This paper analyses aspects of the loss of verb-second (V2) in Old French in a historical sociolinguistic perspective. Data come from sequences in which a main declarative is preceded immediately by a tensed subordinate clause (Vance, Donaldson, and Steiner, 2010). Following Romaine (1982), represented speech and narrative are considered to represent distinct registers within a single text. An analysis of intra-textual variation between narrative and represented speech reveals stylistic variation, in that represented speech evinces higher rates of surface subject-verb-(object) orders in main clauses than narrative passages within the same text. The data also reveal gender variation, as the represented speech of women tends to be more linguistically conservative than that of men.

This study investigates the adult grammars of French simultaneous bilingual speakers (2L1s) whose other language is German. Apart from providing an example of French as heritage language in Europe, the goals of this paper are (i) to compare the acquisition of French in a minority and majority language context, (ii) to identify the relative vulnerability of individual domains, and (iii) to investigate whether 2L1s are vulnerable to language attrition when moving to their heritage country during adulthood. We include two groups of German-French 2L1s: One group grew up predominantly in France, but moved to Germany during adulthood; the other group grew up predominantly in Germany and stayed there. Performance is compared in different domains, including adjective placement, gender marking, articles, prepositions, foreign accent and voice onset time. Results indicate that differences between the two groups are minimal in morpho-syntax, but more prominent in pronunciation.

L'héritage francophone américain qui a survécu à la traversée du 21ème siècle se retrouve essentiellement en Louisiane et en Nouvelle-Angleterre. Cet article propose une description de la communauté francophone de la Nouvelle-Angleterre et d'une enquête sur le terrain au cours de laquelle chaque état a révélé un profil communautaire original. Le corpus audio recueilli en 2011 est composé d'entrevues en français et en anglais auprès de locuteurs franco-américains originaires des six états qui composent la Nouvelle-Angleterre. Ce nouveau corpus nous permettra de comparer l'état du français en Louisiane et en Nouvelle-Angleterre et de révéler des caractéristiques similaires.

Un sujet crucial concernant l'opposition massif/comptable est l'apparente flexibilité morphosyntaxique régulière de certaines classes sémantiques, comme celle des noms d'animaux (Kleiber, 1999; Nicolas, 2002 et références incluses), ou celle des noms de fruits et de légumes. C'est cette dernière que nous examinons ici, par le biais d'une vaste étude de corpus comprenant l'analyse quantitative (profils distributionnels) et qualitative (effets de sens) des acceptions massives et comptables de 18 items lexicaux. Nos observations nous amènent à postuler un modèle original de la localisation de l'opposition massif/comptable, rendant compte des phénomènes de flexibilité régulière sans recourir à la notion de polysémie, et basé sur un Principe de Double Héritage. Ainsi, nos données suggèrent que les noms de fruits et de légumes présentent de manière intrinsèque les deux acceptions, et hériteraient leur caractère comptable au niveau lexical (propriétés ontologiques) et leur caractère massif à un niveau supra-lexical, de par leur appartenance à une certaine classe sémantico-pragmatique (objets de consommation culinaire).

It is often claimed that France is a particularly purist country; the Académie française is seen to be representative of a purist outlook and popular works such as Étiemble's attack on English influence Parlez vous franglais? (Étiemble, 1964) have served to bolster this view. However, this claim has not been empirically verified. In order to determine whether or not the rhetoric around purism in France matches the reality, we developed a questionnaire to investigate whether or not ordinary speakers of French in France are purist, taking the theoretical framework in George Thomas's Linguistic Purism as a base (Thomas, 1991). This questionnaire was distributed online to a random sample of participants in France. To contextualise the findings, the questionnaire was also distributed to French speakers in Quebec. The results of the study show that, contrary to expectations, the French respondents display only mild purism and the Québécois respondents are more purist in the face of English borrowings (external purism). However, the French respondents are more concerned with the structure or ‘quality’ of the French language itself (internal purism) than their Québécois counterparts. This study also highlights some problems with Thomas's framework, which requires some modification for future research.