The Sociolinguistics Laboratory has created a large collection of unique computerized corpora, diachronic and syncrhonic, of natural speech and grammar resources, each targeting a specific real-world social and/or linguistic issue. These data serve as the basis for research on a wide variety of topics relating to the study of language variation and change, including bilingual mixing, language contact and grammatical convergence, prescriptivism, grammaticalization, lifespan change, and minority language structure, among others.
Major corpora
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Corpus du français parlé à Ottawa-Hull
Le français en contexte: milieux scolaire et social Récits du français québécois d’autrefois Corpus du théâtre populaire du XVIIe siècle Recueil historique des grammaires du français Corpus bilingue wolof-français Corpus bilingue fongbe/français Corpus bilingue arabe tunisien/français Finnish-English Bilingual Corpus Tamil-English Bilingual Corpus |
Quebec English Corpus
Ottawa-Hull Spoken Language Archives African Nova Scotian English corpus Samaná English corpus Nigerian Pidgin English corpus Ex-Slave Recordings The Nova-Scotian Vernacular English Corpus Ottawa Grammar Resource on Early Variability in English Ottawa Repository of Early African American Correspondence |
Detail since 2001:
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Corpus du français en contexte: milieux scolaire et social
(Poplack 2015) Recordings of high school students and their French language-arts teachers from the Quebec side of Canada's National Capital Region. The corpus features speech from 190 individuals recorded between 2005 and 2007, totalling 1,326,792 words, plus associated transcriptions and concordances. Its role is to assess the competing contributions of community and school in blocking language change and maintaining the standard language, by comparing actual language use of teachers and students in and outside of school, as well as with the community norm on the one hand, and the prescriptive norm on the other. Because speakers were born between 1946 and 1994, when studied in conjunction with the Récits du français québécois d’autrefois (Poplack & St-Amand 2007) and the Ottawa-Hull French Corpus (Poplack 1989), these materials expand the time span over which the progress of change can be measured in actual speech to an unprecedented 148 years.
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Le Droit. 2006.01.11
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Répertoire historique de grammaires du français
(RHGF; Poplack, Jarmasz, Dion & Rosen 2015) A compilation of 163 French grammars and usage manuals published between 1530 and 1998. The RHGF is the optimal analytical tool currently available for tracing the development of prescriptive norms and attendant ideologies with respect to key linguistic features. It is used to 1) infer the existence of prior variability, 2) trace the evolution of normative dictates associated with different variant forms, and, most innovative, 3) discern hints of linguistic conditioning of variable usage from grammarians’ injunctions. |
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Récits du français québécois d’autrefois
(RFQ; Poplack & St-Amand 2007, 2009) A compendium of oral folk tales, legends and personal interviews of 44 native francophones born between 1846 and 1895, sampled from the Roy (1955) and Lacourcière (1971) collections, totalling 551,596 words. Five (administrative) regions of Québec are represented. These materials, approximately 90 hours of audiotapes recorded between 1942 and 1955, now fully transcribed and concordanced, had never before been analyzed linguistically. A unique window on spoken vernacular French of 19th-century Quebec, this corpus constitutes a real-time benchmark against which to measure the progress of linguistic change.
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Quebec English Corpus
(QEC; Poplack, Walker & Malcomson 2006) A large-scale corpus of interviews recorded between 2002 and 2004 with 164 native speakers of Quebec English born, raised and still residing in one of Quebec City or Montreal, and stratified according to time of acquisition of English (before or after the passage of Bill 101). Speakers of mainstream (Oshawa-Whitby) English constitute a control group. Sample stratification procedures incorporate a number of measures of contact-induced change. This 2.5 million word electronic corpus, the first such documentation of Quebec English, is used to scientifically test the effect of language legislation and minority status on the linguistic structure of Quebec English.
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Ottawa Repository of Early African American Correspondence
(OREAC; Van Herk & Poplack 2003) A collection of personal letters written between 1790-1865 by semi-literate recently freed slaves and free African Americans. These include 41 letters written from Sierra Leone, copied from originals in the National Archives of Canada and the University of Illinois; 496 letters written to the American Colonization Society from Liberia or the United States, copied from originals housed at the Library of Congress. These letters, never before analyzed linguistically (most have never been published), furnish an authentic historical benchmark against which to situate our Early African American English materials.
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Lab databases may be accessed on-site with approval from the Director.
Contact the Research Coordinator ([email protected]) for further information.
Contact the Research Coordinator ([email protected]) for further information.
