Base de Français Médiéval
Available
Editors
- Céline Guillot-Barbance
- Serge Heiden
- Alexei Lavrentiev
Description
The Base de Français Médiéval database (or BFM), founded in 1989, as of September 2023 comprises 219 Old and Middle French texts, covering a considerable geographic area and an extensive chronological breadth, with texts from the 9th century (including the first known French text, the Serments de Strasbourg) to the end of the 15th century. Both verse and prose texts are represented, as well as different genres and domains (e.g., fiction, history, hagiography, law, the sciences…). Thanks to its volume (approximately 6 450 000 words) and the diversity of the texts included, this database is unique in France for this period of the history of French, and, for Latinists, useful for corpus-based research on vernacular languages with Latin origins.
Since May 2012, the BFM is accessible via a web portal powered by the TXM corpus search and analysis platform. All texts can be searched, visualized and downloaded in PDF format. TEI P5 XML files are provided on demand by the corpus adminstrator (see contact information below). All BFM texts are tokenized, morphologically tagged and lemmatized with the help of TreeTagger (using BFM own parameter file). The direct speech is marked up with <tei:q> tags. As of June 2019, morphological annotation of 39 texts has been verified and corrected by experts.