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Que signifie aujourd’hui numérique ? À partir d’une analyse lexicométrique de l’évolution diachronique de son profil combinatoire dans un corpus constitué par des textes parus dans Le Monde pendant la période 1944-2015, l’étude met en évidence les changements de sens qu’a connus ce mot. Ainsi il s’avère qu’à ses collocatifs traditionnels (calcul, force) se sont ajoutés, dans les années 1960, des noms comme commande, traitement, puis, à partir des années 80, disque, réseau ; dès lors, numérique renvoie à un codage et à une technologie. Au début du 21e siècle, les collocatifs ère, révolution, fracture signalent un nouveau changement sémantique : numérique saisit alors un fonctionnement social consécutif aux usages technologiques du même nom. Le programme de sens de numérique se caractérise ainsi par un empilement complexe d’inflexions, conduisant à son opacification. What is today's meaning of numérique in French? Based on a lexicometric analysis of the diachronic evolution of its combinatorial profile within a corpus comprised of texts published in the French newspaper Le Monde during the 1944-2015 period, this study highlights the changes of meaning undergone by this word. It turns out that, besides its traditional collocates (calcul, force), other nouns were added in the Sixties, such as: commande, traitement, and then in the Eighties: disque, réseau; from then on, numérique relates to encoding or technology. At the turn of the 21th century, the collocates ère, révolution, fracture mark a new semantic change: numérique is used to characterize a social functioning consecutive to the uses brought about by the digital technologies. Thus, the production of meaning by numérique is characterized by a complex superposition of inflections, leading to its opacification.

new version, with 4 Appendices including the data, of an article submitted 6 December 2019 to Linguistic Typology (28 p.), after cancellling the submission in a special volume on Valence orientation for Language Dynamics and Change, which was delayed.; This paper investigates the coding of causal-noncausal alternation in three West-African families of languages, studying divergence and convergence within and between these families. Atlantic, Mande and Mel languages belong to the same Niger-Congo phylum but display quite different typological profiles and have long lasting historical contacts in Senegal and the surrounding areas. In order to evaluate the correlation between typological profile and valence orientation and to identify contact-induced changes, the same eighteen verb-pair meanings have been analysed for all the documented Atlantic languages, and for the Mande and Mel languages in contact with them. A new methodology was designed for this, combining family standard-patterns and measure of deviation of individual languages. After overcoming biases in the list of pairs due to verb types and animacy, the results confirm the expected correlation between the favored coding strategies and the typological profiles. Moreover, beside pointing to some contact-induced changes and revealing a strong internal variation inside Atlantic family, attributed here to its historical depth, this study shows that some structural features may favor or preclude specific coding strategies. In this view, the equipollent strategy appears to be important for some languages and usefully included into a new typological cluster of derivational strategies.

International audience

International audience; This paper provides an analysis of the gender system of Ɓə́ná-Yungur (glottocode: bena1260), distinguishing noun classes proper, defined as agreement classes, from morphological classes, defined in terms of number marking on nouns. The gender system is typologically unusual in its symmetry and simplicity. Ɓə́ná-Yungur has three noun classes in the singular and the same three classes in the plural. All logically possible singular-plural pairings are attested, except one. Morphological classes are much more numerous than noun classes and they show a high degree of singular-plural polarity. We argue that many of the morphological class markers are historically stacked, and therefore that their high number does not reflect a complex proto-system. This is important, because the comparison of noun class systems is used as the main criterion for the genealogical classification of languages currently classified as Adamawa and Gur.

International audience; The term " construction " is not a label to be assigned randomly, but presupposes a structural analysis with an associated set of syntactic and semantic properties. Based on this premise, the term " serial verb construction " (SVC) as currently used in Chinese linguistics will be shown to simply refer to any multi-verb surface string i.e,. to subsume different constructions. The synchronic consequence of this situation is that SVCs in Chinese linguistics are not commensurate with SVCs in, e.g., Niger-Congo languages, whence the futility at this stage to search for a " serialization parameter " deriving the differences between so-called " serializing " and " non-serializing " languages. On the di-achronic side, SVCs are invoked as a privileged site for verb-to-preposition reanalysis, but it is left open what structure is referred to under this label. A precise structural analysis of both the input and the output structure is, however , indispensable in order to make meaningful statements about language change.