Digital discourse, often referred to as computer-mediated communication, has revolutionized communication practices since the advent of the personal computer (Crystal, 2011), with ever-growing effects, as smart devices proliferate in every aspect of twenty-first-century human existence. Linguists in the francophone world first took note of these new digital interactional practices in the 1980s with the onset of conversation via Minitel (Levy, 1993), a French-born service that consisted of a computer terminal that connected via telephone lines to remote services like chatrooms, interactive games, and purchasing platforms, years before most Americans had ever heard of the world wide web (Mailland, 2017). Minitel terminals remained functional some 30 years later; the service was ultimately decommissioned in 2012 on account of outdated modems, an inability to support advancements in graphics and the earlier mass migration (in France and beyond) to the present-day internet (Mailland, 2017). But the introduction of virtual interactional spaces – in the francophone world and beyond – had marked the beginning of a new linguistic trend in which users found themselves regularly engaged in the production of written language infused with vernacular tendencies.

Used at first with their original (definite) article, the phrases exception française and fin de l'exception française gained instant notoriety after the publication of Furet, Julliard and Rosanvallon's 1988 book La République du centre: La fin de l'exception française. Before too long, the shorter phrase, which (contrary to what is sometimes asserted) was already in existence, also started occurring without the article, with other determiners, and in the plural. This paper details some of the splendeurs et misères (including progressive trivialization) of both the longer and the shorter phrase, thought of as exponents of a single formula.

This thematic issue of JFLS takes as its subject the connected linguistic phenomena of levelling and diversity in the French of the Hexagon. Diversity in language is obvious enough, is indeed part and parcel of all living languages, since social difference finds expression in linguistic difference. Levelling is, however, harder to define in a way that applies across languages and even more difficult to adapt across languages: the French term nivellement is spontaneously understood as ‘elimination of all differences’ i.e. ‘standardisation in the strong sense’, whereas the English term levelling has the sense rather of ‘standardisations partielles’ (the plural is important) and could perhaps be better translated in this way.

Le projet de recherche que reflète ce numéro thématique est le fruit d'une collaboration entre deux laboratoires de recherche conduite entre avril 2003 et décembre 2006, sous l’égide de l'Institut de Linguistique Française: l'ERSS de l'université Toulouse-Le Mirail (Toulouse II), et le laboratoire EA 1339/Scolia de l'université Marc Bloch (Strasbourg II).

Au sein de l’enseignement de l’oral, il est souvent difficile de convaincre les didacticiens du français qu’un recours à la phonologie et à la phonétique faisant place à la variation et la diversité des usages est possible et souhaitable. Pourtant, dès la fin du 19ème siècle, une autre pratique était défendue par des jeunes phonéticiens dont Paul Passy, auteur des Sons du français (1887) et coordinateur de la mise en place de l’API. Passy, à cause de ses engagements socio-politiques et religieux, de sa défense souvent mal comprise de l’API et de son combat pour la réforme de l’orthographe, est fréquemment relégué à une place relativement mineure dans l’histoire de la phonétique du français. Nous démontrons ici que les nombreuses révisions des Sons du français fourmillent de descriptions fines et de remarques sur des changements en cours qui, dans bien des cas, seront redécouverts dans la deuxième partie du 20ème siècle sans mention de son travail. Nous abordons alors la question de la norme et l’attachement de Passy à la variation et montrons sa modernité à travers son traitement de la prosodie, des unités distinctives, des réalisations allophoniques et de la transcription phonétique.

The final intonation in French wh-in-situ questions is subject to much debate. Although a wide variety of final pitch movements has been observed, recent studies generally agree on a tendency for final rises. In our study, we analysed the answered wh-in-situ questions (e.g. Tu veux savoir quoi ? – Tout ! ‘What do you want to know? – Everything!’) in a corpus of eleven audio books.

For our analysis, we used perceptual classifications by three annotators. Annotations included not only the perception of final intonational movement (‘rise’/‘fall’/‘plateau’), but also string-related (wh-lexeme; ‘wh-word final’/‘wh-word non-final’) and pragmatic (‘information-seeking’/‘non-information-seeking’; ‘hierarchical’/‘non-hierarchical’) features.

Our results show that a) even string-identical wh-in-situ questions can be pronounced with rises as well as falls and b) pragmatics affect the final pitch movement. If the speaker is hierarchically superior to the hearer, rises are less likely, and questions that are answered by the same speaker are even associated with a non-rising default. However, our data also suggest that pragmatic functions cannot be directly mapped to pitch movement. Information-seeking questions can be pronounced with all three final intonations and speakers may even choose opposite patterns for the same interrogative in the same context.

This article examines early attestations of verlan and related backward slangs in French in the nineteenth century. Its main contribution is the edition and analysis of the only known text, a letter, written with features of verlan before the twentieth century. This largely predates other attested forms of verlan. The principles underlying this early form of verlan are shown to be different from contemporary verlan, as is much other early evidence, though all forms have the syllable as their basic unit. The letter is evidence that backward slangs can originate in the education system as much as in the underworld of thieves.

Le but de cet article est de donner un panorama synthétique d'un certain nombre de concepts et d'idées qui caractérisent la phonologie générative moderne et d'examiner quelques applications à l'étude du français. Derrière le foisonnement de la terminologie et des modèles, il y a quelques idées clefs qui sont partagées par de nombreux chercheurs qui travaillent dans ce qu'on appelle souvent ‘phonologie non-linéaire’, ‘phonologie multilinéaire’ ou ‘phonologie multidimensionnelle’. On partira ici de l'approche de Chomsky et Halle dans le Sound Pattern of English (1968), illustré dans de nombreux travaux sur le français, pour déboucher sur des cadres tels que la Phonologie du Gouvernement, la Phonologie de Dépendance ou la Phonologie Moraïque. On verra alors qu'à un système bâti sur des structures relativement pauvres (séquences de traits simultanés et de frontières) que les règles phonologiques manipulent pour produire des formes de surface, on a substitué des approches plus ‘configurationnelles’ où les règles sont écartées en faveur de ‘principes’ et de ‘paramètres’.