Cet article présente une analyse multifactorielle du comportement des consonnes liquides post-obstruantes en position finale de mot en français. Plus précisément, nous nous intéressons au phénomène par lequel un <l> ou <r> final dans la transcription orthographique d’un mot n’est pas prononcé dans la parole continue, p. ex. comme dans les items « découvre » et « terrible », respectivement prononcés [dekuv] et [teʁʁb] au lieu de [dekuvʁʁ] et [teʁʁibl]. Au total, plus de 2500 items comportant un cluster obstruante+liquide en fin de mot ont été extraits d’un corpus de parole d’une durée de 13 heures, qui a été étiqueté à différents niveaux. Ce corpus comprend les productions de 120 locuteurs originaires de 3 pays francophones (Belgique, France et Suisse), enregistrés dans deux tâches différentes (lecture et conversation). Pour déterminer ce qui affecte la (non-)prononciation de <l> ou <r> dans ces contextes, une douzaine de prédicteurs de différentes natures sont testés dans un même modèle statistique. Les caractéristiques phonétiques telles que le lieu et le mode d’articulation, le contexte droit, le statut prosodique et le taux d’articulation; mais aussi les prédicteurs liés aux locuteurs (pays d’origine, sexe, âge, classe sociale) et au style de parole sont pris en compte. Des modèles mixtes linéaires généralisés révèlent que seulement la moitié d’entre eux ressortent comme jouant un rôle significatif sur la variable à l’étude. Les résultats sont discutés à la lumière dʼétudes antérieures portant sur les aspects sociolinguistiques des variantes de prononciation en français.

This study investigates how Japanese-speaking children learn interactional dependencies in conversations that determine the use of un, a token typically used as a positive response for yes-no questions, backchannel, and acknowledgement. We hypothesise that children learn to produce un appropriately by recognising different types of cues occurring in the immediately preceding turns. We built a set of generalised linear models on the longitudinal conversation data from seven children aged 1 to 5 years and their caregivers. Our models revealed that children not only increased their un production, but also learned to attend relevant cues in the preceding turns to understand when to respond by producing un. Children increasingly produced un when their interlocutors asked a yes-no question or signalled the continuation of their own speech. These results illustrate how children learn the probabilistic dependency between adjacent turns, and become able to participate in conversational interactions.

This study investigated whether Korean children follow the acquisition pattern predicted by the Aspect Hypothesis (Shirai & Andersen, 1995), and the relationship between caretakers’ and children’s speech. Accordingly, we analyzed a Korean corpus (Ryu-Corpus) on the CHILDES database (MacWhinney, 2000), which comprised longitudinal video-recorded interactions of three Korean children and their caregivers. Results indicate that the children used the past marker -ess principally with telic verbs, consistent with the Aspect Hypothesis. Each child’s usage closely reflects the caretaker’s frequency, yielding a high correlation (τb = 0.79). However, the acquisition of the imperfective marker -ko iss did not show a predicted association with activity verbs, contrary to the Aspect Hypothesis. Furthermore, caretakers’ input did not correlate with the children’s utterances of the imperfective marker (τb = 0.40). We argue that multiple factors such as input frequency, language-specific organization of aspectual semantics, and individual differences should be considered to explain tense-aspect acquisition.

This article aims to provide a fresh approach to the study of hypercorrection, the misguided application of a real or imagined rule – typically in response to prescriptive pressure – in which the speaker's attempt to be ‘correct’ leads to an ‘incorrect’ result. Instead of more familiar sources of information on hypercorrection such as attitude elicitation studies and prescriptive commentary, insights are sought from quantitative and qualitative data extracted from the 2-billion-word Global Web-based English corpus (GloWbE; Davies 2013). Five categories are investigated: case-marked pronouns, -ly and non-ly adverbs, agreement with number-transparent nouns, (extended uses of) irrealis were, and ‘hyperforeign’ noun suffixation. The nature and extent of hypercorrection in these categories, across the twenty English varieties represented in GloWbE, are investigated and discussed. Findings include a tendency for hypercorrection to be more common in American than in British English, and more prevalent in the ‘Inner Circle’ (IC) than in the ‘Outer Circle’ (OC) varieties (particularly with established constructions which have been the target of institutionalised prescriptive commentary over a long period of time).

With increased lexical influence and general English competence among Norwegian language users, the association of the suffix -s with the category of plural appears to be expanding. This article explores the occurrence and productivity of non-possessive -s in contemporary Norwegian, a feature which incorporates several phenomena. Our aim is to chart the lexico-grammatical categories instantiated by this morpho-phonological segment in light of the previous literature on Anglicisms in Norwegian and on the basis of empirical evidence from present-day language use. The article presents a corpus-based survey of categories where non-possessive -s occurs (i) as the plural marker of Anglicisms, e.g. drinks; (ii) in colloquialisms such as dritings ‘dead drunk’ – a combination of a domestic noun and English (or Norwegian) -ing + non-possessive -s reanalysed into an adjectival stem; (iii) in nouns like en caps ‘a (baseball) cap’, where it has lost its plurality marking function and become part of the lexical stem; and (iv) sporadically as a plurality marker of domestic or non-English words, e.g. temas. The variability in presence vs. absence of -s is further explored in four case studies dedicated to different stages of borrowing.

Using a cross-linguistic approach, we investigated Turkish-speaking children's acquisition and use of relative clauses (RCs) by examining longitudinal child–caregiver interactions and cross-sectional peer conversations. Longitudinal data were collected from 8 children between the ages of 8 and 36 months. Peer conversational corpus came from 78 children aged between 43 and 64 months. Children produced RCs later than in English (Diessel, 2004) and Mandarin (Chen & Shirai, 2015), and demonstrated increasing semantic and structural complexity with age. Despite the morphosyntactic difficulty of object RCs, and prior experimental findings showing a subject RC advantage, preschool-aged children produced object RCs, which were highly frequent in child-directed speech, as frequently as subject RCs. Object RCs in spontaneous speech were semantically less demanding (with pronominal subjects and inanimate head nouns) than the stimuli used in prior experiments. Results suggest that multiple factors such as input frequency and morphosyntactic and semantic difficulty affect the acquisition patterns.

Resultatives in English and Dutch have developed special degree readings. These readings stem from a reinterpretation of the resultative predicate as indicating a high degree rather than an actual result. For example, when a parent says I love you to death, one need not call the cops, since the sentence is not about love turning lethal, but merely indicative of a high degree of affection. Such cases have often been noted in the literature as idiomatic, but this view ignores the fact that these are not isolated cases but productive constructions that can be used with a variety of verbs. We explore various resultative constructions in English and Dutch, and give a classification of the subtypes involved as well as their diachronic development from ordinary to degree interpretation. We link these subtypes to lexical semantic classes of verbs. Both English and Dutch show a steady growth in the lexical and structural diversity of degree resultatives throughout the early modern and contemporary periods (1600-2000). We focus in our paper on the period 1800-2000, for which we did an extensive corpus study using the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) and Delpher (a collection of digitized Dutch newspapers, journals, magazines, and other resources). One of our findings is that, similar to other types of expressive language, such as degree modification and emphatic negation, taboo expressions play a role in degree resultatives; in fact, their role is excessive. We outline a number of the commonalities among the semantic domains of expressive language used in resultatives.

There are several types of absolute constructions (acs) in English. Among these, this article investigates the so-called what-with ac, which has not received much attention in the study of English grammar. This article considers the grammatical properties of the construction from a synchronic as well as a diachronic perspective, using much more representative and robust corpora than previous studies. Based on corpus data drawn from historical corpora such as COHA (Corpus of Historical American English, 400 million words), the article addresses questions about changes in the construction's syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties. In addition, the article provides a Construction Grammar perspective, which supports previous research in arguing that the construction is undergoing the processes of grammatical constructionalization.