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The Centre de Recherches Interlangues sur la Signification en Contexte (CRISCO – Interlingual Research Centre on Meaning in Context) is a linguistics laboratory which is linked to the Institut de Linguistique Française (French Linguistics Institute), a CNRS research federation (ILF, CNRS FR 2393). The laboratory, which continues a former laboratory, ELSAP (Etude Linguistique de la Signification, de l’Ambiguité et de la Paraphrase – The Linguistic Study of Meaning, Ambiguity and Paraphrase), was born in 2000 at the University of Caen, at the instigation of Jacques François, Claude Guimier and Nicole Le Querler. CRISCO, whose present head is Nicole Le Querler, succeeding Franck Neveu, was anchored to the CNRS until 2007 and is now a research unit of the University of Caen. The research conducted in the laboratory is oriented towards the linguistic study of French (Old and Middle French, Modern French), of English, German, Finnish, Russian and Chinese. The main fields of research include predication and linguistic operations, the interface between meaning in tongue and contextual sense-effects, prosody, corpus linguistics, text organization and speech coherence, language typology, linguistic theorization and the history of grammars, computational linguistics. The members of the research unit make use of two automatic data processing tools developed by CRISCO to conduct part of their research : the speech synthesis software program KALI for French and English, and the Dictionnaire Electronique des Synonymes (DES – Electronic Synonym Dictionary). CRISCO also publishes a journal, Syntaxe & Sémantique, to which a linguistics series is coupled at the Presses Universitaires de Caen (Caen University Press). Keywords : Corpus, Diachrony, Discourse, Epistemology, Metrics, Prosody, Semantics, Synonymy, Syntax, Speech synthesis, Text Linguistics, Linguistic Typology, Linguistic Terms.

At present, the personnel of CRISCO is composed of : 22 academic staff (5 PR, 17 MC), 1 research-engineer, 1 executive secretary, 14 associated members, 1 temporary lecturer and 23 doctoral students.