French licenses word-final obstruent-liquid clusters (table /tabl/; souffre /sufʁ/). These clusters may be realised faithfully resulting in an apparent violation of the sonority sequencing principle (Clements, 1990). Yet, the clusters can also be repaired in one of two ways: (1) through the reduction of the cluster (i.e. [tab]) or (2) through the epenthesis of a schwa vowel, resyllabifying the cluster into the onset position (i.e. [ta.blə].) In this article, I investigate which factors condition the realisation of word-final obstruent-liquid clusters. The results are formalised in Maximum Entropy Grammar (Goldwater and Johnson, 2003), but evidence for effects of style and speaker age require the scaling of several constraints (Coetzee and Kawahara, 2013). This study sheds light on these curious clusters, while raising new questions about the interaction of grammatical and non-grammatical factors.

Cet article porte sur les propriétés sémantiques et syntaxiques des néologismes déverbaux en -age en français contemporain. À partir de l’analyse d’un échantillon de 139 néologismes et de leurs bases verbales, selon le type de procès décrit, l’aspect lexical, la structure argumentale et la grille thématique, l’étude montre que la suffixation en -age produit essentiellement des noms de procès similaires à ceux décrits par leur base. L’hypothèse est formulée que les décalages aspectuels observés dans le lexique entre verbes et nominalisations en -age sont dus au processus de lexicalisation, et non à la construction morphologique. S’agissant de la sélection des bases, contrairement à ce qui est parfois défendu pour les noms lexicalisés, aucune prédilection pour les verbes transitifs n’apparaît, et la classe aspectuelle la plus représentée est celle des activités. Par ailleurs, la polysémie des néologismes en -age relève principalement du type ‘action’ / ‘résultat’, et certains éléments laissent penser qu’elle résulte d’une figure métonymique, et non de la dérivation. Enfin, il apparaît que la formation de noms en -age dans le discours peut être diversement motivée, et que de nombreux néologismes sont créés en surabondance lexicale.

Vandeloise’s (1987, 2017) principle of anticipation proposes that French verbs of motion can enable prospective readings of static locative prepositions. However, it has little to say about verbs of motion that do not have a prospective verbal reference place (VRP): that is, to what extent are verbs of initial polarity like partir and s’enfuir able to trigger prospective readings of prepositions? This article argues that each verb must be analysed individually and that prospective readings of prepositions depend on the interaction of verbal and prepositional semantics: for example, the movement away from a viewer expressed by partir favours a prospective reading of derrière but not of devant: this is due to differences regarding access to perception. The animacy of the Ground and its status as a material or spatial entity (Vandeloise, 2017) is also a key factor (e.g. partir près de + spatial entity). This suggests that verbs of initial polarity participate in synergistic verb/preposition/Ground interpretations that help to overcome their lack of a VRP. The prospective reading of the preposition depends on the choice of verb and Ground, thus supporting a distributed view of spatial semantics (Sinha and Kuteva, 1995; Zlatev, 1997, 2003, 2007; Evans and Tyler, 2004).

This paper analyzes the alternation between the near-synonymous French adverbials à nouveau and de nouveau ‘again’, which has received scarce attention in the literature. While previous descriptions assume that both adverbials are used to express that an eventuality is repeated, it is shown that de nouveau and à nouveau differ systematically with respect to their preferred usage contexts. On the basis of combined results from a questionnaire that tests speakers’ intuitions and a probabilistic analysis of the alternation between the two adverbials in corpus data, à nouveau is shown to be more likely to express a repetitive meaning, whereas de nouveau is more likely to express a restitutive meaning, i.e. the return to a previous state of affairs. The analysis also suggests that due to its status of an innovative variant that is gradually displacing de nouveau, à nouveau is less restricted regarding its usage contexts. Finally, a significant difference between the two variants is found regarding modality, in that the use of à nouveau is more likely in written language, whereas the use of de nouveau is more likely in spoken language.

It is standardly assumed that French does not have word-stress, rather it has phrase-level prominence. I will advance a number of arguments, many of which have appeared already in the literature, that cumulatively suggest that French roots are characterized by phonological prominence, even if this is non-contrastive. By prominence, I mean a syntagmatically distributed strength that has all the phonological characteristics of stress in other Romance languages. I will remain agnostic about the nature of that stress, eschewing the lively debate about whether French has feet, and if so what type, and at what level. The structure of the argument is as follows. French demonstrably has phonological word-final strength but one wonders what the source of this strength is. Positionally, the initial position is strong and, independently of cases where it is reinforced by other factors, the final position is weak. I will argue, based on parallels with other Romance languages, that French word-final strength derives from root-final phonological stress. The broader significance of this conclusion is that syntagmatic properties are enough to motivate underlying forms, even in the absence of paradigmatic contrasts (minimal pairs).