An experiment is described in which 74 French subjects were asked to list colour terms within a limited time period. Results are compared with those from a similar experiment with Russian subjects. The resulting data are used as a measure of psychological salience to establish which French colour terms are basic. Particular attention is paid to the two possible French terms for brown (marron and brun), and to beige ‘beige’, which may be emerging as an additional basic term. As Russian also has an additional term for blue, both languages are particularly interesting in the light of Berlin and Kay's 1969 model of basic colour term development.

There is currently no generally accepted theory of metre in French such as the one available for English. Students of French verse-texts look to linguists in vain for a clear decision-procedure for the metrical description of French verse. This essay attempts to derive such a decision-procedure from a historical testing of the hypothesis that the word in French has a prosodic identity and that metre in French can be seen as a structure which orders that identity.

We consider recent Government-Binding work on sentential negation, e.g. by Pollock, and evaluate a fundamental assumption made about the syntax of negative clauses. While accepting that ne is generated as the head of NegP, we reject the dual claim that pas is characteristically: (a) a maximal projection, and (b) base-generated as the specifier of ne. We offer a three-sided argument against such an analysis, invoking: (a) the incompatibility of the proposal with the status of pas as a nominal; (b) the interaction between pas, etc, and indefinite direct objects; and (c) the syntax of ‘adverbials’. We go on to consider Obenauer's work on ‘quantification at a distance’ and Battye's work on ‘nominal quantification’. On the basis of this work, we posit that pas is generated lower in clause structure, either VP-adjoined or as the head of a determiner-less direct object DP.

In the diachronic development of the modern Romance languages, reflexes of the Latin verb habere have replaced reflexes of esse, to a greater or lesser extent in particular languages. In this article it will be argued that the distribution of esse-reflexes is determined by a hierarchy of unaccusativity based on the semantic distinctions concreteness/abstracteness and movement/staticity, and that habere-reflexes have been spreading systematically from the periphery of this hierarchy towards the core. This process has affected Italian and French to different degrees: Italian has largely retained a syntactically and semantically consistent auxiliary system, whereas the French system, at a more advanced stage of the evolution, shows greater variation and inconsistency.

Evidence is presented from the linguistic intuitions of very advanced Italian non-native speakers of French and French non-native speakers of Italian about equivalent unaccusative verbs, and it is argued that the unaccusative hierarchy conditions both the degree and the directionality of difficulty in second language acquisition. The findings reveal an asymmetric pattern: it is easier for the French learners to fully acquire the facts of essere-selection than for the Italian learners to internalize the facts of être-selection, and the degree of difficulty experienced by the Italian learners with individual unaccusative verbs is correlated to their position along the hierarchy.

Les langues offrent souvent des exemples d'évolution phonique qui semblent, à tort, contredire le principe des changements phonétiques ‘vrais’, principe selon lequel ‘toutes les réalisations d'un phonème donné, dans un contexte donné, changent dans le même sens et à la même allure’. De plus, un même locuteur peut, d'un moment à l'autre, prononcer le même mot avec des phonèmes différents. Ce phénomène, connu sous le nom de fluctuations, n'affecte pas tous les monèmes dans lesquels figurent les phonèmes en question et on ne l'observe que lorsque se trouvent en contact constant des locuteurs aux systèmes partiellement différents, chaque locuteur adaptant inconsciemment sa prononciation, pour certains mots, à celle de ses interlocuteurs. Ce type de changement est en fait propagé par emprunt de formes lexicales à un système voisin. Lorsqu'on peut étudier ces changements sur le vif au moment même où ils se produisent, il s'avère particulièrement important de distinguer entre les évolutions que l'on peut décrire uniquement en termes phoniques, indépendamment de toute référence grammaticale ou lexicale, et les changements qui se font ‘mot par mot’, qui touchent donc au lexique et à la grammaire et qui connaissent des périodes de fluctuations, avant de se fixer par convergence des usages.