In French, a quantifier can appear in various positions outside of the NP it quantifies over, whether this NP is the subject or the (direct or indirect) object of the sentence. This phenomenon, often referred to as ‘floating’, has been investigated since the early stages of the generative framework, and several analyses have been proposed to account for both the quantifier subject and the quantifier object in a unified way. However, to my knowledge, none of them has succeeded in providing such a unified account without recourse to non-explanatory restrictions. The main aim of this paper is to propose an analysis that does not require any such restrictions. The focus will be on anaphoric quantifiers (i.e. quantifiers that have to be linked to some other argument position in order to be interpretable), the analysis of which will be shown to extend straightforwardly to pronominal and adverbial quantifiers, according to the principles of Government and Binding theory.

The study of floating quantifiers raises the broader question of how to account for locality requirements in a satisfactory way. Basically, there are two possible ways to account for the restrictions on the distribution of floating quantifiers: either they flow from derivational restrictions, or they are subject to representational restrictions. I will argue in favour of the latter.

The analysis proposed here is essentially syntactic. However, reference will be made to the semantic interpretation of various structures: the position occupied by the floating quantifier at S-structure will be shown to constrain its interpretation. The semantics of floating quantifiers will however not be investigated beyond this.

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.

Nous proposons d'effectuer dans cette étude un large tour d'horizon des problèmes liés à l'interprétation de l'accent en général et de l'accentuation du français contemporain en particulier. Cet état des lieux (première partie) débouche sur l'esquisse d'une modélisation du cadre accentuel du français (seconde partie) fondée sur une classification fonctionnelle des catégories d'accentuation et la mise en óuvre généralisée du principe de bipolarisation accentuelle qui permet, selon nous, de rendre compte du caractère probabilitaire de l'accentuation du français et de la variabilité de ses motifs rythmiques attestés dans les formes prosodiques de surface.

We examine the phrasal vs. clausal syntactic status of French infinitives. Whereas a number of current theories assume a VP-hypothesis (contra principles and parameters theories, including the Minimalist Program), data relative to causative constructions in French are often treated as clausal constructions (the so-called ‘proposition infinitive’). The aim of this paper is to demonstrate (i) that it is possible to account for causative constructions in French according to the VP-hypothesis (e.g. in the HPSG framework); (ii) that it is in fact impossible to maintain a clausal hypothesis for causative constructions with respect to subject inversion in French. We therefore argue in favour of the VP-hypothesis for all (French) infinitives.

Si l'on examine les études linguistiques et chapitres de grammaires consacrés au subjonctif français, ou des ouvrages généraux qui se réfèrent à ce mode, on découvre fréquemment un même principe qui conditionne l'analyse: une forme linguistique n'a de sens que s'il existe un ‘choix’. Le subjonctif n'aurait donc aucune signification là où il est obligatoire. Nous nous proposons ici, après un bref survol d'auteurs qui s'en inspirent, de soumettre ce principe à la critique, afin de démontrer qu'il recouvre de multiples confusions conceptuelles et entraîne des conséquences inacceptables pour l'explication du subjonctif, la morphosyntaxe et, plus généralement, la démarche du linguiste ainsi que les propriétés universelles postulées pour le langage.

It is often assumed that the emergence of a new concept can be traced to the appearance of a new word in a language. The aim of this article is to show that the process is more complex than this by examining the evolution of a number of words and contexts in the field of high altitude topography, when high mountains were being explored for the first time. This is a lexical field of a somewhat special nature, relating to a reality that had always been visible, but had never been described before. While there are undoubtedly examples where a concept crystallises around a newly adopted word, the norm is a slow process of uncertainty and hesitation.

Some recent work on French tenses has proposed a new analysis of the difference between the imperfect and the passé simple/passé composé. The imperfect is said to be a relative or anaphoric tense, while the PS/PC are absolute or deictic tenses. A number of studies have argued against the more widely accepted analysis which sees the difference between these tenses in terms of aspect. This paper argues that the new analysis is fundamentally incorrect as an account of the meaning of the French past tenses, although it has brought to light a range of phenomena which need to be included in a full account of the behaviour of the tenses in discourse. I argue that an enriched version of the traditional analysis can account for all the relevant data.

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.

A growing interest in both the history and the historiography of linguistics has in recent times been seen by many as an indication of the discipline's increasing maturity, despite the fact that in the opening sentence of his recent book (1998), Seuren laments the still insufficient volume of scholarship in this area. There was a boom in the publishing of histories of linguistics in the 1960s and early 1970s: the beginnings of a critical historiography were established, and journals and professional associations were founded. The 1990s saw a new wave of activity: apart from a plethora of edited volumes, several histories appeared and to the now established journals (Historiographia Linguistica, Histoire-Epistémologie-Langage) has been added another (Beiträge zur Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft, started in 1991). Among the histories are one-volume publications by Koerner and Asher (eds.) (1995), Malmberg (1991), Swiggers (1997) and Seuren (1998), as well as multi-volume editions: Lepschy (ed.) which appeared first in Italian (vol.1 in 1990), then in English (vol. 1 in 1994), Auroux, vol.1 in 1989, and Schmitter (1987), which is the first of a planned eight-volume series in German. A trilingual volume is scheduled to start appearing (Koerner, Auroux, Niederehe and Versteegh (eds.), in preparation). In all this, there have been many ‘persistent questions’ (to use a phrase from Koerner, 1995), but there have also been some shifts of emphasis. Unavoidably selective, this article will attempt to survey more recent work, referring back to older work for certain key points only (for earlier work, see Koerner, 1978b; Ayres-Bennett, 1987; Swiggers, 1987). As certain questions tend to recur, concerning, for example, the chronological versus the thematic, the descriptive versus the theoretical, or breadth versus depth of coverage, I shall try to characterise briefly a number of recent approaches, before examining certain key issues in greater detail. Finally, I shall look at two examples from the founding period of contemporary linguistics in France.

This paper examines whether the conceptual distinction made by anglophone philosophers of language between an existential and a universal any holds for the French equivalents of any. It argues that the distinction provides a useful basis for anglophones working towards French, by enabling a correct choice for any to be made from among its various French equivalents. Within the more general perspective of contrastive lexicology, however, the existential-universal distinction proves to be less significant in French than in English. The specific lexical realisations of any in French straddle, like any itself, the existential-universal divide, but with the exception of n'importe qui/quoi/quel(le). The existence of the latter has the effect of displacing the conceptual focus from the existential-universal contrast to nuances within the universal field.

May I at the outset crave the reader's indulgence for focusing the subject matter very largely on metropolitan France. The regional varieties of French referred to in the title are therefore those spoken in the French regions, rather than, for example Belgian or Canadian varieties. Moreover, while it is impossible to discuss the regional languages question without taking into account the languages of the DOM-TOM and, indeed, the so-called non-territorial varieties, both of which have taken on considerable political significance in recent times, I have largely limited myself to reviewing sociolinguistic studies of ‘metropolitan’ regional (i.e. territorial) languages. I have also decided to concentrate on the present and thus may be perceived as giving short shrift to the large and growing body of excellent socio-historical work in the field.

Four major approaches are reviewed: firstly, the work inspired by the dialectological tradition on French regionalisms (section 2); secondly, quantitative variationist studies (section 3); thirdly, the Imaginaire Linguistique approach to linguistic perceptions (section 4) and fourthly, the approach emerging from the notion of diglossia, as defined by Catalan and Occitan linguists (section 5). Sections 6 to 8 deal with current issues – the Poignant (1998), Carcassonne (1998) and Cerquiglini (1999) reports and the vitality of regional languages as presented in numerous surveys of largely professed practices and exposure in the audio-visual media.