Loire Linguistics Laboratory (LLL)

The Loire Linguistics Laboratory (LLL) is a joint research unit (UMR 7270) home to researchers from the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche scientifique) and the universities of Orléans and Tours and to agents from the French National Library (BnF). Located on three sites, it is attached to the Ministry of Higher Education and research and to the Ministry of Culture and Communication for the BnF unit.

The LLL is member of the Fédération de Recherche Institut de Linguistique Française (FR 2393), and of the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme Val-de-Loire which is a service and research unit (USR 3105). The research unit is supported by the Délégation Générale à la Langue Française et aux Langues de France (DGLFLF).

The LLL has focused its activity on the making up, the processing and the exploitation of oral corpora in all their dimensions. It covers a whole range of subjects lin­guistics, phonology and phonetics, morphology, lexicolo­gy, syntax, semantics and pragmatics, discourse analy­sis, taking into account diachrony, didactic applications and natural language processing (NLP). It publishes the Revue de Sémantique et Pragmatique ‘(Semantics and Pragmatics Journal).

The LLL contributes to the description of a great variety of languages in a significant way portugese-based creole, samba-leko, dagara, sèmè and ikwéré in sub­saharian Africa, palikur and wayampi in Guyana with a strong interest in languages used in teaching ( the ESLO corpus an oral portrait of the town of Orléans, En­glish ‘dictionary basis for pronunciation, Spanish, Ger­man). Some work is being carried out on Arabic, Berber, Chinese, Japanese and Vietnamese.

Research topics :

• Language practices, construction of knowledge and literacy
• Construction of meaning
• Formal grammars
• Morphophonology