6. The Académie base
This model of a hypertextual base is intended to serve for a sample CD-ROM in the project to
computerize the eight complete editions of the Dictionnaire de l'Académie
française; this project was presented by myself at the Institut de
France in November 19945 and by Isabelle Leroy-Turcan at Cergy-Pontoise in March 19956. One question that I shall do no more than raise
here is the extent to which it is pertinent to compare the data of the Dictionnaire de
l'Académie with that of Frantext (or its North-American counterpart, the
ARTFL textbase) for the same period (17th-20th c.). Their objectives are different -- an inventory
of good usage on the part of the Academicians, an partial inventory of written language, mainly
literary, in Frantext and ARTFL. On the other hand, several of the Academicians -- amongst others, Corneille, Racine, La Fontaine, Montesquieu,
Marivaux, Voltaire, Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Hugo, Sainte-Beuve, Valéry, Mauriac,
Claudel -- are present in Frantext through their individual writings7. The three dictionary
items doucet/doucette, douze and timoré are indicated as
having a restricted use. For doucet, the Académie
dictionary restricts its syntagmatic possibilities: «guere d'usage que dans ces
exemples»; Frantext contains both examples that conform
to these restrictions and others that do not. The same type of restriction is applied by the dictionary
to douze, and here again the ARTFL data gives examples of conformant and non-conformant use. In
the case of timoré, which according to the dictionary,
from 1694 to 1878, is almost exclusively applied to a fear of offending God, the semantic
restriction is increasingly refuted by the textual data as time goes by.
The Frantext (and ARTFL) data has no other function here than to suggest paths of enquiry
-- particularly in the case of the feminine and masculine nouns and pronouns determined by
timoré and of its collocates -- and to emphasize the necessity of critically examining
both the observed and the observation.
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Note 5. Wooldridge,
«Projet d'informatisation du Dictionnaire de l'Académie
(1694-1935)».
Note 6. I. Leroy-Turcan & T.R. Wooldridge,
«L'informatisation des premiers dictionnaires de langue française: les
difficultés propres à la première édition du Dictionnaire de
l'Académie française», Journée des dictionnaires 1995,
Université de Cergy-Pontoise, March 1995.
Note 7. An Académie text base, complementary to the
Académie dictionary base, is in preparation. It will be discussed in a paper at the
ALLC/ACH conference in Bergen in June 1996.