Lexical Richness of F rench and Q uebec Journalistic Texts (2024)

Abstract: This paper presents some results of a quantitative study that focuses on the variety and word frequency in texts from a comparative perspective. The study aims to analyze and compare French and Quebec journalistic texts on political and cultural topics written in French and recently published in major newspapers such as Le Monde, le Figaro, Le Devoir, etc. The statistical analysis concerns the number of different words in the text, the number of different adjectives, the number of different verbs (and also passive structures, participles and gerunds which contribute to syntactic and stylistic sophistication), and the number of hapaxes. French texts from France exhibit greater lexical richness and sophistication: they contain more adjectives, a greater variety of adjectives, as well as more participles and gerunds compared to French texts from Quebec. The originality of the study lies in the fact that it analyzes variation in French using a lexicometric approach.

## introduction this quantitative ongoing study focuses on the variety and frequency of words in texts from a comparative perspective. this exploratory study aims to test the hypothesis regarding differences in the lexicon of verbs and adjectives between the two varieties of french. the study analyzes and compares french and quebec journalistic texts, written in french and recently published in major newspapers such as le monde, le figaro, france-soir (france), and le devoir and la presse (quebec). quebec french is often perceived as being less rich than standard french (i.e., french from france). the feeling of linguistic insecurity remains strong among quebec french speakers. boudreau (2023) mentions that linguistic insecurity, common in the french-speaking world, stems from the way in which the french language has developed, from the idea of a single standard and a unitary, uniform vision of french written quebec french, especially in texts intended for publication, adheres to a model known as international french, which shows minimal signs of regional variation. these differences are mainly lexical; syntax and grammar conform to the standard shared by all french-speaking countries. consequently, one would reasonably expect few notable differences between french and quebec texts. however, our previous studies on variation in french @xcite @xcite highlighted the choices of verbs that differ in oral narratives in french from france and in french from quebec. these differences concern movement verbs and psychological verbs. thus, we distinguished the following types: verbs of perception such as regarder 'to look', voir 'to see', entendre 'to hear', and verbs of cognition that describe mental representation and activity such as comprendre 'to understand', penser 'to think', décider 'to decide', and se rendre compte 'to realize'. verbs of visual or auditory perception are more frequent in narratives in french from france compared to those in quebec french. this provides another avenue for investigating variations in journalistic texts. another study that we conducted on the use of adjectives in two types of narratives shows that french informants use a significantly greater variety and quantity of adjectives compared to quebec speakers @xcite . the linguistic means used are more diversified in the french corpus: we noted a greater number of different adjectives, a greater diversity of verbal forms and temporal adverbs. ## data and method there are many lexical richness measures @xcite . the most popular one is the type/token ratio: v/n where @xmath0. this is the formula we use in our study. @xcite note that "lexical richness measures aim to reveal the richness of lexis used in a text, with the intention also of discovering the richness of the lexicon which produced the text. but all kinds of measures turn out to have reliability and/or validity problems" @xcite . although in linguistics there is a distinction between lexicon and vocabulary (de saussure, @xcite , the term lexical richness is traditionally used in lexical statistics to measure the vocabulary rather than the lexicon of a language (see also @xcite . at the exploratory stage of the study, the corpus consists of 90 newspaper articles covering current political and cultural topics (45 articles written in each variety of french). this number will be increased in the next phase. the corpus in french from quebec (fq) contains 35975 words and that in french from france (ff) 36999 words; the average length of the texts is respectively 799 words (fq) and 822 words (ff). although it was not possible to select a large number of articles on a single subject, we opted for articles with common themes (post-covid-19, major political and social events). the statistical analysis concerns the number of different words in the text, the number of adjectives, the number of different verbs, and the number of hapaxes. there is no consensus regarding the delimitation of the category of adjectives, the criteria for adjectivity or the classification of adjectives. the literature devoted to adjectives is abundant and reveals several paradoxes @xcite @xcite @xcite @xcite . when talking about adjectives, we mainly consider their functions rather than their forms, because only some of the adjectives constitute a class (or part of speech) called adjectives. for the purposes of this study, we therefore take an inclusive stance. the main function of adjectives is to qualify nouns. there are qualifying adjectives (une robe noire 'a black dress'), relational adjectives which can be replaced by a complement of the noun (une décision gouvernementale 'governmental decision' vs une décision du gouvernement (literally 'a decision of the government') 'a government decision'), and referential or third type adjectives (une carte bleue (literally 'a blue card') 'a credit card'). we consider as adjectives nouns that are used as adjectives, for example, in situation d'urgence (literally 'situation of emergency'), d'urgence 'emergency' plays an adjective role. on the other hand, adjectives that form part of compound nouns which designate, for example, institutions, political parties, or newspapers are excluded from the calculations: la cour suprême 'the supreme court', la république française 'the french republic', le parti vert 'the green party', le monde diplomatique (literally 'diplomatic world', name of a newspaper). possessive adjectives which are considered determiners in the same way as articles are not taken into account either: leur decision 'their decision'. when analyzing verbs, we examine the number of different verbs and the most frequently used verbs, passive structures, participles, and gerunds which contribute to syntactic and stylistic sophistication; and types of verbs: psychological verbs which describe perception (to see, to look) and cognition (to think, to realize), and movement verbs (to go, to come). a long indexing work preceded the analyses. we manually annotated adjectives and verbal forms because of the specificity of morphology. in french, verbal morphology is characterized by a large number of temporal forms, simple and compound, marked by endings and including alternations in verb roots. some homonym forms can be verbs or nouns, adverbs, or adjectives: pouvoir 'to be able / can' vs pouvoir 'a power'; note '(i, he, she) 'note' vs note 'a note/a mark', etc. adjectives agree in both number (singular or plural) and gender (masculine or feminine) with the noun or pronoun they modify. a limited number of adjectives have several masculine forms for historical reasons: vieux (tableau) 'old (painting) vs vieil (homme) 'old (man)'. ## conclusion this ongoing research enabled the identification of avenues for analyzing journalistic texts in two varieties of french. while the genre imposes a certain standard and it is the same language, our results indicate that french texts from france exhibit greater lexical richness and sophistication. they contain more adjectives, a wider variety of adjectives, as well as more participles and gerunds compared to french texts from quebec. increasing the size of the corpora will enable us to validate the results obtained at the exploratory stage. further analyses will be conducted in the future.