Discussions of the need for a Dictionary of Canadian English, during the past several years, have made it rather painfully obvious that most Canadians, lacking ready access to the Oxford English Dictionary and the Dictionary of American English, are unable to grasp the idea behind a dictionary based on historical principles. Others, while familiar with such works, have had little conception of the wealth of materials awaiting lexical exploitation in the field of Canadiana. It is understandable that Canadian scholars, inexperienced in the art of lexicography, should ifeel uncertain how to proceed about cultivation of ground that has for so long lain fallow. So that a beginning may be made, this selection of materials is offered as a suggestion of the lines that an historical Dictionary of Canadian English might follow.

Le moyen français (MF) est une langue à sujet nul qui permet les sujets postverbaux et dont le verbe occupe généralement la seconde position. N’importe quel constituant peut occuper la première position de la phrase, y compris le sujet. Le sujet nul et le sujet postverbal sont habituellement le fait des langues romanes. L’effet du verbe second, “l’effet V2”, est caractéristique des langues germaniques. Une question longuement débattue par la tradition philologique (Foulet 1928; Herman 1954; Hilty 1968; Kuen 1957) est celle de l’influence des langues germaniques sur l’évolution du francais. Fidèles en ce sens à cette tradition, mais dans le cadre de la grammaire générative, Benincà (1984) puis Adams (1987) et Vance (1987) ont appliqué l’analyse proposée par Thiersch (1978) pour l’allemand à l’ancien français (AF) en assumant deux règles de mouvement: antéposition du verbe tensé et topicalisation de n’importe quel adverbe ou NP en position initiale. Le caractère obligatoire de la règle de topicalisation V2 est mis en doute par l’existence de phrases déclaratives à verbe initial en ancien et en moyen français. En effet, on en trouve de la Chanson de Roland (XIIe siècle) jusqu’à Rabelais et Montaigne (XVIe siècle) tant en phrases matrices qu’en phrases subordonnées.

Dans les parlers franco-canadiens du nord de l’Ontario, comme en français populaire ou dans certains français régionaux, on trouve une forme verbale progressive périphrastique qui se construit à l’aide de la particule après [apre] + infinitif. Elle correspond au français commun en train de ou à la forme progressive anglaise. Ainsi pourrait-on traduire “il est après chanter” par he is singing et elle est après faire la vaisselle par she is doing the dishes.

This study investigates how learners with distinct native dialects, Cuban (CS) and Peninsular Spanish (PS), produce the English vowels æ, Λ, a/. Experiment 1 compares the native vowels along several acoustic parameters to determine the extent of the cross-dialectal differences, and Experiment 2 assesses the differences in L2 production of the same speakers who are also advanced learners of English. More fronted and shorter vowels are predicted for PS versus CS. As such, L2 /æ, A, a/ are expected to be more fronted in the interlanguage of PS learners as compared to CS learners. Dialect-specific patterns of assimilation are highlighted. PS learners produce æ, Λ, a/ with good spectral differences but with no duration differences whereas for CS learners /Λ, a/ overlap spectrally but are realized with different durations. Differences found in L2 production are caused by the conjoint effect of the native dialect, the input, and the learning experience.

The past twenty-five years have seen an enormous growth in research into World Englishes, reflecting a new recognition of the status of the many national English dialects. Canadian English has been no exception to this trend and we have witnessed a dramatic increase in the quantity and quality of research into this variety. The stature it is now accorded as a separate dialect of English is reflected in the number of dictionaries, thesauruses, usage guides, and other reference works published since the late 1990s that were devoted specifically to Canadian English (e.g., Guide to Canadian English usage; Canadian Oxford dictionary; Oxford Canadian Dictionary; Collins essential Canadian English dictionary and thesaurus; Fitzhenry and Whiteside Canadian thesaurus) as well as audio-visual productions (e.g., Dialects of Canadian English; Talking Canadian).

Afin de clarifier les explications et pour poser le probléme dans son contexte, voici tout d'abord une reproduction du Questionnaire, dont les éléments ont été distingués en sous-groupes, et numérotés. La liste se subdivise en A, “mots séparés” et B, “mots dans une phrase”.

Any theory of semantics must account for the role of inference in the interpretation of a sentence, however, it is not clear at which level of the grammar this inferencing capability must be represented. In Sperber and Wilson (1986) for example, inference plays an important role in the interpretation of an utterance in discourse, yet their theory does not integrate lexical representations with discourse and inferencing. Jackendoff (1987, 1990) on the other hand, while giving explicit representations for sentences and lexical items, does not address the question of discourse and inference. In this paper I will argue that it is essential to take account of discourse-level factors when analyzing sentence meaning, and indeed word meaning. In particular I will show that the meaning of the auxiliary verb fεla. in Bengali can be properly represented only if such discourse-level factors are included.

The findings presented here are part of a pilot study of the vocabulary of English-speaking residents of Alberta. The study was carried out in 1953 and 1954 with the aid of a number of my students who took the responsibility of getting written answers to several hundred copies of a brief questionnaire. The items in the questionnaire were of a general nature; although, since Alberta is greatly concerned with agriculture, some emphasis was placed on terms connected with the farm and with life on the farm. All informants were notified of the purpose for which the answers would be used, and they were asked to give as their answers the names of buildings and so on which they would normally use in their everyday work and talk. Sample questions follow: What command do you give to make a horse turn to the left? What do you call the buildings where pigs are kept?

The notion ‘drift’ plays an important role in the development of the modals have to and must in early Canadian English in relation to British and American English during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Have to is first found in texts that reflect informal usage, and for the period in question (1750–1849), have to is only attested with deontic readings; the data suggest that its rise was not exclusively conditioned by the defective paradigm of must. Must maintains its epistemic function in relation to its Late Modern English competitors. In early Canadian English, changes progress gradually, with individual variables following different directions. Canadian English epistemic must lags behind, while deontic have to has spread more quickly in North America, with Canadian English more progressive than British English varieties, but less so than American English. Within a more general drift towards have to, Canadian English shows independent development in successive periods.

Montagnais, an Algonquian language spoken in Quebec, exists in a number of different dialects. The main divisions are on a geographic basis, with western, eastern, and southern Montagnais, and within each of these varieties sub-dialects centered on specific communities like Pointe Bleu, Betsiamites, or Natashquan. In addition, within each community there may be other dialectal distinctions based on age, socio-economic factors, or elements as specialized as the location of traditional family hunting grounds, grounds in which one need no longer hunt to still have them considered family territory. One such community is the reserve town of Betsiamites, also known as Bersimis. The most notable dialectal division there is one based on age : there is a dialect of people over 60; one of people between 40 and 60; and one of those under 40. In addition, there seems to be a conservative/innovative split that cuts across the age-based dialect split, which itself is based on innovations in the speech of younger speakers, and which does not seem to be correlated with any social or political distinction, but only with phonological change and retention in relation to earlier forms of Montagnais and Proto-Algonquian itself. In the innovative dialect, sibilant-stop clusters consist uniformly of [š] plus a stop; or, in the case of young innovative speakers, a development therefrom. In the conservative dialect, sibilant-stop clusters are found in complementary neutralization: before [t] there occurs only [s]; before [p] and [k] there occurs only [š], no matter what was the source of the first or second element of the cluster in Proto-Algonquian (PA).

Perhaps the most pervasive issue in the study of adult second language (L2) acquisition concerns the relative contribution of prior first language (L1) experience — the contrastive component — and universal grammatical principles — the constructive component — to this language learning process. Concern with this issue stems in part from basic linguistic and psychological questions about the nature of language learning in the adult and in part from the desire to integrate these two components within a framework that can provide for a unified theory of language learning in general. Current research within the field endeavors to isolate and quantify each of these two components in the adult L2 learning process.

Within this context, this paper reports results of an experimental study of the acquisition of anaphora in structures such as in (1) and (2).

• (1) Alice helped Mary when she walked through the garden.

• (2) Alice helped Mary when walking through the garden.

John B. Smith (1987) recently drew attention to the occasional use of an adverb + infinitive construction in English dialects, and specifically to the non-finite phrase away to go. Joseph Wright included examples of the construction in the English Dialect Dictionary under both away and go, with away to go meaning basically ‘be off, go away, away he went’. Under away (A.5.Phr. away to go):

In French ditransitive sentences, certain person combinations of the two internal arguments cannot be expressed with two co-occurring clitics (a phenomenon referred to as the Person Case Constraint or PCC). To fill the interpretational gap created by this restriction, there is an alternative construction characterized as a “repair”, where the goal is realized as an independent phrase. The fact that the double-clitic construction and the repair construction are in complementary distribution led to a proposal of an interface algorithm that provides a way to repair a non-convergent structure. This article proposes an alternative account of the PCC, and claims that the complementarity between the PCC and its repair is instead accidental and is an artefact of the feature structure of arguments. The proposed account explains the unavailability of certain clitic combinations and some repairs independently, without resorting to a trans-derivational device like the previously proposed algorithm.

The Munda languages of South Asia exhibit sound symbolism in their use of mimetic reduplication, to which they devote a surprisingly large percentage of their lexicons, typically upwards of ten percent. We present an extensive empirical typology of mimetic reduplication in seven Munda languages: Ho, Kera Mundari, Kharia, Mundari, Remo (Bondo), Santali, and Sora (Savara). Munda Mimetic forms can depict sensory qualities of sound, space, movement, texture, smell, taste, temperature, feelings, and sensations. The typology of mimetic reduplication in Munda varies across syntactic class, semantic domain and phonological form. This can shed light on the breadth of diverse structures in Munda languages, and may also be extrapolated to other languages and other examinations of reduplication and/or mimesis. This work provides a wealth of data to researchers of mimesis and reduplication, challenging the definition of what it means for forms to be sound-symbolic or reduplicated.

The present paper is concerned with a historical puzzle: the changing position of the marker si in the extant Baltic languages, Lithuanian and Latvian. Si appears before the root in prefixed verbs and verb-finally in prefixless verbs in Lithuanian and dialectal Latvian, as opposed to a consistently verb-final position in standard Latvian and in Slavic languages, specifically Russian. This ordering is examined within a larger picture of morpheme linearization – focusing primarily on Lithuanian, but also bringing in Latvian and Latgalian data – to account for the Baltic paradigm. Historically a pronoun, si is argued to have incorporated into the verbal structure, and to maintain nowadays a binding relation with the subject of the sentence. The placement of si within the verb is shown to depend on two factors: the type of the antecedent and the morphosyntactic composition of the verb. The findings presented here also provide new evidence against the Lexicalist Hypothesis.