Dictionary of constructions like couper court

Constructions like fr. couper court, parler vrai and so on have been largely neglected in both linguistic research and lexicographical documentation. Only some of these constructions are acceptable according to French standard norms. However, in earlier stages French was very rich in those constructions, and non-standard varieties such as argot or regional dialects, as well as American varieties still use them quite often. The reason for this state of affairs is very simple: Direct conversion of adjectives to adverbs are banned by language teaching, which only accepts adverbs derived from adjectives by means of the suffix -ment. In several publications on the subject, Hummel has shown that, probably, direct conversion from adjectives to adverbs was the main mechanism of adverb formation from spoken informal Latin to all Romance languages. This approach goes against traditional theories on the diachrony of the adverbial system in Romance and provides the theoretical background of a new three-year project, whose aim it is to document neglected, non-standard expressions that have hitherto been neglected in standard treatments. It is argued that expressions like penser profond et juste are not only good but also pleasurable French that should not be excluded from research or lexicographic documentation. Even large dictionaries like Le Robert or Trésor give no reasonable account of these expressions. The aim of our projected dictionary is to give an almost complete documentation of such expressions savoureuses from the 12th century up to the present, based on several electronic and non-electronic corpora. The print-version of the dictionary will give an essential synthesis of our results, whereas a CD version will in addition contain all data and powerful search engines. Our data-bank already contains 3700 examples, taken from written corpora, which allows us to estimate the eventual number of dictionary entries at about 400 (approximately 600 pages).

The Dictionnaire des Expressions Savoureuses, named after a lucky term by Lucien Tesnière, fills a gap in the landscape of French dictionaries. In fact, there is not a single dictionary that covers the use of the adjective as an adverb by simple conversion, as in expressions like parler haut, penser juste, couper court, dire long, etc. In more neutral terms, one could prefer the more precise title Dictionnaire historique de l`adjectif-adverbe. The most important issue from a scientific point of view is the hypothesis that this type of adverb goes back directly to Latin. The use of these adverbs was marginalized by the prescription of the adverb with the suffix -ment in the grammars of standard French. Although the publication of the dictionary in printed form is also planned, the main goal of the project was to provide an online database which contains all of the collected syntagmas from the 11th century until today (13 000 entries compared to about 750 entries in the dictionary). The main source for the entries was the French text corpus FRANTEXT. The compilation of the entries was done by a research group at the University Karl-Franzens Graz (Austria) directed by Martin Hummel and Karin Stiegler. The database can now be found at http://languageserver.uni-graz.at/dicoadverbe.