How to use this website

^{version en français}

This page is meant to provide you with a global view of the scope of the ARBRES website, and help you to fully use its functionality.

the Breton grammar on-line

This website contains a full descriptive and formal grammar of the Breton language in all its dialectal varieties.

It can be used like a classical printed grammar, by browsing the table of contents, or by clicking directly on one of its major sections:

 1. Morphology 
 2. Constituents
 3. Syntax of the sentence
 4. Information structure
 5. Discourse

These five major sections will remain accessible during your entire navigation, on the left pane of the screen, Under Grammaire du breton.

Like a regular printed grammar, one can also browse it at random, by clicking on article au hasard.

It can also be searched through the search box in the upper right corner of the screen.

There is a glossary of the technical terms used, in Français or in English. Every word leads toward a definition page, with glossed and translated illustrations from Breton.

Upon arriving at the article you want to consult, you will find first a brief summary with illustrative examples, followed by a table of contents for the page. A typical article looks as follows:

 1. Morphology
 1.1. accentuation
 1.2. consonant mutations
 1.3. gender, number, person 
 2. Syntax
 2.1. properties
 2.2. distribution
 2.3. associated elements
 3. Semantics 
 4. Diachrony 
 5. Typology
 6. Terminology
 7. Bibliography

examples

Every example is numbered. The first line is in Breton. Below are glosses in French. Most glosses are active links, each leading to a full article with description and analysis. Glosses contain some syntactic annotation such as constituency. Superscripted numbrs are also active links: they indicate the different consonnant mutations (lenition in 1) that affect the initial consonnants in Breton. Separate glosses are provided for affixes.

(1)	Sevel a reas	ar paotr	e zaoulagad …
	lever R fit	le garçon [VP _	son1 2.œil ]
	'Le garçon leva les yeux.'					Standard, Drezen (1990:23)

The example ends with a global translation for the Breton sentence. Sometimes, when relevant, an alternative translation in the dialectal French of Low Brittany is provided above the translation in standard French.

(1)	Me am-eus c'hoant	da lavared	penaoz	ema ar wirionez	gant ar skolaer!	Breton trégorrois
	moi R.1SG a envie	de dire	que	est le vérité	avec le instituteur
	'Moi, j'ai envie de dire que la vérité est avec l'instituteur.					Français du Trégor, Gros (1984:176)
	'Moi, je prétends que l'instituteur a raison.'					Français standard

When available, an IPA transcription is also given, in green.

(4)	[ wa kOmâsǝd	ǝ rEzistâs		nEm fòrmo ]
	Oa komañset	ar Rezistañs	[ SC	en em furmañ ].
	était commencé	le résistance		se former
	'La résistance avait commencé à se former.'							Haute-Cornouaille (Lanvenegen),	Evenou (1987:627)

All examples end by indicating the dialectal variety (in italics), and a reference indicating the source. The reference is an active link, and directs to a separate bibliographic article, here the unpublished thesis of Evenou (1987).

reference pages

This website countains more than 150 articles of references for corpora of written and spoken Breton, and more than 200 articles of references for research works, books and articles, about the language. Each reference is associated with (when available):

• complete bibliographical information
• an active link toward the URL address of the reference
• the publication history of the work
• an abstract or summary
• reviews
• indication of the dialect of the author
• erratum list
• active links toward articles on this site citing the reference

A useful feature allows you to see exactly where a given reference has been cited within the website. In the reference article, go to the the Outils [tools] box and click on pages liées [linked pages]. You will get the list of items linking to the reference.

Explore a topic

After you have read an article, several options help you go further.

• Try the clickable links inside the article and explore the associated pages.

• Look for bibliographical help:

If an article, a thesis or a book has been written on the topic, it should appear at the bottom of the page, in "bibliographie". If this work has not been mentioned (yet), go to the general bibliography page in the Resource Centre.

• Look for pages of the same category

Each article is belongs to one or more category. For example, the article on kalz, 'lot (of)', belongs to the categories determiner, adverb, quantifieur et indefinite. These are listed with links at the very bottom of the page.

Clicking on a given category gives you the list of all the pages from the same category.

• Leave comments or questions on the "discussion" page associated with each article:

I answer comments and questions in a timely manner. I pudate the website accordingly, provide explanations, or develop new tools.

How to use the Resource Centre

The Resource Centre is meant to provide all type of information for research. It is always accessible through the left pane on the screen.

It provides the classical tools of printed grammars, and some less classical ones deriving from the choice of the digital medium and of the Open Science research paradigm.

Classical Tools

• a general bibliography

The bibliography, is intended as a complete, up-to-date guide to the descriptive and scientific works on the morphosyntax of Breton. Active links are made available to documents on-line. References used on the website are visible at a glance.

Specialized journals like Hor Yezh or La Bretagne Linguistique have a dedicated page listing their contents.

• A glossary of more than 200 technical terms used in formal grammar, and its version version in French

In order to find the French translation of a term, follow the links in the English glossary - you will arrive at an article whose title is the French translation or appears in bold at the beginning of the article. ***For translation from French, search for the terminologie [terminology] subpart of the articles.

• A list of technical abreviations, as well as traditional acronyms for old corpora and glosses.

What's new?

This website is evolutive, and can be used to share news about the morphosyntax of Breton, internal or external to the website.

• A news page

Here I announce calls for papers, conferences, important publications, news about the Breton language and also the lastest works on the website.

• It is also possible to follow the history of one page in particular, or check the latest modifications on the website under "modifications récentes".

• A page of useful external links:

In English, Breton, French, there are links to explore the study of Breton, electronic resources on Breton, on the Celtic languages or on minority languages in general.

This is a participative website: you can post informations in the news page, add new references in the bibliography, or enrich the links pages.

Find out more about a particular dialect

The tools of the Resource Centre are meant to be of help.

• Find corpora or references

The dialects of works in the general bibliography have been geographically localized on a googlemap. This lets you to visualize the geographical distribtion of works on different varieties of Breton.

A grammar gives a special feature for a dialect and you want to check the facts? The map helps you find references for corpora and grammars closest to this place.

• Consult the list of native Breton speakers who have produced corpora, identified by dialect.

This list is far from exhaustive, but allows you to choose an author ***in being informed of the type of language you would be studying.

• Consult the list of different usable corpora in the Resource Centre.

Provides references for audio transcripts, written, glossed, IPA transcripted corpora, etc.)

Teaching

There are many funny clever ways to use this website in order to create pedagogical content. Here are two suggestions :

• The page "Catégorie:Désambiguïsations" collects a clickable list of ambiguous morphemes, which have more than one meaning in Breton. This could provide for good quiz material.

• Specific maps of the Linguistic Atlas of Low-Brittany have been integrated within articles, making it easy to build cartographic representations for a given topic like consonant mutations.

• Why not propose a collaboration project with this website?

Open Science

This website ARBRES has been since 2009 an experiment of open and participative science. This is an open research notebook. I have discussed this experiment in an article: Jouitteau (2013b). [***ajoute liens à wikipedia pour les terms "open science", "open notebook science" en anglais, ici et ci-dessous/dessus pour "open access", "Science 2.0", "active/passive crowdsourcing" peut-etre "traceability" peut-etre plus].

Open Access

Open access means that the results of research are to be made available at the end of the process of research.

The Breton grammar on this website is freely accessible, and collects links toward other works made available on the web. Some articles are available for download directly from this website.

Research in the Making

Research is at heart a process accessible to anyone. Here one can see research in the making, with contributions, corrections, discussions, new hypotheses and ***???perseverance.

• The tracability of this work is complete. Each page is associated with a complete history giving all modifications made to it since its creation. One can see live how is science done, how new data and new publications change our hypotheses .

• The raw results of elicitations are available in the Elicitation Center.

Science 2.0

Passive Crowdsourcing

This website is provided with internal statistical tools and with google analytics. This allows for a ???***quite precise statistical representation of the way this website is been used. This anonymized data, a flow of about 50 human visits a day, provides a first ***???mean of feedback.

Active Crowdsourcing

The new digital tools allow for both cumulative collaboration (massive aggregation of small contributions into a single architecture), and a distributive collaboration (with differentiated tasks).

This project raises the question of your place in the process. You can help the project at many different levels. Will you take part?

Science for Citizens ***citizens - un citoyen en est tourjous un d'un etat: Science for Everyone

The object of science is not reducible to its civic and social impact: science has legitimate goals internal to itself. But when science can flourish in the civic and social dimensions as well, why do without?

• At the end of 2013, the organisers of the "Race for Breton", Redadeg 2014 asked for the translation of I speak Breton, what about you? in as many languages as possible. Within a few days, linguists from the whole world joined in with great joy and built the page I speak Breton, what about you?, gathering linguistic information from more than 77 languages. The self-portraits of Breton speakers [***which breton speakers??? portraits or descriptions] are now to be found here.

Le projet ARBRES d'Atlas

Le cartouche projet ARBRES décrit le projet d'Atlas de la variation syntaxique des dialectes de la langue bretonne. Vous y trouverez une description générale du projet d'atlas, une fiche qui explique comment participer au projet, et une liste des prévisions de collecte.

Ces fiches thématiques concernent toutes un redoublement de marques grammaticales, et sont renseignées à but de collecte systématique sur le domaine parlant. Le collectage des marques de redoublement à travers les langues d'Europe est un projet Edisyn.