ARABIC VARIETIES WITHIN CORPAFROAS Alexandrine Barontini - INALCO, Paris Stefano Manfredi - Università di Torino Dominique Caubet - INALCO, Paris Christophe Pereira - CSIC, Spain Àngeles Vicente - Universidad de Zaragoza This paper is a summary of thè panel General and technical presentation ofthe CorpAfroas project held at AIDA 9* Conference. It aims at presenting thè CorpAfroAs project and its possible applications in comparative Arabie dialec- tology. The first part of this paper is based on collective documents written for thè project's website, and various collective publications. In it, thè generai aims ofthe project and thè exposure ofthe main technical issues are presented, such as thè defìnition of transcription and glossing conventions and their practical application with Praat, ELAN and ToolBox software. In a second part, five con- tributions concerning comparable problems regarding in thè morpho-syntax and in thè prosody ofthe Arabie dialects represented in thè corpus will be presented. 1. The project1 The CorpAfroAs Project is funded by thè Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR) in France (2006-2010). The project is coordinated by Amina Mettouchi (LLING, University of Nantes) and it involves two other French laboratories, thè LLACAN (CNRS Villejuif), headed by Mattine Vanhove, and thè CREAM- LacNad (Inalco Paris), headed by Dominique Caubet. Other researchers from thè Netherlands, Italy and Spain participate in thè project, as associate members ofthe LLING or thè CREAM-LaCNaD laboratories2. We also asked two renowned scholars to be our external experts: Professor Ber- nard Comrie (Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, and University of California at Santa Barbara) for typological glossing, and Professor Shlomo Izre'el (Tei Aviv University) for prosodie segmentation. The background for thè project is thè current lack of transcribed and sound- indexed spoken data for Afro-Asiatic languages. hi a technical context where it ' Website: http://corpafroas.tge-adonis.fr/ 2 The members ofthe project are thè following: — LLING (University of Nantes) & Associates: Amina Mettouchi, Azeb Amba (Uni- versity of Leiden), Mauro Tosco (University of Turin), Stefano Manfredi (University of Turin), Il-il Malibert-Yatziv (University of Paris 8), Cécile Lux (University of Lyon 2). — LLACAN (CNRS, Villejuif): Martine Vanhove, Raymond Boyd, Christian Chanard, Bernard Caron, Marie-Claude Simeone-Senelle, — LACNAD-CREAM (INALCO, Paris) & Associates: Dominique Caubet, Christophe Pereira (CSIC, Spain), Alexandrine Barontini, Àngeles Vicente (University of Zarago- za).