It is with great regret that we announce the death of one of our associate Editors, David Trotter, on 24 August 2015. Professor and Department Head at Aberystwyth University (UK) since 1993, David was a valued colleague who served on the board of the Journal of French Language Studies for 14 years. His fellow editors will deeply miss his contributions to a collegial working environment and his diligence in ensuring the high standards of the journal from an editorial perspective. A full obituary will appear in a future issue of the journal.

Cet article étudie un emploi de l’adverbe déjà qu’on rencontre exclusivement dans les questions. Cet emploi peut être illustré par l’exemple prototypique: Quel est son nom, déjà? Deux problèmes sont abordés: d’une part, le rapport complexe que cet emploi mémoriel de déjà entretient avec les questions; d’autre part, les conséquences socio-interactionnelles que produit l’indication d’oubli à laquelle il est associé. On montre notamment que les questions marquées ainsi portent prioritairement sur l’oubli de formes linguistiques (noms propres et expressions). On formule par ailleurs une hypothèse rendant compte du fait que déjà mémoriel marque une forte prédilection pour les questions ouvertes (partielles), au détriment des questions fermées (totales). L’article aborde également les rendements socio-interactionnels de cet adverbe et distingue trois circonstances d’emploi. Cette distinction est fondée sur les présomptions habituellement associées aux questions, en particulier celles commentées par déjà mémoriel.

Prescriptive pronunciation manuals of French generally present a vocalic inventory with two low vowels: front [a] and back [ɑ]. At the same time, descriptive overviews of modern French note the tendency of the posterior vowel to merge with the anterior token, especially in unstressed position. The actual spread and conditioning factors of this alleged merger are nevertheless unknown: we are ignorant about the degree of neutralization, and it is not clear whether it is a change affecting all regions and generations in France.

This article studies the French low vowels from a sociolinguistic perspective, by analyzing metropolitan French corpus data.

This study presents a variationist analysis of the expression of future temporal reference (variation between the inflected future and the periphrastic future) in a linguistically conservative variety of Acadian French spoken in Baie Sainte-Marie, Nova Scotia, Canada. Results show that Acadian French is distinct from Laurentian French and that the Baie Sainte-Marie variety also differs from other Acadian varieties in some respects. A comparison of the distribution of variants and of the conditioning factors reveals that Acadian and Laurentian varieties have different future temporal reference systems. The Baie Sainte-Marie variety retains vestiges of earlier stages of the grammaticalization of one of the variants, the periphrastic future, not found in other Acadian varieties, thus supporting its characterization as a conservative variety.

Using texts selected from the C-Oral-Rom corpus, this study considers how linguistic and sociolinguistic variables affect liaison. In the majority of cases, liaison appears on monosyllabic function words. Individual lexemes differ greatly in rate of liaison. With regard to sociolinguistic variation, female speakers realize liaison consonants more often than male speakers, younger speakers realize it more often than older speakers, and liaison rates for speakers without university degree are higher than for speakers with university degree. Results are discussed in the light of models of prosodic structure and with respect to their implications for models of socio-linguistic variation.

This article examines a case of real-time language change in the spoken French of adolescents residing in four localities in Ontario, Canada. The focus of the study is the alternation between verb forms meaning ‘went/have gone’ over a three-decade timespan (1978–2005), and involves three main variants: avoir été, être allé and avoir allé. This study investigates the influence of both social and linguistic factors on variant choice, showing evidence for both devernacularization and regularization as a result of social change.

This paper studies three thematic markers (TMs) in informal written French: pour ce qui est de, au niveau (de) and en matière de. We will demonstrate that they have different syntactico-semantic and discourse-functional properties and that the exact function of the TM construction results from the interplay between the inherent properties of the TM and the specific syntactic construction it appears in. We will demonstrate that TMs do not only introduce the aboutness-topics, but that they can also establish the frame in which the main clause holds or functions.