Prescriptive attitudes to language seem to be more deeply engrained in France than in many other speech-communities. This article traces their development between the sixteenth century and the present day within the model of language standardization proposed by E. Haugen and in the light of the notion of ‘standard ideology’ proposed by J. and L. Milroy. It will be argued that early definitions of what was considered ‘the best French’ were based simply on the observed usage of ‘the best people’; later it was felt that the standard required more permanent jusitification, giving rise to the idea that the ‘best French’ was the ‘best’ because it was the variety most closely in line with clarity and reason; a third stage was reached with the French Revolution when this variety of French became mandatory for everyone wishing to be considered ‘French’ and ‘reasonable’. Powerful institutional forces are engaged in promoting and maintaining this ideology in contemporary France, but excessive rigidity in the traditional standard in the face of the alternative norms which exert countervailing pressures on speakers could lead to a sitution of diglossia.

We analyse genre in the speech of young people with multi-ethnic friendship groups in Paris in order to address the as yet unresolved question of whether new quotatives equivalent in meaning to English BE LIKE result from simultaneous independent parallel developments in languages other than English or from a process of calquing. We conclude that French quotative genre results from independent internal developments, but that it enters the French quotative system in the same way that BE LIKE entered the English system, driven by the meanings of ‘similarity’ or ‘approximation’ that are shared by the lexical item genre in a range of syntactic categories. We propose that in order for a new similarity quotative to emerge, a lexical item with a meaning of ‘similarity’ or ‘approximation’ must become syntactically multifunctional, and that the use of that lexical item must reach a critical frequency threshold. In the case of genre we suggest that the necessary increase in frequency results from the development of the lexical item into a discourse marker. We also analyse another new French quotative, ETRE LA, a sequence that we find is used to highlight activity of many kinds (including, but not confined to, spoken behaviour). The trajectory followed by each of the new quotative expressions conforms to De Smet's proposals about how linguistic innovations spread through the grammar.

Cet article porte sie les noms propres ‘méonymiques’ tels que du Mozart et Un Rodin dans J'secoute du Mozart et Paul a acheté un Rodin. I1 a pour objectif de répondre au double probléme que posent l'origine du genre masculin invariable et la variation de sens qu'sentraīne le passage du massif au comptable et inversement du comptanle au massif. Notre réponse au premier problÈme établit que le masculin est une valeur par défaut, découlant du changement de référent d'un nom propre animé disposant d'un genre sémantique à un référent inanimé doté d's un genre grammatical arbitraire. Pour résodure le second, nous postulons une opposition entre traits inhérents et traits dérivés de la distinction massif/comptable.

Our study presents a variationist analysis of lexical variation in L2 immersion in French. Two variables are considered: a) words referring to remunerated work, e.g. travail; b) verbs used to indicate one's place of residence, e.g. habiter. One linguistic factor, priming in the interviewer's question, is shown to condition both variables. A number of social factors are also considered. The only correlation that obtains with a social factor is speakers' home language for the ‘work’ variable. The main finding from our study is that in comparison to L1 Canadian Francophones, the immersion students make use of a limited number of lexical variants and show no knowledge of highly frequent non standard L1 forms.

In previous discussion of the phonological interpretation of nasal vowels in liaison, the assumption has been that there are just two competing patterns, seen in bon ami and mon ami. Compelling evidence exists however of a third pattern which involves ‘ZERO-liaison’ or the non-use of a distinct liaison alternant. Strikingly, this pattern is found in contexts where productive liaison usage can be tested for, and consequently it may be viewed as the emerging default arrangement in modern French pronunciation. In the light of this, a new interpretation is proposed for liaison with nasal vowels.

Le débat sur le statut grammatical en français (adverbes ou prépositions ?) de certains éléments de la phrase a souvent porté sur le cas des ‘prépositions orphelines’. Dans ce cadre, on s'intéresse au cas particulier des structures du type: ‘il m'a sauté dessus’, ‘je lui ai couru après’, ‘elle me tourne autour’, etc., où un élément prépositionnel (ou adverbial ?) se trouve postposé au pronom qu'il régit. Un examen systématique de ce type de constructions, très fréquentes en français parlé, met en évidence, sur la base d'inventaires et d'un corpus de français parlé et écrit, leur statut particulier, du double point de vue syntaxique et sémantique. Au-delà du strict point de vue syntaxique, l'examen débouche sur plusieurs observations: inventaire et nature des verbes et éléments prépositionnels, domaines sémantiques, statut lexical des unités ‘VII’ inventoriées.

This article examines the use of second-person pronouns in on-line French language discussion fora, with specific focus on Doctissimo and Meilleur du chef, two fora from which approximately 400,000 words were collected for this corpus. Two hundred discussion threads (i.e., series of linked postings), with a minimum of fifteen postings (i.e., messages) and a maximum of twenty per thread, were analysed in three different ways in order to determine whether tu, vous-singular, or neither could be considered the default address pronoun. The results of the analysis suggest that while tu is clearly preferred in many cases, its use has not become systematic.

This paper outlines the development of socio-historical studies of French and examines some of the problems with attempting to apply sociolinguistic methods and models of the type derived from Labov's work to the study of a past état de langue. It is argued that, despite the many difficulties both of data collection and of analysis and interpretation, the study of past variation is essential.

Notre objectif est de montrer que les unités définies en laboratoire par la phonologie intonative sont non pas seulement identifiables dans la « parole naturelle », mais-jouent également un rôle discursif et interactionnel. Cependant, en vue de procéder à leur identification, on doit réussir à séparer, dans des données non contrôlées, la structure phonologique des autres types d'information encodés par la prosodie. Cela inclut à la fois des variations prosodiques « orthogonales » et graduelles de registre mélodique et de tempo, relative à la structure informationnelle ou au marquage du discours rapporté, mais aussi les disfluences (inhérentes aux processus de la production de la parole), qui jouent un rôle important dans la négociation de la prise de tours.

Cet article expose les fondements et la démarche de notre approche des relations de l'accentuation au phrasé prosodique en français. Cette approche s'inscrit dans un cadre théorique général que nous exposons dans la première partie. D'autre part, elle s'appuie sur des principes généraux et sur des principes spécifiques au français que nous présentons dans la seconde partie. Ces principes supervisent des dispositifs de projection accentuelle fonctionnellement motivés (décrits dans la troisième partie) dont l'application conduit à la construction des trois domaines prosodiques qui constituent selon nous le système-noyau du phrasé prosodique du français: l'unité tonale, le syntagme prosodique et l'unité intonative. Ces unités sont illustrées par des exemples empruntés à divers types de corpus.

The fact that the subject clitic on has such a wide range of referential values has been studied extensively, in particular from a variationist perspective. Quantitative methods have been used (e.g. Laberge and Sankoff, 1980) to establish correlations between, on the one hand, on and its paradigmatic ‘equivalents’ tu and vous and, on the other, a number of linguistic, discoursal and social variables. Indeed, pragmatic factors figure increasingly prominently amongst investigated constraints on use and interpretation. It is the aim of this paper to explore, from a broadly qualitative, non-variationist perspective, and within the context of Brown and Levinson's ‘Politeness Theory’ (1978, 1987), how speakers can exploit the indeterminacy of pronominal reference and in particular that of the French indeterminate pronoun on in the interests of face protection.

Cet article porte sur la variation syntaxique entre qu’est-ce (que) et pourquoi dans les questions rhétoriques conflictuelles (QRC). Le corpus utilisé est constitué de 38 films du cinéma de banlieue afin d’observer cette variation chez les locuteurs du français multiculturel, garants d’un langage très expressif. Il s’avère que la structure /kesk/ est une structure très emphatique, directe et plus menaçante que sa variante en pourquoi, qui elle, est ambiguë entre une demande d’information traditionnelle et une QRC. Cette structure, /kesk/, utilisée sans distinction d’âge et favorisée par les locuteurs masculins du corpus, se révèle être un outil communicatif très puissant et présent dans le français parlé dès 1668 chez Molière.

Despite the fact that a French (Norman) dialect has been spoken on Guernsey for over a thousand years, very little work has been done on this variety. This paper begins to redress that balance by investigating the position of the subjunctive mood in spoken and written Guernsey Norman French. As well as considering the vitality of the present and imperfect subjunctive and documenting their usage in so-called ‘grammar book’ contexts, the mood's morphology is examined, revealing in some cases survival of forms found in the medieval Norman dialect. Furthermore, it is found that the conditional tense may replace the subjunctive in certain contexts and possible reasons for this are also examined.

L'article propose de questionner la production discursive des normes (les discours tenus sur les façons de parler d'autrui ou de soi-même) sous l'angle de la multipolarisation des espaces de référence. Il rend ainsi dans un premier temps compte d'enquêtes épilinguistiques effectuées dans trois configurations urbaines distinctes: 1. le discours sur l'accent de Rouen, forme linguistique identitaire et en même temps stigmatisée, 2. le discours sur le cauchois d'Yvetot (le cauchois est une des variétés du normand), et 3. le discours sur les langues à Rennes (entre autres, autour de la langue française et des langues bretonnes). Dans un second temps, après avoir rappelé les propositions théoriques concernant la spatialité en sociolinguistique urbaine, il présente une modélisation inédite de l'espace urbanisé pour tenter de mieux saisir les spécificités des dynamiques discursives impliquées par la culture urbaine. Il commente, en regard avec le concept de nivellement, les conceptualisations qui sont à la base d'une telle approche, et notamment la centralité linguistique comme processus producteur de normes et son corollaire quasi dichotomique, le confinement linguistique, comme processus vecteur de contre-norme.

Cet article apporte un éclairage nouveau sur la dimension diatopique de la liaison en français, largement négligée dans la littérature par rapport à la variation sociale ou stylistique. L'analyse de données récentes du corpus PFC montre une variation importante dans l'espace francophone, au-delà d'un ensemble stable de contextes de liaison catégorique. Deux dimensions de la variabilité sont identifiées: (1) la réalisation de la liaison variable, reliée au contact avec des langues qui maintiennent l'autonomie prosodique du mot ; (2) la prégnance des liaisons non standard, associée au poids de la norme dans le développement historique des variétés.

Anglo-Norman (AN) showed a tendency to lose Old French conjugation and gender inflectional distinctions, but is thought to have largely maintained the syntax of Old French. This study considers whether in the early 14th century AN syntax continued to follow continental French (CF) by moving towards new word-order patterns, namely XSV order and subject-verb inversion after et, which were to typify Middle French. Using corpora of CF and AN historical writing, especially chronicles, it is found that AN to some extent shadowed developments found in later 13th and in 14th century CF. In both AN and CF, XSV order was widespread with time adjuncts, but avoided with place adjuncts and direct and indirect objects. This dissociation was not calqued on Old/Middle English subject-verb inversion, which showed a different dissociation, i.e. inversion of verb and nominal subjects, but not pronominal subjects; AN showed no influence of this contrast. Inversion after et was found in AN, but only with unaccusative verbs, whereas in CF by the late 13th century it was spreading to other verbs as well, having initially shown a similar limitation as in AN. It is concluded that underlying syntactic processes of change began to affect AN as well as CF, but that they were interrupted by the switch away from French in England in the later 14th century.

This article will review the parameters of a grammatical variable within the putative variety ‘Multicultural Paris French’, i.e. its distribution and use within a group of young banlieue speakers. The structure in question stands out as it has rarely been found in previous corpora in France: indirect questions following verbs like savoir, where the question word is post-verb (je sais pas il a dit quoi). We discuss which groups use the new forms in Paris, referring briefly to some comparable changes in London. This structure appears to be an instance of ‘change from below’ (Labov, 2007), which seems to have emerged in the speech of young people of immigrant background. It might also, on the other hand, be a long-standing vernacular variant, which has re-emerged, with specific identity-related significance, in this particular group of speakers. Its exceptional character in the Paris context highlights a lack of evidence for the emergence of a more wide-ranging, distinct multiethnolect, as found in London and other European capitals.

In Spoken Continental French, the subject clitic il can in some cases be dropped – for example in certain impersonal construction (e.g. faut que ‘is necessary that’). This phenomenon is of particular interest in the context of claims that this variety of French is in fact a null subject language, with subject clitics acting as agreement affixes rather than true arguments (e.g. Roberge, 1990; Auger, 1994; Culbertson, 2010, among others). Under this view, the il in impersonals (and other constructions with less than fully referential subjects) is likewise an agreement marker, which can be dropped under some circumstances. Here we report the results of a controlled acceptability judgement task designed to probe features which affect the availability of il-drop. Our findings suggest that verb frequency, subcategorisation by the verb for a quasi-argument vs. true expletive, and modal vs. non-modal status influence il-drop. We discuss implications of this variation for an analysis of subject clitics as agreement affixes in Spoken French.

Using texts selected from the C-Oral-Rom corpus, this study considers how linguistic and sociolinguistic variables affect liaison. In the majority of cases, liaison appears on monosyllabic function words. Individual lexemes differ greatly in rate of liaison. With regard to sociolinguistic variation, female speakers realize liaison consonants more often than male speakers, younger speakers realize it more often than older speakers, and liaison rates for speakers without university degree are higher than for speakers with university degree. Results are discussed in the light of models of prosodic structure and with respect to their implications for models of socio-linguistic variation.

Cet article étudie l'alternance modale indicatif–subjonctif dans les complétives dépendantes d'un verbe d'opinion employé négativement ou interrogativement.

L'hypothèse défendue ici consiste à expliquer la sélection modale dans ce contexte comme le résultat d'un phénomène d'accord entre deux paquets de traits – sémantiques – dont l'un serait porté par l'élément gouvernant la complétive, et l'autre serait porté par la tête fonctionnelle de la complétive.

Or ce phénomène d'accord est en grande partie syntaxique. En effet, non seulement les traits sémantiques responsables de la sélection modale doivent obligatoirement être assignés à des têtes syntaxiques, mais en plus, l'héritage des traits en question doit obligatoirement suivre des chemins syntaxiques précis, i.e. qui relèvent de la complémentation.