Dictionaries and Spoken Language: A Corpus-Based Review of French Dictionaries

Abstract

Starting from the observation that traditional lexicography has tended to rely on corpora of written text, the present article argues that this might be to the detriment of covering the commonest colloquial lexical units which carry the main burden of everyday conversation. Using a new reference corpus of French ( Corpus de référence du français contemporain or CRFC ), it presents a number of case studies of highly common informal words and expressions, each of which sets out with a corpus-based dictionary entry and then goes on to compare this with the treatment accorded the entry word or phrase in ten major monolingual and bilingual dictionaries. The general findings are that colloquial words, far from being stylistically ‘inferior’ substitutes of more formal words, are imbued with their own specific shades of meaning, phraseology, and pragmatics, and that medium-sized spoken corpora like the CRFC shed light on lexical patterns and collocations about which the dictionaries under survey and large written corpora are largely uninformative. This leads to the conclusion that there may well be a second corpus revolution ahead which will apply Sinclair’s famous dictum that ‘the language looks rather different when you look at a lot of it at once’ to the investigation and documentation of intimate and colloquial language use.

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