This study provides an acoustic profile of the prosody of right-dislocations in French, using the computer hardware and software package known as CECIL. Twenty-eight right-dislocations occurring in a corpus of natural French discourse provide the data for the acoustic analysis. While right-dislocations appear to fulfil various functional roles in discourse, no correlation appears between functional type and the acoustic properties studied (pause, frequency, amplitude).

Les jeux de langage, en tant que manifestations de la langue, peuvent constructivement participer à la réflexion linguistique. Ce sont non seulement des instruments de validation d'hypothèses émises sur la langue source, mais aussi des outils permettant de mettre à jour des phénomènes phonologiques non visibles en dehors des manipulations qu'ils occasionnent.

Ainsi, l'étude phonologique que nous avons menée sur le verlan nous a conduits à appuyer certaines hypothèses phonologiques sur le français, concernant en particulier la constituance syllabique, et à attirer l'attention sur d'autres aspects plus originaux.

The passé surcomposé régional is widely recognised as a feature of the régional French of the langue d'oc andfranco-provençal areas. It is also generally regarded as a highly stigmatised form in relation to the prescriptive norm. Less clear, however, is its précise function in the tense System of speakers who use it. In this paper, we investigate the temporal, aspectual and expressive properties of the régional double compound, taking into account semantic/pragmatic, sociolinguistic and syntactic factors. Our analysis suggests that in addition to the temporal and aspectual properties traditionally attributed to this form, the expressive properties of the surcomposé régional are central to any description of its function in contemporary spoken French, and fundamental to the opposition between the passé surcomposé and the passé composé.

The article argues that, contrary to a widespread view (e.g. Haiman, 1985; Palmer, 1984), agreement in those languages which exhibit it is not a purely redundant, semantically empty and grammatically predictable phenomenon, but performs several important functions at the level of discourse.

Taking French as the example language, I will argue (section 2.1) that agreement signals the function-argument interpretation to be assigned to pairs of expressions of various kinds; and second, that it may also code anaphorically the high-focus status of particular discourse referents (section 2.2). Section 3 compares certain written errors in agreement marking made by advanced learners of French, with certain other interpretative errors in their reading of French articles - errors based on agreement relations and leading to the mis-assignment of reference to an agreement target or personal pronoun. Finally, section 4 argues that third person personal pronouns should be treated differently from the (essentially predicative) agreement targets discussed in sections 2 and 3, claiming that they do not participate in agreement stricto sensu.

The article examines the variable distribution of word-final consonant devoicing (=WFCD) among working-class speakers in the Roubaix district, with respect to phonological conditioning and speaker characteristics. WFCD is shown to affect coronals, labials and velars in that order, and to be favoured by pre-pausal position. Among speakers over forty-five WFCD is primarily associated with female speakers, and to a lesser degree with male speakers under thirty. This sociolinguistically unusual distribution of a strongly vernacular variant may plausibly be attributed to language/dialect contact consequent on the immigration of Flemish-speaking textile workers. Such language contact would have tended to reinforce an already existing characteristic of Picard patois rather than introducing a totally new feature as the brief review of other Picard varie-ties would suggest.