The acquisition of subject properties in adult instructed L2 English by Spanish speakers still constitutes an area of difficulty, especially in situations of minimal exposure where explicit teaching of the syntax of subjects rarely occurs. By exploring the L2 learners’ intuitions and corrections of grammatical and ungrammatical sentences containing subject properties, this article contributes new cross-sectional data from adult learners at three stages of L2 development: beginners, intermediate, and advanced groups. The data show initial L1 transfer and subsequent developmental progress. Yet results are clearly not target-like even among advanced learners, which suggests that adult learners do not resort to parameter-resetting in instructed L2A and necessarily apply general learning mechanisms to adopt L2 structures with feature specifications different from those of their L1.

Although “language” and “community” are assumed for all normal, that is, stable, conditions experienced by human beings, both phenomena are problematic in situations where there is no shared means of communication. We should like to know how they emerge, which one takes precedence or is more dominant (if such can be determined) and what factors accompany the predominance of one of these phenomena. In this paper, I approach the problem by examining the origin of jargons and pidgins. I propose, as a modest contribution to the enormous task that has to be addressed, a set of generalizations that might serve as a heuristic for understanding pidginization as a context for the emergence of both language and community.

The purpose of this paper is to describe in detail allophonic variation in Cree vowels so as to exhibit certain correlations between quality and quantity. The phonemically short vowels have considerable allophonic variation and this paper will be concerned to a large degree with their description. The pertinent conditioning factors will be stated in terms of (a) particular consonants preceding or following the vowel sounds in questions, and (b) the position of the vowel in the phonological word — a rhythm-stress unit bounded by potential pause.

Malgré l’existence d’un nombre considérable d’études portant sur les mots d’emprunt dans les langues romanes, l’intégration grammaticale de ces emprunts a reçu relativement peu d’attention. Correa-Zoli (1973) s’est adressé à l’attribution du genre aux emprunts anglais en italien américain. Un seul article est consacré entièrement au genre des emprunts anglais en français: celui de Haden et Joliat (1940) qui concerne l’intégration des noms anglais en français canadien. Plus de trente ans plus tard, dans Cahiers de Lexicologie Humbley (1974:67) fait remarquer (sans spécifier la source ni la date des exemples) que près de 90% des inanimés empruntés à l’anglais dont le genre est explicite, ont été attribués au masculin en français. Dans un article récent, Poplack et ses collaborateurs étudient l’attribution du genre grammatical aux emprunts anglais en espagnol américain et en français canadien (Poplack et al 1982). Ces linguistes constatent d’une part que le genre, une fois attribué, est stable, et d’autre part que seul le genre naturel du référent constitue un facteur catégorique dans l’attribution du genre grammatical, Ils concluent que les facteurs déterminant le genre sont spécifiques à une langue et que les emprunts sont gouvernés, en ce qui concerne le genre, par les mêmes processus et les mêmes contraintes que les autres mots du lexique.

This article is concerned with plural marking in two English-lexified creoles, Jamaican Patwa and Tok Pisin. In addition to bare plurals, these creoles possess two overt strategies of plural marking—a free-standing morpheme and the suffix -s. The analytic and inflectional plural markers occur according to different linguistic constraints. It appears that the creoles use two conceptually and typologically different number marking systems — that of set noun languages, based on the opposition between singleton and collective sets, and that of singular object noun languages, based on the opposition between singular and plural individuals. This poses problems for the definition of the lexical semantics of the creole nouns if one assumes the existence of cross-linguistic differences. The analysis proposed here is based on the universalist approach to lexical semantics. Under this approach, individuated and collective (set) interpretations of plurals are encoded in the noun phrase structure.

Babine, which has also been known as Northern Carrier, has two major dialects, Lake Babine (LB) spoken in Babine Lake and River Babine (RB) spoken in Bulkley River in northwestern British Columbia. The speakers of the latter in Moricetown and Hagwilgate prefer to call their language [wətsowət’en]. The recognition of Babine as a language distinct from Carrier is based on the work of Hildebrandt and Story (1974), Kari (1975), and Story (1984). In claiming Babine as a distinct language, rather than a Carrier dialect, Story (1984:1) cites “the Babine vowel shift”. She presents an extensive discussion of the historical process of vowel shift conditioned by two categories of syllable-initial consonants, which she calls F(ortis)-Mutation and L(enis)-Mutation.

The development of contrastive studies (CS) in recent years, judging by the proliferation of projects and published materials, has been accompanied since the late sixties by vigorous discussions and controversies concerning the theoretical status of CS, their form and their place in both general and applied linguistics.

Many linguists and language teachers have gone so far as to reject the validity and usefulness of CS (cf. Alatis, 1968). It seems that this attitude results from a number of misunderstandings created by such factors as the peculiar methodological status of CS, the lack of a clear-cut distinction between theoretical and applied CS (Stockwell, 1968:25; Fisiak, 1971:88ff), and the lack of any precise formulation of the different aims of theoretical CS and applied CS, as well as the confusion of the relationship between CS, psycholinguistic theories of interference and errors, and the theory of second language learning (Zabrocki, 1976). Some confusion also stems from the misunderstanding of the relationship between CS and linguistic theory.

Cet article est essentiellement extrait (avec les adaptations nécessaires) du mémoire de maîtrise (Lagacé, 1984) déposé en juin 1984, mais non publié, mémoire qui analysait les relations concessives et les structures syntaxiques connexes afin d’établir une systématique à la fois sémantique et syntaxique permettant de définir ce champ linguistique et de créer des outils d’analyse et d’exploration.

En créole haïtien (CH), l’agglutination du déterminant dans certains items lexicaux empruntés au français réalise des paires minimales révélant dans la plupart des cas une distinction sémantique évidente entre la forme à déterminant préfixé et sa correspondante non agglutinée. Ceci est illustré dans l’opposition établie entre listoua ‘histoire’ et istoua ‘une histoire’. Quelle est la source d’un tel type de distinction?

Pour Baker (1984, 1986), la fréquence d’apparition d’un article particulier devant certains noms du français plutôt que d’autres constitue une condition préliminaire ayant favorisé l’agglutination du déterminant. L’influence de la structure morphologique des langues sources permet, quant à elle, d’expliquer l’inégale répartition de ce phénomène dans les différents créoles à base lexicale française.

Une série d’articles sur les consonnes épenthétiques est apparue dans les pages de cette revue ces dix dernières années: Walker (1978, 1981), Morin (1980), Singh (1980), Wetzels (1985), Piggott et Singh (1985) et Picard (1987), passant progressivement d’un problème très particulier (le statut phonologique en ancien français des consonnes épenthétiques issues du gallo-roman) à des théories générales sur l’épenthèse. Un certain nombre de données et d’analyses antérieures n’ont malheureusement pas été utilisées par le dernier de ces auteurs, conduisant ainsi à des généralisations hâtives et probablement fausses. Il est peut-être temps maintenant de rappeler quelques-unes des analyses antérieures et de revenir sur certaines de ces généralisations.

My starting point is the theory of CV phonology as developed by Clements and Keyser (1981, 1983) which, in turn, is one of a number of theories of syllable structure that have been proposed during the past decade to replace the earlier linear concept of generative phonology. These theories have in common that the syllable is recognized as a hierarchical unit in phonological representation and not just a concatenation of segments. Kahn (1976), whose dissertation on English first persuaded generative linguists of the need to depart from the linear model, proposed a tier of syllable nodes (here symbolized as $) linked directly to the segments — consonants and vowels — of the traditional analysis, as in the representation of the word Jennifer in (1) (taken from Clements and Keyser 1983:3).

This article’s main objective is to propose a synthesis of the large amount of data measuring the use of French and English in the Montreal region, and to analyse the main determinants of linguistic behaviour in Montreal’s private and public space. A brief discussion of the policy implications to be derived from the results of this analysis is also presented.

The aim of this article is to present a unified analysis of Romance past participle agreement. Data from 19 standard and non-standard Romance varieties are considered. It is shown that in order to account for the variation found across the various Romance varieties, past participle agreement should not be considered as following simply from another module of the grammar, such as Case Theory, coindexation or the theory of functional categories, but should rather be considered from the point of view of a general theory of grammatical agreement. It is also shown that past participle agreement must be treated as an example of nominal-modifier agreement rather than as an example of verb-argument agreement.

We argue that a multimodal approach to defining a depictive class of words called ‘ideophones’ by linguists is essential for grasping their meanings. Our argument for this approach is based on the formal properties of Pastaza Quichua ideophones, which set them apart from the non-ideophonic lexicon, and on the cultural assumptions brought by speakers to their use. We analyze deficiencies in past attempts to define this language's ideophones, which have used only audio data. We offer, instead, an audiovisual corpus which we call an ‘antidictionary’, because it defines words not with other words, but with clips featuring actual contexts of use. The major discovery revealed by studying these clips is that ideophones’ meanings can be clarified by means of a distinction found in modality and American Sign Language studies. This distinction between speaker-internal and speaker-external perspective is evident in the intonational and gestural details of ideophones’ use.

Le présent article décrit la constitution d’un corpus de français oral, baptisé les Récits du français québécois d’autrefois (RFQ), qui comprend des contes, des légendes et des entrevues recueillis auprès de locuteurs nés entre 1846 et 1895. Leur parler est celui du Québec rural du 19e siècle; il montre la variabilité inhérente et les structures vernaculaires caractéristiques des dialectes d’aujourd’hui. Nous examinons les avantages et les inconvénients de ces données diachroniques et montrons que, si elles sont utilisées judicieusement, elles représentent effectivement un stade antérieur du français québécois, avant son contact intense avec l’anglais. À ce titre, elles constituent un point de repère pour situer les traits linguistiques actuels. À partir d’une étude de cas de l’élision du ne, nous montrons comment une comparaison systématique entre les RFQ et le parler vernaculaire contemporain peut servir à repérer un changement linguistique, à le dater et à suivre son acheminement.

Rex Wilson has clearly demonstrated that tape recording is a useful technical aid for dialect field interviews, such as those for the Linguistic Atlas. In his own work, Wilson obviously and properly handles the tape as a tool, not as a substitute for the fieldworker. Nevertheless, since the New World too often assumes that the development of a gadget automatically solves a problem, one may justifiably emphasize a few of the pitfalls for the investigator who uses the tape uncritically — and this while being in substantial agreement with Wilson's position.

It is important, however, that such skepticism be not the skepticism of inexperience, which is too often evident in criticisms of tape recordings

Although variants of the form [fri] and [bof] for standard [θri] ‘three’ and [boθ] ‘both’ are well attested in dialects as divergent as Cockney (Sivertsen 1960) and Black English Vernacular (Wolfram and Fasold 1974), there has been no attempt, to my knowledge, to treat these “substitutions” (a term with which they are frequently dismissed) as anything but isolated phenomena. Wyld (1936) and Dobson (1957), who are among the most respected authorities on English phonology, both specifically identify the [θ]/[f] alternation as an “isolative change.

A few years ago, a writer in a Canadian magazine complained that the word snye was not defined in any dictionary even though the Canadian Board on Geographical Names had certified it as “a lawful and proper generic term.” Later, another writer in another journal complained that none of his dictionaries included the word mukluk. About the same time, a Canadian novelist writing about a semi-rural part of Queen’s, near New York City, referred to a character living “near the end of a concession road”; unwittingly, he was using a term that would be quite unintelligible to Americans and, no doubt, to some Canadians. Still another Canadian, a historian, having found the word carcajou in an eighteenth-century document on the fur trade, glossed it as “the American badger”; had he had access to a Canadian dictionary, he could have ascertained that carcajou was a common traders’ synonym for wolverine, the word having come into Canadian English from Canadian French, the coureur de bois having borrowed it from the Cree, who also gave the English traders the term quickhatch, yet another Canadian synonym, one that entered another door, so to speak.

These anecdotes illustrate the long-felt need for readily accessible information about Canadian English, past and present. Happily, the situation has much improved in recent years, ever since the first volume of the Dictionary of Canadian English series became available in 1962; this series, completed in 1967 and revised in many particulars since, was the first extensive attempt to satisfy the need for Canadian dictionaries. To this series belongs the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles (Toronto: Gage, 1967), which attempts to provide a historical record of words that are peculiarly Canadian.