Despite the fact that a French (Norman) dialect has been spoken on Guernsey for over a thousand years, very little work has been done on this variety. This paper begins to redress that balance by investigating the position of the subjunctive mood in spoken and written Guernsey Norman French. As well as considering the vitality of the present and imperfect subjunctive and documenting their usage in so-called ‘grammar book’ contexts, the mood's morphology is examined, revealing in some cases survival of forms found in the medieval Norman dialect. Furthermore, it is found that the conditional tense may replace the subjunctive in certain contexts and possible reasons for this are also examined.

We examine the phrasal vs. clausal syntactic status of French infinitives. Whereas a number of current theories assume a VP-hypothesis (contra principles and parameters theories, including the Minimalist Program), data relative to causative constructions in French are often treated as clausal constructions (the so-called ‘proposition infinitive’). The aim of this paper is to demonstrate (i) that it is possible to account for causative constructions in French according to the VP-hypothesis (e.g. in the HPSG framework); (ii) that it is in fact impossible to maintain a clausal hypothesis for causative constructions with respect to subject inversion in French. We therefore argue in favour of the VP-hypothesis for all (French) infinitives.

Si l'on examine les études linguistiques et chapitres de grammaires consacrés au subjonctif français, ou des ouvrages généraux qui se réfèrent à ce mode, on découvre fréquemment un même principe qui conditionne l'analyse: une forme linguistique n'a de sens que s'il existe un ‘choix’. Le subjonctif n'aurait donc aucune signification là où il est obligatoire. Nous nous proposons ici, après un bref survol d'auteurs qui s'en inspirent, de soumettre ce principe à la critique, afin de démontrer qu'il recouvre de multiples confusions conceptuelles et entraîne des conséquences inacceptables pour l'explication du subjonctif, la morphosyntaxe et, plus généralement, la démarche du linguiste ainsi que les propriétés universelles postulées pour le langage.

Some recent work on French tenses has proposed a new analysis of the difference between the imperfect and the passé simple/passé composé. The imperfect is said to be a relative or anaphoric tense, while the PS/PC are absolute or deictic tenses. A number of studies have argued against the more widely accepted analysis which sees the difference between these tenses in terms of aspect. This paper argues that the new analysis is fundamentally incorrect as an account of the meaning of the French past tenses, although it has brought to light a range of phenomena which need to be included in a full account of the behaviour of the tenses in discourse. I argue that an enriched version of the traditional analysis can account for all the relevant data.

A growing interest in both the history and the historiography of linguistics has in recent times been seen by many as an indication of the discipline's increasing maturity, despite the fact that in the opening sentence of his recent book (1998), Seuren laments the still insufficient volume of scholarship in this area. There was a boom in the publishing of histories of linguistics in the 1960s and early 1970s: the beginnings of a critical historiography were established, and journals and professional associations were founded. The 1990s saw a new wave of activity: apart from a plethora of edited volumes, several histories appeared and to the now established journals (Historiographia Linguistica, Histoire-Epistémologie-Langage) has been added another (Beiträge zur Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft, started in 1991). Among the histories are one-volume publications by Koerner and Asher (eds.) (1995), Malmberg (1991), Swiggers (1997) and Seuren (1998), as well as multi-volume editions: Lepschy (ed.) which appeared first in Italian (vol.1 in 1990), then in English (vol. 1 in 1994), Auroux, vol.1 in 1989, and Schmitter (1987), which is the first of a planned eight-volume series in German. A trilingual volume is scheduled to start appearing (Koerner, Auroux, Niederehe and Versteegh (eds.), in preparation). In all this, there have been many ‘persistent questions’ (to use a phrase from Koerner, 1995), but there have also been some shifts of emphasis. Unavoidably selective, this article will attempt to survey more recent work, referring back to older work for certain key points only (for earlier work, see Koerner, 1978b; Ayres-Bennett, 1987; Swiggers, 1987). As certain questions tend to recur, concerning, for example, the chronological versus the thematic, the descriptive versus the theoretical, or breadth versus depth of coverage, I shall try to characterise briefly a number of recent approaches, before examining certain key issues in greater detail. Finally, I shall look at two examples from the founding period of contemporary linguistics in France.