Chapter 2. French liaison and the lexical repository 33
of observable mechanisms of statistically oriented learning and the formation of
secondary assemblages within the classes of exemplars (Foulkes 2006). Such pre-
dictability is therefore based on the acknowledgement of corpus linguistics as a
normal sociophonological practice (see also the Sornicola’s paper in this volume).
It was within this theoretical and empirical context, characterised by the
return to the forefront of a corpus-based linguistics, that the “Phonologie du
Français Contemporain” (PFC) programme has been constructed and developed
since 1999 (Durand et al. 2002, 2005). The aim of the PFC programme is to con-
struct a significant repository of contemporary French that will enable researchers
to address the diversity of the oral usages of the language, both within France and
in the wider French-speaking world.^2 The construction of a large database which
has been devised, labelled and standardised in order to allow as many types of
secondary analyses as possible, rests at the heart of the programme whose initial
objectives can be enumerated as follows:
a. to provide a linguistically faithful and scientifically constructed image
of spoken French, in both its unity and diversity, be it social, stylistic, or
geographical;
b. to enable researchers to test the hypotheses and phonological models, whether
old or new, that are proposed for French, both in synchronic and in diachronic
terms;
c. to construct a representative database on the basis of a common and stan-
dardised methodology which allows secondary analyses to be undertaken in
a variety of theoretical frameworks;
d. to provide new reference data for applications in the domain of automatic
processing of speech, French teaching and French linguistics.
Currently containing more than 900,000 words, the PFC is one of the largest audio-
oral databases in the world. Over the course of the past ten years, 169 research-
ers have participated in the PFC programme (empirical enquiries, transcription,
coding etc.).^3 In 2010, thirty-three geographical regions of the French-speaking
world accounting for seventy-six locations of enquiry were involved. Among the
- In addition to France, PFC covers Belgium, Switzerland, Canada, Louisiana, the Maghreb,
the Near and the Middle East, Africa, the French Caribbean Islands, the Indian Ocean, the
Pacific. All information, data, protocols, the list of researchers and research teams involved, and
the results of the programme can be accessed on the PFC website (www.projet-pfc.net). - The programme itself draws on the support of twelve different research teams and has ben-
efitted from various funding sources. More than ten doctoral projects have been either partly or
entirely carried out within the framework of the programme, and five others are still in progress.
More than 150 publications concerning the whole domain of French phonology have come out
from the PFC programme.