Some quantitative aspects of written and spoken French based on syntactically annotated corpora

Abstract

ABSTRACTBased on two syntactically annotated corpora, and within the theoretical tradition of dependency grammar, the current study investigates the quantitative differences and similarities between written and spoken French. Our findings support the assumption that spoken and written French are two realizations of one language that do not differ in the syntactic categories, but in the frequency of these categories, and also in their organization in sentence. The subjects in spoken French are mostly pronouns, whereas in written French the subjects are mostly nouns and pronouns. Spoken and written French share many syntactic relations, but with different frequencies. For instance, dislocations are more diverse and frequent in spoken French. Spoken French and written French differ in the word order of vocative nominal phrases. Finally, written French is slightly more difficult to process than spoken French.