THE CORPUS DE REFERENCE DU FRANCAIS CONTEMPORAIN (CRFC) AS THE FIRST GENRE-DIVERSE MEGA-CORPUS OF FRENCH

Abstract

The Corpus de reference du francais contemporain (CRFC) is a new purpose-built genre-diverse corpus for investigating modern French. The 310-million-word corpus is the first collection of French to incorporate a substantial amount of spontaneous speech (approx. 30m words) and `pseudo-spoken' data (approx. 125m words); it is evenly divided between spoken/pseudo-spoken and written sources. The present article begins by comparing the CRFC with previous corpora of French before discussing the design of the corpus and a number of pilot studies based on it, including an investigation into oral uses of common lexemes which have gone unrecorded in dictionaries and a reanalysis of the French subjunctive.