The xml files are annotated, using TEI markup, for a range of contextual phenomena (such as laughter, sighs etc.) and for a number of linguistic phenomena (speech and thought presentation, syntactic detachment, subject-verb inversion and the retention or loss of negative 'ne') that are of key interest for research on oral discourse.
The corpus contains 87 stories told by 18 different storytellers. Recordings belong to the collection of the Conservatoire contemporain de littérature orale in Vendôme, France. There is around 1000 minutes of speech in total. The stories include a wide range of story types, including, amongst others, contes merveilleux/marvellous tales, contes facétieux/jokes or anecdotes, in addition to myths and legends from a wide variety of sources. All stories were recorded in authentic storytelling contexts, with both storyteller and audience present. The storytellers come from a variety of regions in France and all have French as their first language.