Contribution empirique à l’étude du gérondif et du participe présent en français parlé et écrit

The purpose of our contribution is to study the distribution and use of present participle (i.e. sortant) and french “gérondifs” (i.e. en sortant) in spoken and written French, which is a question that has not yet been discussed in the literature, as far as we know. By oral French we mean spontaneous oral productions by native speakers including unformal and unguided conversations as well as guided oral interactions; by written French, the formal written language used in contemporary news papers. Empirical data analysis shows evidence that frequency of use and meaning effects of both forms considerably vary according to the type of corpus: both verbal modes are rare in oral speech, they are concentrated on very few verbs and grammaticalized forms. More over their distribution over spoken and written language show a reverse tendancy, “gérondifs” being more frequently used than present participles in spoken French whereas present participles are more numerous than gérondifs in written French. This fact could explain why “gérondif” forms may take over some values usually attributed to present participles in written French. The data used for the linguistic analysis – verbal forms and their concordances extracted from corpora of oral and written French– are the results of a semi-automatic computer assisted analysis via TaLTaC2, performed on non lemmatized corpora following a procedure of graphical forms extraction through local grammar based queries, categorization, lexicalization of the verbal forms and retrieval of the concordances.