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Volume 13 - Issue 2 - September 2003

Journal of French Language Studies Volume 13 - Issue 2 -
Contents

Research Article

  • Pour une description textuelle et discursive de l'expression anaphorique ledit N
  • SUNNIVA WHITTAKER
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 September 2003, pp. 159-176
  • View abstract

    Le présent article vise à décrire les particularités textuelles et discursives de l'expression anaphorique Ledit N. La première partie de l'étude est consacrée au mode de donation référentielle de Ledit N. La spécificité de cette expression réside dans le fait que l'identification de la source d'interprétation se fait par le biais du texte et non par le biais de la mémoire discursive, à la différence des autres expressions anaphoriques. La deuxième partie porte sur l'emploi de Ledit N dans trois types de textes différents: textes l'gislatifs, journalistiques et littéraires. La comparaison de ces trois sous-corpus a pour objectif de mettre en évidence les différents effets discursifs que peut induire Ledit N.

  • Vowel Devoicing in Contemporary French
  • CAROLINE L. SMITH
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 September 2003, pp. 177-194
  • View abstract

    Fagyal and Moisset (1999) suggested that vowel devoicing in standard French occurs most often in phrase-final high vowels. An experiment testing the effect of both immediate segmental context and sentence-level contextual factors was conducted to further identify the linguistic features involved. Six French speakers were recorded reading test sentences. Devoicing only occurred in sentence-final vowels, but in more contexts than expected. From a cross-linguistic perspective the distribution of devoicing in French is unusual. Final position is prosodically prominent in French, whereas in many languages devoicing is a form of vowel reduction associated with lack of prominence. Different physical mechanisms may therefore be responsible.

  • Emploi du ‘futur’ dans le français parlé des élèves d'immersion française
  • TERRY NADASDI, RAYMOND MOUGEON, KATHERINE REHNER
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 September 2003, pp. 195-219
  • View abstract

    Notre étude porte sur l'acquisition des variantes du futur par les élèves d'immersion. Tous comme les locuteurs L1, ces élèves emploient trois variantes (le futur périphrastique; le futur fléchi et le présent de l'indicatif) et ils le font au même niveau de fréquence: le futur périphrastique est de loin la plus fréquente. Nous discutons des facteurs éducatifs et sociologiques auxquels on peut attribuer ces résultats inattendus. Ceci dit, les élèves d'immersion expriment aussi parfois le futur avec des formes verbales non natives qui font l'objet d'une étude spéciale. Nous terminons par une micro-étude des variantes du futur périphrastique à la 1ère personne du singulier.

  • Finite-State Description of the French Determiner system
  • MAX SILBERZTEIN
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 September 2003, pp. 221-246
  • View abstract

    This article describes a large-coverage formalisation of a French determiner system that includes simple words such as “le” (the), compounds such as “la plupart des” (most of), and more complex sequences such as “toute une partie de ce groupe de” (a whole part of this group of). The grammar is available in the form of a library of 150 Finite-State graphs and is compiled into a Minimal Deterministic Finite-State Transducer of over 5,000 states and 113,000 transitions.

  • Markedness, Faithfulness, Vowel Quality and Syllable Structure in French
  • CAROLINE FÉRY
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 September 2003, pp. 247-280
  • View abstract

    The quality of vowels in French depends to a large extent on the kind of syllables they are in. Tense vowels are often in open syllables and lax vowels in closed ones. This generalisation, which has been called loi de position in the literature, is often overridden by special vowel-consonant co-occurrence restrictions obscuring this law. The article shows first that the admission of semisyllables in the phonology of French explains a large number of counterexamples. Many final closing consonants on the phonetic representation can be understood as onsets of following rime-less syllables, opening in this way the last full syllable. Arguments coming from phonotactic regularities support this analysis. The second insight of the article is that Optimality Theory is a perfect framework to account for the intricate data bearing on the relationship between vowels and syllable structure. The loi de position is an effect dubbed Emergence of the Unmarked, instantiated only in case no higher-ranking constraint renders it inactive.

Book Review