Apports des corpus linguistiques : Étude de « aller » et « venir » en français et en thaï

Abstract

In linguistics, a corpus is a set of annotated linguistic data (speeches, texts, conversations, etc.) and metadata. Among the different types of corpora, the bidirectional parallel corpus is a corpus made of an original text (in a language A) and its translation in a language B, and vice versa. This kind of corpus is used to study and compare different languages. Our study focuses on the words “come” and “go” in French (venir and aller) and in Thai (มา ma and ไป pai). In both languages, these words are polyfunctional (i.e., they have both lexical and grammatical meanings, for instance, verb and auxiliary). We use a literary bidirectional parallel French-Thai corpus (from French to Thai : Maïté Coiffure, Marie-Aude Murail 2004 ; and from Thai to French : The Happiness of Kati, Jane Vejjajiva 2003). This study aims to address the difficulties regarding the different uses of “come” and “go” in French and Thai encountered by FLE (French as a Foreign Language) and TFL (Thai as a Foreign Language) students. These words are indeed used as full lexical verbs, or alternatively as tense-aspect-modality auxiliaries. We show how our corpus address these issues, and more generally, what are the possible applications of such corpora in language teaching and translation.

Keywords

• Thai
• corpus
• translation
• linguistics
• grammaticalization