The paper focuses on the syntax and semantics of the French verbal prefix auto. It is proposed that auto is an intensifier stating that no agent other than the one specified in the clause (agent-focusing), or, in anticausative clauses, no agent (agent-denying), is responsible for the event. Syntactically, auto merges with a verbal projection, and the nature of the constituent to which it attaches determines and constrains the interpretation of the clause. The proposed analysis of auto provides support for generative approaches in which a v head introduces the external argument role, while a grammatical Voice head determines its syntactic realization.

The aim of the article is to explore a small corner of the interface between micro-characteristics of texts – such as sentence syntax – and the macroproperty of textual coherence, in the context of second-language academic writing. French and English passives are analysed in terms of their information-packaging role in essays in English LI, and French LI and L2. The analysis provides insights into the role of passives in academic writing in both languages and into some specific problems for English-speaking learners of French: in particular it throws some light on the excessive – and often erroneous – use of on, regarded as a substitute for the English passive.

Ce travail est consacré aux articles introduisant les SN dont la tête est un nom d’événement complexe (Grimshaw, 1990). On montre d’abord que l’article défini qui, selon Grimshaw, est obligatoire avec ce type de noms, est dû à l’emploi de la construction possessive (Kayne, 1994; Zribi-Hertz, 1998), qui a pour propriété de légitimer l’article défini dès la première mention du nom. Or, le français autorise également l’indéfini avec certains NEC (une ventilation des locaux). Nous montrons que l’emploi de l’indéfini indique le caractère comptable du NEC, et signale que l’événement décrit est présenté sous l’aspect perfectif.

Current research on conceptual and semantic representations is mainly based on prototypical word classes, such as nouns and verbs. Hence, most models of language processing and language representation rely on experimental investigations on these word classes. Until today, only a few psycholinguistic studies centre on the processing of pragmatic markers and hedges and their effect on speech comprehension. The present article aims to give experimental evidence for the processing of semantic meaning patterns and pragmatic functions of pragmatic markers. The focus will be on the question, if pragmatic markers and hedges play a role in sentence processing. This main problem will be illustrated and discussed by means of experimental data. In a monolingual sentence verification task with lexical decision, the meaning patterns and functions of the partially equivalent pragmatic French markers comme and genre are investigated in Canadian and European French. The results of the sentence word verification task provide evidence for an impact of pragmatic functions and semantic meaning patterns of pragmatic markers on sentence processing.

This article investigates the evolution of bare nouns, used without a determiner, through the history of the French language. The loss of bare nouns is charted through calibrated corpora of non-fictional prose texts from the same genres and region, ranging from the 12th to the 19th century. The change is first completed with nouns in subject function, significantly advances with direct objects, and progresses with obliques. The extensive quantitative documentation demonstrates that the change is impacted by the syntactic function of the noun, along the Accessibility Hierarchy. The speculation is examined that the more accessible functions encourage expression of (definite) determiners, thus explaining the pattern of change.

L'impératif nominal, qui sert à donner un ordre sous forme nominale au lieu de verbale (p. ex. ‘Silence!’), présente un cas intéressant et peu étudié de l'alternance entre présence et absence de déterminant dans un syntagme nominal. L'étude d'un corpus du point de vue de la situation énonciative et de l'effet sémantique des exemples permet de faire des hypothèses sur le signifié des différents types de détermination dans l'impératif nominal, et en particulier de deceler les conditions de l'absence de determinant.

This article presents the results of a corpus study of prosodic rhythm in the urban vernaculars of 24 female and male adolescents featured in the MPF corpus (Gardner-Chloros et al., 2014). Using canonical rhythm metrics, among them the normalized Pairwise Variability Index (nPVI), we show that there is no clear effect of gender and only a small effect of cultural background on the variability of adjacent vocalic and consonantal duration intervals, typically correlated with more or less syllable-timed rhythm. However, female and male teens with multicultural background who clearly dominated their conversational exchanges with their peers and also used multiple phonetic features attributed to adolescent urban-vernaculars in French tended to show more variability in interval durations, pointing to more stress-timed rhythm. We discuss these findings in comparison with other urban contact varieties in Europe and North America. We speculate that rather than the leveling of phonological contrasts, as in London English, or societal pressures to conform to monolingual norms, as in French spoken in minority contexts in Ontario, Canada, rhythm-type differences in the present corpus are tied to speakers’ allophonic repertoires and best thought of as elements of interactional styles.

Vandeloise’s (1987, 2017) principle of anticipation proposes that French verbs of motion can enable prospective readings of static locative prepositions. However, it has little to say about verbs of motion that do not have a prospective verbal reference place (VRP): that is, to what extent are verbs of initial polarity like partir and s’enfuir able to trigger prospective readings of prepositions? This article argues that each verb must be analysed individually and that prospective readings of prepositions depend on the interaction of verbal and prepositional semantics: for example, the movement away from a viewer expressed by partir favours a prospective reading of derrière but not of devant: this is due to differences regarding access to perception. The animacy of the Ground and its status as a material or spatial entity (Vandeloise, 2017) is also a key factor (e.g. partir près de + spatial entity). This suggests that verbs of initial polarity participate in synergistic verb/preposition/Ground interpretations that help to overcome their lack of a VRP. The prospective reading of the preposition depends on the choice of verb and Ground, thus supporting a distributed view of spatial semantics (Sinha and Kuteva, 1995; Zlatev, 1997, 2003, 2007; Evans and Tyler, 2004).

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.

Dans ce travail nous proposons un examen des emplois de l'adverbe honnêtement en français contemporain, ainsi que de leurs propriétés les plus saillantes et des liens existant entre ces emplois et la catégorie sémantique des marqueurs d'attitude énonciative. Notre hypothèse de départ est qu'honnêtement connaît aujourd'hui un triple fonctionnement: 1. comme adverbe qui caractérise la réalisation de l'action évoquée par le verbe de l’énoncé (i.e. Il essayait de faire honnêtement son travail; Michel Houellebecq, 2010, La carte et le territoire); 2. comme adverbe qui montre l'attitude du locuteur vis-à-vis de sa propre énonciation (i.e. Honnêtement, je ne pouvais pas les laisser là. N'importe qui aurait pu les voler; Daniel Pennac, 1999, Aux fruits de la passion); 3. et comme un adverbe qui indique un degré moyen, ou un peu plus élevé que la moyenne, du contenu de l'adjectif qu'il modifie (i.e. Le passage s'est fait dans l'euphorie factice d'un réveillon organisé chez Pinaud. C’était bon et honnêtement copieux; Benoîte et Flora Groult, 1994, Journal à quatre mains). Pour atteindre notre objectif nous avons eu recours à une série de tests linguistiques (de type foncièrement syntaxique et sémantique) qui ont été appliqués à un corpus personnel de deux centaines d'occurrences tirées de la base de données FRANTEXT.

This introduction presents very briefly some of the main issues currently discussed around negation particles and clitics in contemporary French and taken up by the six contributions it assembles, namely language change (grammaticalisation of clitics into agreement markers, completion of the Jespersen Cycle) vs. stable variation, and external (sociolinguistic) or internal (phonotactic, prosodic, or syntactic) factors triggering variation in both cases; the hypothesis of a potential diglossia in French opposing two grammars with considerable syntactic differences. Five out of six contributions focus on modern standard and non-standard varieties of French, with a formal theoretical background, while one shows a more philological-descriptive approach and is dedicated to Old French manuscripts.

The article seeks to account for the communicative values of tense choice in the main clauses of the sentences occurring in a corpus of eighty-two Le Monde articles dealing with French national politics. There are 2,706 such tense choices. A set of three discourse topics, the current situation, its antecedents and its implications, is identified as constituting the subject matter of the articles. All the tense choices are correlated to the evocation of one or other of these discourse topics. The relative frequencies of the three discourse topics are correlated to the context of production and reception of the journalistic texts. An appendix tabulates tense choice in each of eighty-two articles of the corpus.

L'étude mettra en évidence l'existence de subordonnées introduites par avant que (ou avant de) dont le contenu, au lieu d'être présupposé (comme c'est généralement le cas pour les subordonnées temporelles), fait l'objet d'une assertion. Le phénomène a déjà été identifié et largement étudié à propos des subordonnées introduites par un quand dit ‘inverse’. Dans la subordination inverse, le quand joue le rôle discursif d'un connecteur temporel – qu'on définira très simplement par l'établissement d'une relation temporelle entre deux propositions assertées. Nous nous appuierons sur ce phénomène bien reconnu pour explorer le cas comparable quoique moins clairement identifié de avant que/de à rôle de connecteur temporel.

The independent microstate of Andorra lies on the border of France and Spain and constitutes a case of complex societal multilingualism. The country’s official language, Catalan, coexists with French and Spanish, among others. French is an important vehicle of education, with around three quarters of Andorran children taught exclusively or partly through French. However, recently, the position of French has become increasingly precarious, and the language is rarely heard or used in the public domain. This article presents the results of a mixed-methods study that seeks to determine the current and future place of French in Andorra by studying language attitudes, ideologies and policies. Quantitative analysis of attitude survey data reveals that French is associated with employment opportunities but does not fulfil in-group solidarity roles. A critical analysis of semi-structured interview data shows how lack of in-group ‘pride’ (Heller and Duchêne 2012) attached to French reinforces its perceived lack of instrumental value. Finally, the analysis of public discourse from Emmanuel Macron in his role as co-Prince of Andorra highlights how combining existing strategies that emphasize historicity and civic duty with discourses appealing to the extensive migrant population could be a more suitable means to safeguard French in Andorra.

La construction avec superlatif à l'intérieur de la construction verbale (ce qui me plaît le plus c'est …) est la plus connue. Cependant les données du français parlé font émerger l'existence d'énoncés dans lesquels le superlatif est en tête de la construction verbale (le plus qui me plaît c'est …). On pourrait faire l'hypothèse que ces énoncés ne sont qu'une variante des constructions jugées standard. Cependant on peut démontrer, au vu des exemples attestés, que l'hypothèse dérivationnelle est inadéquate. Les énoncés avec superlatif en tête n'ont pas tous leur correspondant dans l'autre structure et laissent une grande part de liberté dans l'interprétation des relations syntaxiques.

In this article I shall propose an explanation of the ordering and co-occurrence constraints operating within complement clitic sequences in French, which I shall present as template-formed syntactic constituents. I shall argue that these result from the interaction of two features – [+Accusative] and [+Individua-tion] (in the sense of Blanche-Benveniste (1978) and Blanche-Benveniste et al (1987)) – in conjunction with certain phonological constraints. Furthermore, I shall argue that, once explained, the complement clitic sequence can be seen to constitute an efficient referential system, well adapted to the role of 'kernel sentence’ which, together with the subject clitics and the verb, it performs in Modern French.

L'analyse quantitative et qualitative de la formule d'appel dans plus de trois cents courriels à caractère personnel en français et en japonais, conduit, suite à sa confrontation avec les tournures préconisées dans la correspondance épistolaire, à la mise au jour des pratiques privilégiées par les cybercorrespondants des deux communautés sur la base de critères d'ordre générationnel et socio-relationnel. Les phénomènes constatés permettent de conclure à des divergences relevant davantage d'écarts intergénérationnels et donc de variations intraculturelles que de manières de faire culturellement marquées, excepté pour l'ancienne génération qui a tendance, dans les relations professionnelles, à user largement de formules d'appel empruntées à la lettre, démarche qui révèle un degré de formalité plus élevé en japonais qu'en français.