Après avoir examiné successivement l’usage de l’auxiliaire avoir ou être au passé composé et plus que parfait et l’usage de la préposition POUR (Mougeon et Carroll, 1976; Canale, Mougeon, Bélanger, Ituen, 1976), nous allons dans la présente étude décrire l’usage de SUR et DESSUS dans le français parlé et écrit d’élèves bilingues fréquentant des écoles secondaires de langue française à Sudbury, Welland et dans le canton de Rayside/Azilda. Notre description se fera par rapport à plusieurs normes: le français standard, le français de l’Ontario formel écrit et le français parlé par les jeunes Québécois unilingues, ce afin de mieux cerner les caractéristiques de l’usage des jeunes Franco-ontariens. Avant de rentrer dans le détail de notre étude, nous allons brièvement exposer certaines des règles d’usage du français standard concernant SUR et DESSUS. Ceci servira d’arrière plan à l’analyse des résultats de notre étude.

The first part of this paper is devoted to an analysis of the basic concepts underlying Reich’s 1973 and 1970 complexity count for relational networks in a stratificational grammar. The second part treats of some problems arising in connection with optionality.

Rule reordering as a principle of phonological change has come under heavy criticism in the recent past. A number of articles, e.g. Iverson (1973), Picard (1974), Hogg (1976), Dinnsen and Koutsoudas (1976), have been devoted to this question, endeavouring to show in one way or another that the reordering of phonological rules does not constitute a type of linguistic change. Some of the better known cases of alleged reordering have been examined, and many of these have been judged to be deficient for two main reasons: implausibility, due to the unjustified degree of abstractness involved, and inaccuracy, due to the omission or misinterpretation of crucial data. Generally, at the very least, a reasonable and plausible alternative solution has been put forth in each case.

One of the principle aims of research in linguistic theory is to discover linguistic universals which may be represented as a part of linguistic metatheory. In phonological theory there are many examples of such attempts. For example, the formal conventions proposed by Chomsky and Halle (1968) in The Sound Pattern of English were to represent universal constraints for natural languages.

It has been shown on numerous occasions (for example, Labov, 1971) that phonological theory must be able to account for the systematic variability regularly present in all phonological systems. Although quantitative studies of phonological variability are still relatively new, it is important all the same to attempt to posit possible universal constraints, both formal and substantive, within the current formulation of variability theory in order to test the theory itself. Of particular interest are questions such as the following: What are universal constraints on the FORM of variable rules? Are there universal constraints on the types of environments in which variable rules may apply?