C’est l’année 1810, et vous vous promenez sur les Grands Boulevards de Paris. Vous avez l’impression que toute la ville, voir même toute la France, a eu la même idée, et est venue pour se promener, pour voir les gens et se faire voir. Qu’est-ce que vous entendez? Vous arrivez à un théâtre, vous montrez un billet pour une nouvelle pièce, et vous entrez. La pièce commence. Qu’est-ce que vous entendez de la scène? Quels voix, quel langage?

Since I first encountered The Parisian Stage , I’ve been impressed by the completeness of Beaumont Wicks’s life’s work: from 1950 through 1979 he compiled a list of every play performed in the theaters of Paris between 1800 and 1899. I’ve used it as the basis for my Digital Parisian Stage corpus, currently a one percent sample of the first volume (Wicks 1950), available in full text on GitHub.

Scene: a quietly bustling bistro in Paris’s 14th Arrondissement. SERVER: Oui, vous désirez? PIXELBUDS: Yes, you desire? TOURIST: Um, yeah, I’ll have the steak frites. PIXELBUDS: UM, OUAIS, JE VAIS AVOIR LES FRITES DE STEAK SERVER: Que les frites? PIXELBUDS: Than fries? TOURIST: No, at the same time. PIXELBUDS: NON, EN MEME TEMPS SERVER: Alors, vous voulez le steak aussi? PIXELBUDS: DESOLE, JE N’AI PAS COMPRIS.

Slides

For the past five years I’ve been working on a project, the Digital Parisian Stage, that aims to create a representative sample of Nineteenth-century Parisian theater.

I just got back from the American Association for Corpus Linguistics conference in Ames, Iowa, and I’m calling the Word of the Year: for 2016 it will be said . You may think you know said . It’s the past participle of say . You’ve said it yourself many times.

I am looking forward to presenting my Digital Parisian Stage corpus and the exciting results I’ve gotten from it so far at the American Association for Corpus Linguistics at Iowa State in September.

Slides from my contribution to the roundtable “Culture, Identity, Diversity: The Challenge of Multicultural Classes” at the Northeast Modern Languages Association, April 5, 2014.

Slides from my talk today at the Georgetown University Roundtable on Linguistics.

John Murphy of Georgia State published an article about using non-native speakers, and specifically the Spanish actor Javier Bardem, as models for teaching English as a Second Language (ESL) or as a foreign language (EFL). Mura Nava tweeted a blog post from Robin Walker connecting Murphy’s work to similar work by Kenworthy and Jenkins, Peter Roach and others.