Cet article examine les clitiques sujets du picard. Comme le français familier, le picard ‘redouble’ les sujets lexicaux à l'aide d'une copie pronominale, ce qui soulève la possibilité que les pronoms sujets soient devenus des marques affixales d'accord verbal. Les tests morphophonologiques et morphosyntaxiques auxquels nous soumettons les clitiques sujets révèlent que s'ils sont devenus de véritables marques d'accord, leur comportement n'est pas tout à fait celui d'affixes lexicaux. Nous proposons donc qu'ils sont générés sous Agr dans la structure syntaxique et qu'ils se cliticisent au verbe en forme phonologique pour former un Groupe Clitique tel que proposé par Hayes 1989.

This article analyses Locating Adverbials (LAs) such as un peu plus tard, ce matin, deux kilomètres plus loin (‘a little later’, ‘this morning’, ‘two kilometers further’) when they are dislocated to the left of the sentence (IP Adjuncts cases). Although not discourse connectives, in such a position, they seem to play an important part in structuring discourse. It is this contribution of LAs to discourse that we tackle, providing a descriptive analysis and a formal account grounded on Segmented Discourse Representation Theory. In particular, we deal with the frame introducer role of the LAs and with spatio-temporal interpretations of these markers occurring in trajectory descriptions.

Cet article étudie les conditions dans lesquelles un déterminant démonstratif peut introduire un groupe nominal (GN) à référence générique. On y envisage successivement les différents types de fonctionnement du GN démonstratif, selon que son référent est repéré par deixis, par des indices figurant dans le contexte antérieur ou par une relative en relation de cataphore avec le déterminant. Deux propriétés principales se dégagent de l'examen de ces trois cas: 1) le GN démonstratif n'introduit un référent général que si ce dernier peut être opposé à d'autres référents généraux dans une catégorie plus large, 2) les référents généraux introduits par un GN démonstratif sont en relation avec l'événement (particulier, donc) que constitue le discours où apparaît le démonstratif.

Fagyal and Moisset (1999) suggested that vowel devoicing in standard French occurs most often in phrase-final high vowels. An experiment testing the effect of both immediate segmental context and sentence-level contextual factors was conducted to further identify the linguistic features involved. Six French speakers were recorded reading test sentences. Devoicing only occurred in sentence-final vowels, but in more contexts than expected. From a cross-linguistic perspective the distribution of devoicing in French is unusual. Final position is prosodically prominent in French, whereas in many languages devoicing is a form of vowel reduction associated with lack of prominence. Different physical mechanisms may therefore be responsible.

In this article, we analyze French and Picard data, extracted from sociolinguistic interviews with four Picard–French bilingual speakers and four French monolingual speakers from the Vimeu (Somme) area of France, in order to determine whether the two closely-related varieties maintain distinct grammars or whether they now constitute varieties of the same language. Focusing on two linguistic variables, subject doubling and ne deletion, we argue that the variation observed in our French data results from variation within a single grammar, while our Picard data display markedly different patterns that can only be explained by a speaker's switch to a Picard grammar. We propose a model that schematises our results and attempts to reconcile the notions of diglossia and variation. In addition to providing empirical evidence in favour of an approach that recognises the structurally distinct status of Picard, our data indicate that resorting to a diglossic approach for French fails to capture the intrinsically variable nature of human language.

This study highlights the complexity of French grammatical gender as a lexical property at the interface of morpho-phonology and the lexicon. French native speakers (n = 168) completed a gender assignment task with written stimuli illustrating common versus uncommon nouns, vowel-initial versus consonant-initial nouns, compounds and grammatical homonyms; they also indicated the strategies they used to assign a gender to stimuli. The findings showed strong lexical and gender effects suggesting that grammatical gender must be acquired for individual lexical items as morpho-phonological cues alone are unreliable and vary greatly.

The aim of this paper is to show how databases and computer tools can be used for archiving and browsing corpora of social interactions. The development of specific search engines allows for both qualitative analysis of naturally occurring interactions and for quantitative explorations of larger corpora. The paper is based on the CLAPI Workbench <http://clapi.univ-lyon2.fr>, an interfaced ensemble of analytic tools which operates on a consistent body of corpora to facilitate their description and theoretical reconstruction. The analytical part of the paper focuses on the uses of a discourse particle in French interaction: voilà.

Pour les sciences du langage, comme pour toutes les sciences, la question du rapport aux données est l'une des plus fondamentales qui soit. Les avancées technologiques récentes en matière d'analyse et de fouille de bases et de banques de données linguistiques ont donné à la question de la relation entre corpus et modèles une acuité nouvelle. Face aux constructions génératives qui voient la théorie comme fondamentalement sous déterminée par les données factuelles, de nouvelles approches ont été proposées qui mettent au premier plan les faits de langue observables et construisent l'analyse linguistique comme une modélisation des usages. Voir dans ce renversement de la relation entre données et modèles un simple effet des technologies nouvellement disponibles et défendre que les linguistiques de corpus ne sont rien d'autre que de simples dispositifs techniques au service d'une linguistique descriptive, empirique ou herméneutique, occulte les questions épistémologiques centrales qui commandent la relation de la science linguistique à ses observables. En réanalysant l'opposition classique entre sciences de l’exemplum et sciences du datum, je montre ici que la linguistique, et singulièrement la phonologie, se sont construites, contre la grammaire, comme des sciences empiriques ayant pour objet la modélisation des observables linguistiques. La notion de corpus apparaît ainsi l'une des plus anciennes qui soient. Comprendre son ancienneté et construire son historicité permettent de saisir ce qui est en jeu dans son resourcement technologique récent et permet de voir le moment génératif comme une parenthèse, certes un temps productive, dans la longue confrontation du linguiste modélisateur à ses corpus d'observables. L'enjeu de la réanalyse de la notion de corpus en linguistique et en phonologie est donc considérable, contre la vulgate saussurienne qui doit si peu à la pensée du Maître genevois, il ne s'agit de rien de moins que frayer le chemin d'une linguistique de parole, condition sine qua non, comme il l'a souvent dit, d'une linguistique de la langue.

This article tests Diessel's ‘integration’ path of development of adverbial clauses (cf. Diessel, 2004), with special focus on the acquisition of ‘causal’ adverbial clauses, in the context of the overall development of grammatical/semantic complexification in a French child's longitudinal corpus of spontaneous speech (Madeleine, Paris Corpus) from 10 months to 4;01 years old. Three main patterns are retrieved in the child's uses of parce que constructions in interactional contexts. Linguistic analysis of these constructions reveals a dynamic pattern of syntactic expansion, integration and diversification, here called the concertina effect, which may provide an insight into the cognitive and pragmatic motives for syntax development in first language acquisition of French.

This article supports the diglossic approach to variation in metropolitan French by delving into the subject from the point of view of acquisition. Drawing on naturalistic data from 37 native French children between the ages of 2;3 and 4;0, the investigation exemplifies the existence of two cognate, but distinct grammars in the mind/brain of these children. The distinction between Spontaneous French (G1, all children) and Normed French (G2, 4 children by age 4) hinges upon two crucial characteristics, i.e. the morpho-syntactic status of nominative clitics and the emergence of the negative particle ne. Accusative clitics with imperatives and past-participle agreement are also examined in order to gain a comprehensive picture of the two grammars. Finally, the emergence of ne is interpreted as a trigger forcing a speaker to move from G1 to G2 due to the total unavailability of ne in G1.

This article discusses ne-variation in French sentential negation based on the phonologically transcribed corpus T-zéro (cf. Meisner, in preparation) which allows a new interpretation of the facts. In the last decades, sociolinguistic and stylistic approaches to linguistic variation in French (cf. Armstrong, 2001) have shown that extra-linguistic factors, such as the speaker's age, sex, social background or geographic origin as well as the communication situation may have considerable influence on variable ne-omission. However, in contrast to most sociolinguistic studies dedicated to this phenomenon (cf. Ashby, 1976, 1981, 2001; Armstrong and Smith, 2002; Coveney, 2002) we will focus on the linguistic factors influencing ne-variation, since their importance is empirically evident but not yet fully exploited on a theoretical level.

One leading assumption with respect to ne-variation in literature is that the particle ne is most frequently retained in combination with a proper name or a full DP and is commonly omitted when combined with clitic subjects. However, there are many exceptions to this rule which, as we argue, can be better explained by considering the phonological form of the involved subject. Ne-realisation is treated here as an inner-grammatical phenomenon that is triggered by context sensitivity with regard to the element to its left, i.e. usually the grammatical subject, and not as a consequence of ‘code-switching’ between two grammars nor as a sociolinguistic variable characterising certain groups of speakers in the Labovian sense (cf. Labov, 1972), since we seek to describe general variational tendencies, present in nearly all speakers of contemporary European French. Our analysis, which is implemented in a Distributed Morphology framework (Halle & Marantz, 1994), is compatible, however, with stylistic approaches to ne-variation, such as audience design (cf. Bell, 1984, 2001).

Comme plusieurs variétés de français familier, le picard redouble les sujets. Puisque les clitiques sujets sont devenus des marques d'accord, il est logique de penser que les sujets redoublés sont les vrais sujets du picard. Cet article examine les sujets redoublés du picard sous les angles de la syntaxe, de la pragmatique et de la prosodie. Nous concluons que les sujets redoublés préverbaux sont ambigus: la plupart sont de véritables sujets (SN SV) mais certains conservent les caractéristiques de la dislocation (SN pro SV). Nous discutons aussi les sujets redoublés postverbaux et distinguons deux constructions: l'inversion stylistique qui place le sujet à l'intérieur du SV et la dislocation à droite.

L'objectif de cet article est de montrer comment le marqueur parenthétique tu vois s'est pragmaticalisé au cours des siècles. Afin de déterminer s'il existe une corrélation entre l'émergence de contextes syntaxiques et l'apparition de sens nouveaux pour ce marqueur, nous avons adopté une méthode d'analyse, en diachronie, de données de corpus pseudo-orales. Après avoir mis en exergue les résultats d'analyse en termes de déplacement sémantique et de complexification syntaxique, l'article montre in fine en quoi le recours à la grammaticalisation semble insuffisant pour expliquer l'évolution des parenthétiques et propose d'inscrire ce processus dans la perspective plus large du changement linguistique.

This article deals with constructions such as Jean a fait une promenade or Jean a soif which contain verbs called here ‘support verbs’. These structures are known to pose immense difficulties for the translator (whether human or automatic) and part oif the purpose of this paper is to suggest representations which render their translation easier on the basis of work carried out by the author within the EC Eurotra Machine Translation project. First of all, it is argued on linguistic grounds that support verb constructions behave differently from constructions containing ‘ordinary’ verbs such as lire or ouvrir. In particular, it is claimed that the syntactic and semantic head of Jean a fait une promenade is the noun promenade and not the verb faire which is a mere carrier of tense and aspect. We then raise the question of the representation of support verb constructions for the purposes of machine translation and examine several alternative possibilities. The representations adopted below are shown to lead to simple transfer rules limited to the substitution of lexical items which do not entail complex structural changes between source and target sentences. The linguistic ideas presented here have been implemented in nine languages within the Eurotra project but most of the discussion is based on contrastive evidence between French and English.

The quality of vowels in French depends to a large extent on the kind of syllables they are in. Tense vowels are often in open syllables and lax vowels in closed ones. This generalisation, which has been called loi de position in the literature, is often overridden by special vowel-consonant co-occurrence restrictions obscuring this law. The article shows first that the admission of semisyllables in the phonology of French explains a large number of counterexamples. Many final closing consonants on the phonetic representation can be understood as onsets of following rime-less syllables, opening in this way the last full syllable. Arguments coming from phonotactic regularities support this analysis. The second insight of the article is that Optimality Theory is a perfect framework to account for the intricate data bearing on the relationship between vowels and syllable structure. The loi de position is an effect dubbed Emergence of the Unmarked, instantiated only in case no higher-ranking constraint renders it inactive.

Dans cet article, nous explorons le fonctionnement discursif des titres en nous appuyant sur l'hypothèse qu'ils contribuent à la construction d'un modèle interprétatif du discours. Notre objectif est de montrer que les relations que les titres entretiennent avec le texte qu'ils chapeautent ne se laissent pas décrire avec les mêmes outils théoriques ni avec les mêmes méthodes selon le genre des textes. Parce qu'ils sont uniques, les titres d'articles de presse devraient pouvoir être décrits au travers de relations de cohérence. Parce qu'ils sont multiples, en revanche, les titres qui structurent les textes longs ne peuvent pas être abordés ainsi. La description de leur fonctionnement exige une méthode de linguistique de corpus fondée sur l'annotation systématique d'indices susceptibles de faire émerger des types fonctionnels distincts.

The present paper reports findings from a controlled large-scale (N = 1018) experimental study investigating how four different gender-fair forms influenced native French speakers’ estimated percentage of women compared to the masculine form (interpretable as generic) in 22 non-stereotyped French role nouns. The findings show that the masculine form generated lower perceived percentages of women compared to all other tested forms. In addition, gender-neutral and double forms were found equally efficient in resolving the male bias induced by the masculine form. Since the role nouns were non-stereotyped in terms of gender, these results suggest that the actual form of a role noun has indeed a strong influence on how the gender ratio of that role noun will be perceived. Moreover, the direction of the questionnaire’s response scale had a significant effect on the results, which entails methodological implications for future research. Finally, the provided ratios can be used for future studies investigating French role nouns in different gender-fair forms. In sum, our study suggests that gender-fair forms in French are an efficient tool for increasing the visibility of women, at least in nouns representing non-stereotypical activities.

This paper investigates the scale of vocabulary learning that appears to be common among British foreign language learners of French up to university graduation. These results are compared with historical data and the knowledge learners possessed in previous generations. This is done by comparing current students' vocabulary knowledge with students who studied more than 20 years ago. These comparisons provide very powerful evidence in support of claims made to the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority of a progressive decline in the knowledge of learners and the standard of school examinations over a period of decades.

This article presents a synthesis of the sociolinguistic situation of what the authors refer to as the ‘contemporary dialects’ of French in the France of today. The introduction emphasises the methodological and conceptual problems attending any such definition and evaluation, attempting to clarify the complex situation and to identify the various kinds of ‘dialects’, ‘uses’ and ‘speakers’. We then concentrate on the regional ‘dialects’ of French in continental France, urban and rural, and summarise a series of important recent studies, concentrating on local variation. We also distinguish the sociolinguistic situations of the northern and the southern parts of the country. Even though France is known to be a highly centralised country, whose linguistic policy has been aiming at monolingualism for the past two centuries, the article offers some possibly surprising and nuanced results that show more variation than established opinion would generally admit about contemporary France.

:L'enjeu de cet article est, à partir de I'observation du fonctionnement et de la distribution de données orales attestées et d'exemples écrits, de donner un statut autonome à la dislocation et de mettre à jour plusieurs cas de dislocations qui different tant par le statut syntaxique du syntagme disloqué que par l'éventail des relations référentielles qui l'unissent au pronom clitique.

Nous montrons que la prise en compte de la place de l'élément disloqué (avant le verbe / après le verbe), les marques formelles que sont les prépositions, les comportements des différentes catégories grammaticales et les bomes syntaxiques révélées par les subordonnées imposent alors une répartition de la dislocation en trois grands types:

le double marquage d'une fonction syntaxique conjointement effectué par le syntagme disloqué et le pronom clitique qui sont alors coréférents;

les cas de dislocations ou le segment disloqué est adjoint au pronom clitique uniquement de par les différentes relations référentielles qu'il entretient avec le clitique;

les cas de dislocations où l'élément disloqué est adjoint à l'ensemble de la construction verbale car il n'est ni en relation syntaxique avec le verbe, ni en relation référentielle avec le pronom clitique.