Historical dictionary of French adjective-adverbs

This project is situated in the general framework of the Research group on "The Interfaces of Adjective and Adverb in Romance" (Homepage http://sites.google.com/site/rsgadjadv/). The dictionary project is the continuation of the FWF project 2002 "Dictionary of constructions like couper court" (Nr. P15806-G03). The primary result of the FWF 2002 project was the database http://languageserver.uni-graz.at/dicoadverbe/. This database with free online access is technically managed by the Center of Information Modeling in Graz. It contains approximately 13,000 attestations of French adjective-adverbs from the 11th century until today. The importance of adjective- adverbs for the history of French has long been underestimated because research has typically focused on the canonical ment-adverb. Our database provides clear evidence for the relevance of adjective-adverbs in the oral tradition. Main Research Issue (Issue 1): The elaboration of a printed dictionary was strongly recommended by the external evaluation of the foregoing project. The dictionary shall contain a select number of 1200 verb-attribute collocations (e.g. couper court) (from 2081 in the data base) in alphabetical order, corresponding to 500 pages. In the dictionary, these will be listed. In addition to this macrostructure, onomasiological charts shall show the paradigmatic structures of the adjective-adverbs. The dictionary project will be combined with 6 scientific issues from the domain of fundamental research (Research Issues 2-7). Consequently, the dictionary will not only document the data but include the results of further scientific analysis. The fundamental research issues 2,3, and 4 are dedicated to the reconstruction of the oral tradition. This is a methodological challenge, since historical linguistic data are necessarily written data. The project aims at discerning the inner core of the French oral adverb system through criteria such as frequency, length, etymology (belonging to inherited vocabulary). Moreover, the data not only permit the reconstruction of the core elements, but also the paradigmatic relations between them. These issues are methodologically innovative and provide new insights into the history of orality. Issue 5 is dedicated to a neglected aspect of verb-modifying attributes. Adjective-adverbs are underspecified for event- or participant-oriented attribution (e.g. les cheminées fument bleu). Lexicalized secondary predication emerges from this continuum dominated by the interplay of linguistic function and contextual inference. Depending on the possibilities of morphological gender and number marking, inflection may mark participant-orientation (Elle marche droit vers qcch. Elle marche droite). The relation of linguistic function and inference has not been systematically analyzed in the domain of secondary predication. Issue 6 deals with the stylistic development of collocations in poetry, (popular and erudite) sayings, and publicity. Cases like rêver tricolore, truander petit, voir grand, baiser utile, etc. evocate complex scenes that shall be analyzed from the cognitive linguistic standpoint, on the one hand, and Maas` theory of "Sprachausbau" on the other. Issue 7 uses the database for a comparative study with English. The results of these issues are taken into account in the microstructure of the dictionary and shall be published in international peer reviewed journals (6 papers).

The project aimed to develop and realize a historical dictionary of French short adverbs such as couper court interrupt / cut short or aller direct go direct on a clearly defined corpus basis (Dictionnaire historique de ladjectif-adverbe). A revised manuscript of approximately 1400 pages has been finished at the end of the project. According to the idea of the project, the dictionary was not intended to be self-sufficient but to provide a starting point for parallel and subsequent scientific research. For this purpose, two databases have been developed for further analyses. The primary database includes some 13,500 entries. It has public online access and allows for data filtering according to 66 criteria. The data can be exported as pdf or excel files, the latter being particularly useful for further analyses. The Centre for Information Modelling Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities (CIM-ACDH) of the University of Graz has developed the database by using the text encoding standard TEI on basis of eXist in order to ensure long-term sustainability and compatibility. Two other databases on Spanish short adverbs have been integrated. The platform thus supports and integrates several projects of the Research group The Interfaces of Adjective and Adverb in Romance. The database has already been used for scientific cooperation with other universities. The second database comprises 3,500 attestations from informal French in Internet sources. For this database open access is not provided yet, but planned in future (an ORD application has been submitted to the FWF). The two databases were used for 24 already published, forthcoming or submitted papers. Ten of them directly deal with research issues of the project, the others use the data for general research issues of the Research group Interfaces. The scientific outcome provides new insights into the categorial status of French short adverbs, it permitts an innovative analysis of the dynamics of constructions emerging from baseline verb + adjective structure, and it allows for a more differentiated description of the oral and written traditions. In particular, the informal data from the Internet sources show that the continuity of Old and Middle French is stronger than the standard corpus Frantext suggests. The publication of the dictionary is projected after accomplishing additional research with two years.