Studies of word-order universals have had great impact in modern linguistics, thanks to Greenberg’s (1963) work and to Hawkins’s (1983) refinements. Greenberg’s conclusions were based on a sample of 30 languages “for more detailed information” and 142 languages “for certain limited cooccurrences of basic word order” (Hawkins 1983:xi; cf. Greenberg 1963:74–75). Hawkins expanded the 142 “to some 350 languages”, and for “between one-third and one-half of these supplementary data have been collected of the type that Greenberg listed in his 30-language sample” (Hawkins 1983:xi-xii). Hawkins proposed extensive revisions in Greenberg’s universals based on this expanded sample.

This study examines certain properties of human memory which impose limits on topic accessibility in discourse. While the discussion is centred on so-called “dative” and “cleft” sentences in English, the work is motivated by more general concerns which have been variously referred to as “topicworthiness” (Thompson 1988), “information flow” (Chafe 1987; Kuno, 1987), “topic continuity” (Givón 1983), “degree of presuppositionality” (Givón 1979), “pragmatic perspective” (Dik 1978), “packaging phenomena” (Chafe 1976), “staging” (Grimes 1975), “communicative dynamism” (Firbas 1967), “the theme system” (Halliday 1967), and “linear modification” (Bolinger 1952). The term adopted here is “information flow”.

One important aspect of the study of information flow is the attempt to determine the conditions under which speakers make selections from among alternative syntactic expressions of identical propositional meaning. While some of the motivation for such choices lies in sentence-internal factors such as the animacy or definiteness of NPs (e.g., Ransom 1979), I shall restrict the discussion here to the issue of contextual motivation as originally developed in Smyth (1977) and in Smyth et al (1979). A particular syntactic choice is said to be contextually motivated if the information flow features which govern it are external to the sentence, and the alternative structure is contextually inappropriate. Where contextual motivation is absent, I claim that either of the candidate syntactic forms is appropriate, although sentence-internal information flow factors may then exert a weaker influence on syntactic choice.

Il suffit d’écouter attentivement plusieurs locuteurs franco-ontariens pour se rendre compte que /h/ est encore bien vivant dans cette province. Mais il est réalisé de manière si irrégulière qu’on peut se demander s’il n’est pas menacé de disparition. La chose ne serait pas surprenante, puisqu’on a déjà noté son amuïssement en latin, avant la période classique, et surtout en français moderne, quelque 20 siècles plus tard. Assisterait-on au même phénomène d’économie phonétique en franco-ontarien?

La question a déjà été abordée, dans des pré-publications, par Cichocki et Lepetit (1981) et Thomas (1982), mais l’absence de dimension diachronique dans ces deux études en a considérablement réduit la portée. Les données, en effet, étaient basées sur deux corpus d’adolescents francoontariens, provenant respectivement de Welland et de Sudbury, et ce n’est que par recoupements et déductions successives en synchronie dynamique que les auteurs arrivaient à postuler une évolution probable du /h/.