TEI Encoding and Syntactic Tagging of an Old French Text

Abstract

This paper report on some of the concrete outcomes of a larger research project on the study of syntactic change. In this part of the project, we are collecting and encoding historical texts and tagging them for syntactic analysis. We have so far produced a TEI-conformant version of an Old French text, La Vie de Saint Louis written by Jehan de Joinville around 1305, and we are in the process of adding syntactic tags to this text. Those syntactic tags are derived from the Penn-Helsinki coding scheme, which had been devised for the syntactic encoding of Middle English texts, and have been translated into TEI. Thus this paper addresses two issues: the development of a TEI encoding for the text, and the adaptation of the Penn-Helsinki syntactic coding scheme. While the first part of this work raises issues of a textual nature independently of the language of the text, and proposes concrete immediate solutions, the second part points to a more general extension of the PH tagset to other types of texts and to other languages.