In recent decades, the digitisation of printed works and progress in NLP have significantly changed the way that corpora can be created and the way that research on these corpora has been carried out. It is now possible to obtain vast amounts of quantitative data which allow for fine-grained analysis and identification of linguistic or stylistic phenomena in written corpora of historical states of language. Digital corpora created over the last quarter century allow for an easier appreciation of the dynamics of French in the long-term: the Grande Grammaire Historique du Français (Marchello-Nizia et alii, 2020),completed after many years of work is a shining example. We define long-diachronic corpora as periodised corpora, containing texts chosen for their representativeness of certain states of language (from Old French to Contemporary French, for example) corresponding to the time-periods covered by the corpus.

The proposed themes of the conference take viewpoints that are retrospective (what have diachronic corpora shown? How can corpora built in recent decades be put to better use?) as well as forward-looking (what theoretical and methodological challenges await research based on diachronic corpora in the era of digital humanities and corpus-tool platforms?). Contributions can be based on both French-language and foreign-language corpora.

Deadline for submission of abstracts: 1^st June 2022