A Frequency Dictionary of French (2009)

An attempt was made to project the register, style, and structure. of the source context into its translation. However, translations were focused more on meaning than structure, so some translations are fairly loose and sometimes creative. On occasion a translation may involve a word whose part of speech is different than its related word appearing in the English gloss. Since the glosses are only meant to be indicative and not exhaustive, the translations may involve words not shown in the glosses, but usually the relationship is readily apparent. Sometimes idiomatic usages or collocations may be used in a translation to show how flexibly the word can be used. It is important to note that the contexts were translated in standalone fashion. Since the context was isolated from its surrounding material before translation, reference of pronouns, articles, etc. is not guaranteed to perfect match the meanings in the source documents. For example, a context “Je lui téléphone” might either be translated “I’m telephoning him” or “I’m telephoning her”. Clearly one translation would be most appropriate to the context when viewed in its original source file, but to supply such is not necessarily our intention here.

The statistical and register information

The last line of each entry has two numbers divided by a vertical bar. The first is the dispersion value discussed above. The second is the raw frequency count for all of the variants of the entry’s headword. Some words also have a register code that specifies the word’s distribution across registers. The three registers and their codes are spoken (±s), literature (±l), and non-fiction (±n). A positive value for some register means that the word occurs in the top 5% of the expected frequencies for the words in that register, when compared against the other two registers.

Conversely, a negative value means that the word occurs in the bottom 5% of the expected frequencies for the words in that register. For example the first-person pronoun “je” has a −n register code, indicating that it occurs comparatively very infrequently in the nonfiction register. On the other hand, a very imagery-laden descriptive adverb like “brusquement” has the codes +l and

−s, meaning that it is very infrequent in spoken language but very frequent in literature.

Thematic vocabulary (“call-out boxes”)

A number of thematically-grouped words are given in tables that are placed throughout the frequency index. These include lists of terms for such semantic classes as animals, body parts, foods, colors, nationalities, and professions. Other tables give data on grammatical questions (e.g.

use of the pronoun “se”), word length, and variation of word usage across the three registers (spoken, literature, and nonfiction). When glosses appear in these lists, they may only represent a portion of the glosses given in the main frequency list. In addition, sometimes words are ambiguous in their meaning; for example, the word “poisson (fish)” is both an animal and a food. In cases where the word’s usage exhibits a clear preference for one sense over another, it will only appear in the list associated with the preferred sense. In other cases, though, where no clear preference exists, the word may appear in both relevant thematic lists.

Alphabetical and part of speech indexes

The alphabetical index gives an alphabetical listing of all of the words listed in the previous section.

Each entry in this chapter includes: (1) the lemma (2) the part of speech (3) a basic English equivalent, and (4) the word’s score in this dictionary.

The part of speech index gives a listing of the words from the frequency index, this time arranged by “parts of speech”. Each category lists the lemmas by their score in decreasing frequency of oP

R

plB

L

D

C

W

IF

r•

occurrence. The alphabetical index can be used to link a given word with its score.

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References

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Buxbaum, M.O. 2001.1001 Most Useful French Words. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications.

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Davies, M. and Preto-Bay, A.M.R. 2008.Frequency Dictionary of Portuguese: Core Vocabulary for Learners. New York: Routledge.

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Dictionnaires spécialisés de la langue. Dictionnaires de spécialité. International Journal of Lexicography (15)3:246–248.

Gougenheim, G. 1958.Dictionnaire fondamental de la langue française. Paris: Librairie Marcel Didier.

Gries, S.T.forthcoming. Dispersions and adjusted frequencies in corpora. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics.