Most studies of child bilingualism (Döpke, 1992; Fantini, 1985; Genishi, 1999; Gumperz, 1977, 1982; McClure, 1977; Myers-Scotton, 1993a; Romaine, 1994) concern children raised in a bilingual language community. The present study concerns a four-year-old child in an English-speaking community raised in an environment where his mother only spoke French to him. Two questions were raised: Can a child raised by a non-native parent produce situational code-switching triggered by topic changes? Are there additional topics or roles to add to the previous literature that trigger a young English-French bilingual child to code-switch? The data in this study showed that the child produced situational code-switching. Two novel hypotheses for code-switching were also found: leadership and expression of emotions and sensations. This case-study is important for the field of code-switching in the environment of a non-native parent raising a child in a second language.

This final article re-examines the approaches outlined in the other articles in this Special Issue in order to evaluate the contribution which each one has brought to the study of the second language acquisition of French. The final section identifies the difficulty for all approaches of stating how input can be converted into intake and suggests three possible ways forward.

L'objet de cet article est l'étude des processus d'élision et de liaison en français de Marseille. Une attention particulière est accordée aux mots avec initiale vocalique ou semi-vocalique qui bloquent ces processus. La recherche des principes qui régissent leur application dans le parler en question révèle un certain nombre de régularités. On est ainsi amené à considérer le H aspiré comme une position démarcative plutôt qu'une position phonémique vide. D'autre part, on constate une corrélation nette et non fortuite entre le comportement des séquences semi-voyelle + voyelle (à l'initiale du mot) en contexte de liaison/élision, les règles de construction de la syllabe, et les contraintes distributionnelles. La découverte de cette corrélation permet de déterminer quelles règles productives sont à l'oeuvre en discours aux frontières de mot. Elle conduit aussi à une révision de l'analyse de la structure syllabique.

In this article, we explored the pitch contour patterns of the French discourse marker donc in realizing different pragmatic functions from native and non-native oral corpora in French. Statistical analyses using generalized additive mixed modeling revealed that even though Mandarin Chinese L1 speakers learning French also used the pitch cue to realize pragmatic functions, their prosodic pattern is different from the native pattern. Their L1 Chinese seemed to influence their usage of the pitch cue significantly. In addition, women were shown to be better than men in using the pitch cue in conveying pragmatic functions with a closer pattern to the native pattern. Overall, our study sheds new light on the relationship between speakers’ L1 and L2 regarding the interaction between pragmatic and prosodic features. It also provides new reflections on the acquisition of socio-pragmatic competence.

Little is known about what guides children in their acquisition of grammatical categories. This paper investigates how semantic knowledge could be involved in discovering these categories, thus confronting two competing hypotheses: are semantic categories innate, or are they developed in a piecemeal fashion? We tested for regular associations between basic semantic dimensions and the development of the founding categories of noun and verb. Six perceptually based semantic dimensions (Parisse and Poulain, 2010), shared by nouns and verbs but potentially distinctive, are coded in the productions of three children aged 1;06 to 2;06. Our results suggest that semantic dimensions do not offer an entry into the early differentiation of noun and verb categories.

Cette étude se propose dans un premier temps de faire un tour d'horizon de la question du statut indécis de la tournure finale négative pour (ne) pas que et de celle relative à sa motivation. Chemin faisant, seront exposés des observables qui montreront à quel point cette tournure est productive. Dans un deuxième temps, on évaluera les avantages de la motivation du déplacement du (des) marqueur(s) de négation (ne + pas ou pas tout seul) à l'extérieur du complexe verbal à la lumière du principe de l'iconicité, piste qui reste moins exploitée dans le traitement de pour (ne) pas que.

This study explores variation in the use of English-origin verbs in Quebec French. These lexical borrowings are usually integrated grammatically into the receiving language (Poplack, 2018), as in il va crasher and elle m’a ghosté in Quebec French. However, a new lexical insertion strategy for English-origin verbs has been observed in the past few years: verbal borrowings can lack overt morphological integration, as in il va crash and elle m’a ghost. This article examines the use of English-origin verbs in Quebec French from a variationist perspective by focusing on 1) possible correlations between speakers and how they evaluate the different lexical insertion strategies, and 2) the social factors that constrain the use of morphologically unintegrated English-origin verbs. Results from quantitative analyses based on 675 participants indicate that young Quebecers from Montreal with a high level of proficiency in English are the ones who use this morphologically unintegrated form the most and evaluate it more positively. This unintegrated form poses a theoretical problem according to Poplack’s (2018) theory, for which nonce borrowings are morphologically and syntactically integrated into the receiving language.

This paper analyzes the alternation between the near-synonymous French adverbials à nouveau and de nouveau ‘again’, which has received scarce attention in the literature. While previous descriptions assume that both adverbials are used to express that an eventuality is repeated, it is shown that de nouveau and à nouveau differ systematically with respect to their preferred usage contexts. On the basis of combined results from a questionnaire that tests speakers’ intuitions and a probabilistic analysis of the alternation between the two adverbials in corpus data, à nouveau is shown to be more likely to express a repetitive meaning, whereas de nouveau is more likely to express a restitutive meaning, i.e. the return to a previous state of affairs. The analysis also suggests that due to its status of an innovative variant that is gradually displacing de nouveau, à nouveau is less restricted regarding its usage contexts. Finally, a significant difference between the two variants is found regarding modality, in that the use of à nouveau is more likely in written language, whereas the use of de nouveau is more likely in spoken language.

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.

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.

Cet article porte sur un problème de sémantique lexicale appliquée à un domaine particulier, celui des adjectifs préfixés par pré. Il s'agit en effet d'étudier la construction du sens de ces adjectifs, celui-ci ayant pour particularité de se construire sur deux niveaux. Les adjectifs dérivés s'interprètent en effet avec un sens d'antériorité mais aussi avec ce que j'appelle les valeurs ‘continue’ et ‘discontinue’, cette double structure interprétative étant caractéristique de l'ensemble des mots préfixés par pré- (adjectifs mais aussi noms et verbes). Il s'agira donc de mettre en évidence les mécanismes de construction du sens d'antériorité lui-même, ainsi que les principes qui régissent l'attribution des valeurs ‘continue’ et ‘discontinue’. Ceci nous permettra alors de distinguer ce qui, dans le sens des adjectifs dérivés, est à imputer à des mécanismes purement linguistiques et ce qui relève plutôt de l'ordre du culturel, i.e. des représentations et des connaissances que nous pouvons avoir sur le monde. Les adjectifs prétuberculeux et précolombien me serviront d'exemples privilégiés tout au long de ces analyses.

La traduction de la comédie de répertoire distingue la tendance archaïsante, qui conserve la forme et la culture originelles du texte dans la version L2, et la tendance modernisante, qui, pour satisfaire la communication contemporaine, accommode les différents niveaux du texte au destinataire L2. Dans trois traductions italiennes contemporaines de Le malade imaginaire, on a constaté que l'orientation archaïsante domine. Cependant, l'opposition stricte des deux tendances est fréquemment dépassée, car la traduction de la comédie veut surtout conserver ses effets pragmatiques sur le spectateur. Il n'est donc pas rare que le texte traduit mélange les procédés indépendamment de son orientation générale.

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.

Dans cet article, l'auteur aborde des questions de fond sur la notion de codage et de décodage, si naturelle en linguistique. Il entend montrer qu'elle ne permet pas d'atteindre la langue car elle est fondamentalement métaphysique, le plus souvent à l'insu de ceux qui l'utilisent. Il illustre son propos par une étude du verbe commencer en contexte, dans un corpus électronique. L'explication en langue doit se faire à partir de l'observation des faits et sa généralisation en termes de ressemblances et de différences, et non grâce à la formulation de codes à l'existence chimérique.

Cet article présente une approche hyptohético-déductive pour analyser les événements prosodiques à l'œuvre dans le français parlé lu et spontané (dialogue, map task, texte journalistique), approche qui prend en compte les aspects dynamiques liés aux processus d'encodage et de décodage de la structure prosodique. Il présente ainsi un ensemble de contraintes propres à la structure prosodique, le clash accentuel, la règle d'eurythmie et la contrainte des sept syllabes. La mise au jour de ces contraintes permet de mieux comprendre ce qui régit le caractère en apparence aléatoire de la formation des groupes accentuels en français, mais aussi leur organisation hiérarchique en une structure indépendante mais néanmoins associée aux autres structures, syntaxques, sémantiques, etc. de l'énoncé.