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The learning outcomes are that students (i) gain insight into the relevance of corpora for linguistic research illustrating diaphasic, diastratic and diatopic variaties of spoken French (ii) are able to critically review the literature on the phonetic/phonological issues addressed during the course, (iii) can analyse relevant data from the PFC corpus and/or other corpora of spoken French and (iv) conduct their own small scale research project on one phonetic/phonological French phenomenon by gathering data from the PFC corpus.
The course focuses on phonological and phonetic aspects of modern French. It will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of several empirical sources and methodological issues will be addressed. The large PFC (Phonologie du Français Contemporain) online corpus of spoken French is an excellent tool to investigate topics in French linguistics from an empirical view. Student activities during this MA course will allow them, thanks to the collection and analysis of selected data in PFC, to apprehend the complex behavior of unstable e and mute e, and to test the three-consonants law (Grammont 1922) in different linguistic contexts while documenting individual stylistic variation and the diatopic variation in France, Belgium and Switzerland. The aim of this class is on the one hand to investigate computer corpora as resources in a linguistics course from a learner-centered perspective and on the other to demonstrate the great utility of using them autonomously as a way to raise language awareness of different types of sociolinguistic variations.
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