Un dictionnaire électronique des mots à trait d'union

Abstract

M. Mathieu-Colas : Electronic Dictionary of hyphen words This study focuses on the problem of the hyphen in French spelling. It is based upon lexical data laid out in the form of an electronic dictionary, organized according to the principle of data bases (records and fields), which means that each entry is coded in explicit terms, both formally (flexion, variants, etc.) and semantically : 17,000 hyphenated words are thus described. This lay-out lends itself to a more precise analysis of spelling. In particular, it brings into relief the correlations between the use of the hyphen and the morphological structure of compound words (over 300 types are represented) ; it appears that the possibilities of normalization and harmonization depend on word patterns. Agglutinated forms are not always to be preferred, and there is no reason for the hyphen to be systematically discarded : the ambivalence of the sign (halfway between union and separation) reflects the intrinsic duality of certain forms of composition.