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<Paper uid="W04-2107">
  <Title>A computerized dictionary : Le Tresor de la langue francaise informatise</Title>
  <Section position="4" start_page="0" end_page="8" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
3 Hypernavigation
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Hypernavigation throughout all the databases interconnected under Stella is possible. For example, when consulting the TLFi and by simply clicking on any word in an article, the user can navigate towards another article of the TLFi, towards a lexical database giving information on the grammatical category of the word, towards the  th edition of the dictionary of the French Academy (1932-1935), towards the 9 th edition (started in 1990), towards the historical database for French language, called DDL, giving new datations for words or phrases, and also towards the database FRANTEXT, which enables the user to discover other or more examples on a given word. Historically, the base derives from the texts assembled for providing examples to be used in the elaboration of the Tresor de la langue francaise (TLF). This first raison d'etre turned to a new one: the desire to offer the scientific community a vast corpus of texts linked to an efficient query tool. Nowadays, FRANTEXT is a textual database which currently includes 3737 French texts covering a period from 1505 to the present day, amounting in all to more than 217 millions of words.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
  <Section position="5" start_page="8" end_page="8" type="metho">
    <SectionTitle>
4 Uses of the TLFi
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> At the start the TLF in its paper version was intended to a public of specialists in linguistics, erudite persons and scholars.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> The computerization of its data, the friendly interface with its help on line, the capacities of the software Stella give a new life to the TLF.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> As described above, all the possibilities of queries allow anyone, specialist or not, to extract any piece of information from that textual database.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> The TLFi is directed at the widest audience with the possibility of making queries without knowing the right spelling of a word. The majority of electronic dictionaries do not offer this possibility of access to words when spelling is unknown by the user. For instance, in the French word &amp;quot;sculpture&amp;quot;, the letter -p- is mute. Thanks to this first query of research, the user can ask the word by its spelling : &amp;quot;skultur&amp;quot;. The right answer will be immediately found. Besides, another friendly way to read the computerized TLFi consists in putting in evidence one or several textual objects by colouring them.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> Its interest for linguistic research is obvious for it is a powerful tool to help the user who wants to study grammatical classes (verbs, adjectives, adverbs, for instance), syntactical classes (in studying constructions of a verb, more precisely, the user can find the verbs which are followed by the french preposition &amp;quot;de&amp;quot;), etymological classes (verbs borrowed from a language, Latin or English), stylistic classes (ironical or metaphorical uses, for instance all the adverbs used in slang), morphological classes (the words ending with a suffix, or beginning with a prefix, for instance all the verbs ending with the suffix -age and which are an action of a verb). It is also possible to exclude the content of a textual object, for instance if the user wants to extract all the words ending with the suffix -able which are not adjectives.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> The use of the TLFi can also be foreseen for learning and teaching French language. Actually we are thinking, on one hand, about the pedagogic possibilities given by that computerized dictionary such as it is available at the moment, and on the other hand, about the modifications we could make in order to encourage its use in education In the use of the TLFi in teaching such as it is at present, we have defined a methodology whose aim is to allow the use of this important linguistic resource. In collaboration with a teacher we have prepared and experimented a set of pedagogical activities for children in the CE1 class (7 years old). The results show that young children, who are learning to read, are able, alone or in pairs, to use the TLFi to write a word in capital letters, to tell its grammatical category, to find a noun phrase or verb phrase containing this word or to say whether it is monosemic or polysemic.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="6"> As regards the modifications we could implement in order to get the TLFi to adapt to the learners, we could mention different types of modifications according to the ages of the learners. Firstly, we could, in the articles, change the literary examples extracted from the textual database Frantext for examples coming from another textual database containing youth literature. Secondly, we intend to present the information in a slightly different way. For instance, the syntagms could be found at start of a new paragraph, instead of being at a place where it is not easy to detect them for a young learner. Thirdly, we intend to give specific helps and commentaries on line to guide the young learner.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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