ConCorDial III (2026) Conference – Continuities, Innovations, Transitions: Linguistic and Methodological Challenges

For several decades now, the diachronic study of languages has relied on digital corpora (cf. Prévost 2020; Marchello-Nizia 2004), whose diversity, size, and sophistication have been steadily growing. While the first large diachronic corpora (such as Frantext for French, available since the 1980s) were often compiled from printed editions, the parallel development of scholarly digital editions — grounded in detailed representation of sources and their materiality — has progressively given rise to a dense, plural, and sometimes fragmented documentary landscape. Recent developments in the digital humanities, the growing prominence of quantitative approaches in linguistics, literary studies, and discourse analysis, together with the rapid diffusion of technologies based on large language models (LLMs) and generative AI, have prompted renewed reflection on the boundaries between the construction, modelling, and exploration of textual data (Brezina 2025), including data with a diachronic dimension.

In this context, the third edition of the ConCorDial conference, while building on the two previous editions (Grenoble 2022 and Lyon 2024), aims to deepen reflection on diachronic corpora by focusing on four main themes:

1. the challenges posed by data heterogeneity and its processing;
2. quantitative and qualitative approaches suited to diachronic variation;
3. the historical evolution of textual genres, considered as a structuring element in the organisation and interpretation of corpora;
4. the new possibilities offered by AI technologies for the creation, enrichment, and exploitation of textual resources.

Contributions may address any period in the history of French or other languages and any type of textual data, with particular attention to proposals that articulate linguistic, philological, or technological issues.

Thematic Areas

Area 1 – Construction, Processing, and Interoperability of Diachronic Corpora

In continuity with the previous editions, this first area welcomes contributions on the challenges posed by the heterogeneity of diachronic corpora (Denoyelle et al. 2024): diversity of sources, formats, metadata, annotation systems, and graphical and morphological variation. Proposals may address questions relating to: (i) normalisation, interoperability between resources, and the implementation of shared reference frameworks; (ii) the management of diachronic variation affecting lexical units, lemmatisation choices, or grammaticalisation phenomena; (iii) documentation, preservation, and data curation challenges in a context of continuous growth and diversification of text archives.

Area 2 – Quantitative, Qualitative, and Hybrid Approaches to Diachronic Analysis

This area concerns the study and exploration of corpora in long or short diachrony. Contributions may address any topic related to: (i) corpus-based studies targeting the evolution of various linguistic phenomena at the lexical, morphosyntactic, semantic, or discursive/stylistic level; (ii) the interplay between quantitative and qualitative approaches, and the levels of annotation required for the study of diachronic phenomena; (iii) quantitative approaches suited to the analysis of diachronically structured data; (iv) the relationships between philological constraints and computational analyses.

Area 3 – Textual Genres in Diachrony: Continuities, Emergences, and Transformations

This area is devoted to the diachronic evolution of textual genres, understood as historically situated discourse traditions in constant transformation (Winter-Froemel 2023). Contributions may address: (i) the emergence, disappearance, or mutation of genres from a longitudinal perspective; (ii) the impact of these evolutions on corpus construction, segmentation, and annotation; (iii) the modelling and classification of genres and sub-genres in heterogeneous corpora; (iv) the relationships between genres, editorial practices, and the interpretation of evolving socio-historical contexts.

Area 4 – Contributions of Large Language Models and Generative AI to the Processing and Annotation of Textual Resources

This final area focuses on the use of LLM-based technologies and generative AI in the construction, enrichment, and exploitation of diachronic corpora. Contributions may address topics relating to: (i) the use of LLMs for XML markup, segmentation / tokenisation, lemmatisation, or PoS and morphological tagging of historical texts; (ii) the automatic extraction of metadata, assisted normalisation, or the alignment of textual variants; (iii) the automatic classification of genres or discourse traditions; (iv) the limitations and biases raised by these technologies in the domain of diachronic humanities.

Submission Guidelines

Presentations will be 30 minutes long, followed by a 10-minute discussion. The conference will be held in hybrid format (in-person attendance is preferred for presenters). The accepted languages of communication are French and English.

Abstracts must be between 300 and 500 words (excluding references) and should be written in the language of the proposed presentation. They must be submitted on the conference website (https://concordial.sciencesconf.org) in two versions: an anonymised version (to be pasted into the submission form) and a version including the name(s) and affiliation(s) of the author(s), submitted as a Word or PDF document. Please use the submission template provided on the website.

Registration Fees

Registration fees will be €50 for faculty researchers and €25 for postdoctoral researchers and doctoral students. Online participants and members of the organising laboratories will be exempt from registration fees.

Dates and Venue

The conference will be held on 12–13 November 2026 at the Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, Saint-Charles campus.

Key Dates

• Abstract submission deadline: 14 June 2026
• Notification of acceptance: 12 July 2026
• Submission of final abstract version: 1 October 2026
• Conference registration: 1 September – 15 October 2026

References

Brezina, V. (2025). Corpus linguistics and AI: #LancsBox X in the context of emerging technologies. International Journal of Language Studies, 19(2), 75–90.

Denoyelle, C., Kraif, O., Mounier, P., Renwick, A., Sorba, J. & Souvay, G. (2024). Le corpus PhrasméoRoChe : les défis de l’établissement des textes et de l’hétérogénéité des états de la langue, Corpus [En ligne], 25 | 2024. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/corpus/8501 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/corpus.8501.

Marchello-Nizia, C. (2004). Linguistique historique, linguistique outillée : les fruits d’une tradition. Le français moderne, 72(1), 58–70.

Prévost, S. (2020). Une grammaire fondée sur un corpus numérique. In Marchello-Nizia, C., Combettes, B., Prévost, S. & Scheer, T. (eds), Grande Grammaire Historique du Français (GGHF). Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 37–53.

Winter-Froemel, E. (2023). Discourse traditions research: foundations, theoretical issues and implications. In Winter-Froemel, E. & Octavio De Toledo y Huerta, Á. S. (eds), Manual of Discourse Traditions in Romance. De Gruyter, 25–58.