Syntactic Reference Corpus of Medieval French – SRCMF

The two largest machine-readable text corpora of Medieval French have been built in two independent, though cooperating, projects in France (ENS-LSH Lyon: ICAR, UMR 5191) and Germany (ILR, University of Stuttgart). The central theme of this project is the syntactic annotation of both corpora in a joint project, so that researchers can base their research on both resources, according to shared principles. The project will use and, if necessary, develop tools for automatic and manual annotation on both morphology and syntax levels. It will keep tools and resources as system-independent as possible and thus ensure their reusability in future research. The project will be an important contribution to closing the gap between English and French medieval corpus resources and constitute an important impact for future work in diachronic syntax. The collaborating scholars world-wide will embed the annotation project in their diachronic linguistic research on various syntactic subjects. The added value of the German-French cooperation over two national projects is the simultaneous coordinated work on two different corpora according to shared standards. Only an intense well-structured cooperation between both groups will provide a resource on such a scale and having such an extensive chronological span (7 centuries). The collaborating scholars will embed the annotation project in their diachronic linguistic research on various syntactic subjects, and the henceforth possibility to process such a large syntactically enriched corpus will enable to discover many new evolution processes and to verify existing theories.