologists of writing discovered is comparable today to what we gather about the meaning of the crosshatched rectangles and insignia we admire on the great prehistoric petroglyph of Bedolina standing over its arable valley below [Jacob 41–48; Thrower 4–5]. In the early modern age cartographical issues are central to broader inquiry about the power of writing.New historicists take up early modern cartography not just to assess the impact of Ptolemy on humanism but to develop agendas that concern how a sense of habitus was conceived, projected, and betrayed at a time of tumultuous change. They ask how the “world” could be both imagined and experienced when its boundaries were expanding at exponential rates. Cartographic studies have shown where the unknown, vital for any definition of consciousness or even the drives of life itself, was located and bracketed. 2 The unknown was an integral part of cartography prior to the eighteenth century. But to assert, as many have, that cartography sought to contain the unknown within the terrae incognitae it indicated on its maps does not solve the relation of the discipline with the [End Page 23] unknown. Evidence shows how much in the early modern age the unknown inhabits most written and schematic representations of the world. 3 Unnamed patches that we retrieve on maps printed in the sixteenth century prompt reverie of spaces that can be fancied as unknown by virtue of the maps themselves. The cartographical impulse in early modern studies cannot be dissociated from our own drive to find spots that can remove us from the regnum of nonplaces that define our world, that is, other places, whether heterotopical or “anywhere out of this world,” valorized when the “nonplace” has come to define contemporary human geography [see Augé 1992].Concurrently, the history of cartography remains one of the most immediate modes of access for what we can understand about the imagination of power, control, statecraft, and economy at a time when maps figured with increasing regularity in matters of administration. In broader terms, we can say that the unforeseen growth of map production and the consequent stress laid on fantasies of power that accompanied cartographic representations from the beginning of print culture to the establishment of “state reason” under Louis XIV bore witness to a greater spatialization of knowledge. What in the study of literature goes by the name of discourse is seen through a cartographical lens as patterns of utterances and exchanges that owe much to the influence of Ramism, monocular perspective, and diagrammatical logic. It is a truism to note that when the world became a function of cartographical representations made accessible to a public at large, the ways it was configured bore great impact on communication in general. 4In this issue of Diacritics, where the current plight and uncertain future of French studies is being pondered, it also goes without saying that many teachers and scholars are wondering what can be done to invigorate one of the richest of all literary canons. The assault that American media have led on French culture (among others, articles in the New Times by Roger Cohen and Craig Whitney) would lead us to believe that literature has [End Page 24] become equivalent to freeze-dried croissants, a... (shrink)