-ing forms in contemporary French in the context of the Araneum corpus and selected dictionaries

Abstract

This article examines words ending with the English -ing suffix that have already been lexicalized in contemporary French. The first part offers a discussion on the perception of the -ing suffix in metalinguistic corpora, in particular in Le Petit Robert dictionary, which contains about one hundred -ing lexemes. These items are often accompanied in the dictionary entries by their official French equivalents. The frequency of use of these equivalents is measured by different linguistic tools and compared with the frequency of the original English -ing terms. The second part employs the functionalities of the Araneum corpus as well as those of selected terminological dictionaries in order to analyse the -ing lexemes in more detail and to show their specific features.