Laboratory

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). In Orléans, the LLL is part of the  Modelisation, Systems and Language Pluridisciplinary Thematic Institute (ITP) of the university of Orléans. The research unit is supported by the Délégation Générale à la Langue Française et aux Langues de France (DGLFLF).

The LLL is home to 32 professors and lecturers and one research assistant, 9 of which are entitled to supervise Doctoral research, 5 are curators and 8 are engineers or technicians. There are also 34 PhD students in Orléans and Tours’ doctoral schools, 5 lecturers, two associate professors, one professor emeritus, and some twenty French and foreign collaborators which add up to approximately one hundred members.

The LLL has focused its activity on the making up, the processing and the exploitation of oral corpora in all its 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.

For more informations, please contact Jean Michel Fournier