The Loire Linguistics Laboratory (LLL) home to researchers from the universities of Orléans and Tours and to agents from the French National Library (BnF). Located on three sites, it is attached to the Ministry of Higher Education and research and to the Ministry of Culture and Communication for the BnF unit.
The LLL is home to 32 professors and lecturers. There are also 24 PhD students in Orléans and Tours’ doctoral schools, and some sixty French and foreign collaborators which add up to approximately one hundred members.
The LLL has focused its activity on the making up, the processing and the exploitation of oral corpora in all its dimensions. It covers a whole range of subjects — linguistics, phonology and phonetics, morphology, lexicology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics, discourse analysis, taking into account diachrony, didactic applications and natural language processing (NLP). It publishes the Revue de Sémantique et Pragmatique (Semantics and Pragmatics Journal).
The LLL contributes to the description of a great variety of languages in a significant way — portugese-based creole, samba-leko, dagara, sèmè and ikwéré in subsaharian Africa, palikur and wayampi in Guyana — with a strong interest in languages used in teaching (the ESLO corpus — an oral portrait of the town of Orléans, English ‘dictionary basis for pronunciation, Spanish, German). Some work is being carried out on Arabic, Berber, Chinese, Japanese and Vietnamese.