L'insertion des pronoms ce et çα, reléguant le SN qui occupe originellement la position sujet en position disloquée, peut engendrer une interprétation générique de ce SN sans néanmoins exercer systématiquement cet effet. Le présent article offre une explication de ce problème en faisant le départ entre les propriétés inhérentes aux pronoms ce et çα et les propriétés qui résultent de leur insertion dans un contexte propositionnel déterminé. L'examen de la gamme des articles pouvant introduire le SN générique dans une construction de dislocation au moyen de ce ou çα met en lumière une contrainte surprenante: l'article le, tout en s'accommodant d'un nom massif, s'allie difficilement à un nom comptable. Cette différence distributionnelle entre les SN génériques ‘le + N comptable’ et ‘le + N massif’ trouve son origine dans une différence entre leurs valeurs respectives: alors que celui-là opère une réduction de l'extension à une entité individuelle, celui-ci appréhende l'extension comme un ensemble.

In spite of the linguistic ‘dirigisme’ during the past three and a half centuries, there remains in contemporary French a number of nouns of double or doubtful gender. Non-standard usage is potentially even more prone to fluctuation and hesitation, given the relative lack of awareness in spontaneous, informal speech of official norms. The changes of gender that have occurred and the anomalies – real or perceived – that have arisen in unconventional French are attributable to a variety of processes, both morpho-syntactic and semantic in nature. Most cases can be explained in terms of one or other of these processes (e.g. apocope, ellipsis, syllepsis). However some remain mysterious, contradicting established patterns. Intra-register gender attraction may well occur, though it is likely to be unconscious. The question of zero gender and neutralization is also raised.

Throughout the present century the nature of Anglo-Norman and its role in the history of both French and English has been misunderstood and misrepresented by the endless repetition at second hand of views that have their origin in the nineteenth–century ‘reconstructionist’ movement in French philology. Evidence readily available from original sources of many kinds shows that the French used in England between the Conquest and the end of the fourteenth century is at once a more complex and far more important phenomenon than current writing on the subject would suggest, especially as regards the history of the English language.

Much recent work (e.g. Hansen 1994) is demonstrating that French schwa is becoming stable in many contexts where it formerly deleted freely. In this paper, I expand on Hansen's study of the new stability of schwa, extending consideration to the lexicalized conditioning of the stability as indicated in four contemporary pronouncing dictionaries of Standard French. This increasing stability also provides evidence for a reanalysis of schwa as underlying /œ/; the implications of this analysis for the distinction between lexical and post-lexical rules are briefly explored.