• Funding: FWF (P 25467 individual project)

• Project duration: 01.10.2013 to 30.09.2016

• Team

  • Project leader: Martin Hummel

  • Post-doc project collaborator: Anna Gazdik

  • Student assistants: Helena Telsnig, Greta Korper

  • Cooperation partner: Raymund Wilhelm (AAU Klagenfurt)

The project served to develop and compile a dictionary (Dictionnaire historique de l'adjectif-adverbe), which documents the historical development of French short adverbs alphabetically on the basis of collocations of the type couper court 'to interrupt' or aller direct 'to go directly'. At the end of the project, the dictionary was available as a revised manuscript of approx. 1400 pages.

Publication:
Hummel, Martin & Anna Gazdik. 2021. Dictionnaire historique de l'adjectif-adverbe, Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110629675

This FWF project continued the previous FWF project dicoadverbe database (2002-2005)in the context of which the online accessible database dicoadverbe was created. It contains around 13,000 entries for French adjective adverbs from the 11th century to the present day, which were obtained from the Frantext reference corpus. The database is technically maintained by the Center for Information Modelling in the Humanities at the University of Graz. A further database comprises 3,500 documents with informal French from internet sources. It is not publicly accessible at the end of the project. However, this is being planned and will be made possible as part of the ongoing Open Access project until 2019.

The important role of adjectival adverbs in the history of French was underestimated for a long time because research focused on the canonical adverbs on -ment .The scientific results of the dictionary project led to a reassessment of the categorial status of French short adverbs, to a previously unavailable analysis of the dynamics of the emergence of constructions based on the syntactic structure "verb + adjective" and to a differentiated presentation of the relationship between written and spoken tradition, whereby the informal language data from the Internet in particular was able to show that the continuity of informal language with Old and Middle French is much greater than the usual standard corpus Frantext suggests.

The project linked the dictionary project with 6 scientific questions on important sub-aspects. Three research questions concern the reconstruction of the oral tradition of French to which the adjectival adverbs are assigned. This is a methodological challenge, as historical language data is generally only available in written form. With the help of criteria such as frequency, word length, etymology and membership of the core vocabulary, the aim is to examine the extent to which adjectival adverbs do indeed cover the core of linguistic communication needs that can be assigned to the oral tradition oriented towards everyday life. In this context, paradigmatic core structures such as "dimension", "time", etc. are also examined in terms of their coverage with adjectival adverbs. A further research question is devoted to the systematic underspecification of verb-modifying attributes with regard to event- or participle-oriented modification. In les cheminées fument bleu, for example, the unnamed smoke is modified. Depending on the possibilities of gender and number marking, participle orientation can also be marked by inflection(Elle marche droit vers qcch. - Elle marche droite). Cases such as rêver tricolore, truander petit, voir grand, baiser utile etc. even evoke complex mental scenes, which are examined from a cognitive linguistic perspective.