Nous proposons ici des stades de développement du français acquis par les adultes suédophones, formulés comme profils grammaticaux d'apprenants à des niveaux différents. Cette proposition se fonde sur les résultats empiriques des travaux menés au sein de deux projets différents sur l'acquisition du français L2 des apprenants suédophones. À partir d'itinéraires acquisitionnels nous proposons six stades, qui s'étendent des débuts de l'acquisition jusqu'à la production d'apprenants quasi-natifs. Ces itinéraires, et les stades que nous essayons d'en déduire, reflètent l'acquisition du français de l'apprenant suédophone, dans des situations orales spontanées où elle/il doit avoir recours à ses connaissances automatiques. Le cadre de cette étude est donc descriptif et empirique. Un objectif ultérieur est de servir de base à une évaluation du niveau grammatical d'un certain apprenant à un moment donné.

French liaison has long been a favourite testing ground for phonological theories, a situation which can undoubtedly be attributed to the complexity of the phenomenon, involving in particular phonology/syntax, phonology/morphology, phonology/lexicon interfaces. Dealing with liaison requires stepping into all the components of the grammar, while at the same time tackling the quick sands of variation. The data on which a number of formal analyses are based have often been a source of concern since liaison, in part because of its intrinsic variable character, requires extensive and robust data. In the wake of the results from the study of other corpora, we present here extensive results based on the PFC database (Phonologie du français contemporain: usages, variétés et structures) and point to their implications for models of linguistic structure. While we do not believe that a motivated theoretical account can be mechanically extracted from the data, we conclude that future analyses will have to take explicitly into account the results of extensive corpus work as well as sociolinguistic surveys, acquisition studies, experimental phonetics and (neuro-)psycho-linguistic investigations, including the relationship between speech and writing. As stressed in Chevrot, Fayol and Laks (2005), these analyses will have to acknowledge that French liaison is not a homogeneous locus but a multi-faceted phenomenon requiring us to accept, without demur, the crossing of disciplinary boundaries.

In this cross-sectional study of the a acquisition of French by English-speaking immersion students in Ontario, Canada, patterns of second language development are examined with particular reference to verbs. The analysis focuses on second language production data from interviews with 36 early immersion students at three different gradr levels, along with comparison data from a group of late immersion students and two groups of native French speakers. The study documents the learners' well-developed ability to negotiate meaning in context and the continuing impact of the first language in various aspects of their verb use.

Quoique la norme du français standard prescrive le double marquage de la négation dans le syntagme verbal (ne . . . pas), l'usage contemporain veut que le français parlé laisse tomber la première marque (ne). Dans un article de 1981 qui s'appuyait sur un corpus de français oral enregistré à Tours en 1976, Ashby avait mis en lumière une forte co-variation entre la chute du ne et l'âge du locuteur, les jeunes omettant beaucoup plus souvent le ne que les personnes plus âgées. Cette distribution semble relever d'un changement en temps apparent. Pourtant, comme le signale Labov (1994), un trait linguistique plus fréquent chez les jeunes ne représente pas nécessairement un changement en cours. On peut supposer qu'il s'agit d'un phénomène lié à l'effet de génération (age grading), phénomène dans lequel les locuteurs alterent leur comportement linguistique au cours de leur vie tandis que la grammaire de la communauté ne change pas. De manière à trancher entre les deux hypothèses (d'un côté, changement en cours; de l'autre, effet de génération), cette étude établit une comparaison des distributions de la variable (ne) à deux époques différentes: le corpus tourangeau de 1976 est doublé d'un nouveau corpus enregistré en 1995 au même endroit. Cette comparaison démontre que, sur le plan du temps réel, la chute du ne s'est accélérée, ce qui sous-tend donc l'hypothèse du changement en cours.

In the diachronic development of the modern Romance languages, reflexes of the Latin verb habere have replaced reflexes of esse, to a greater or lesser extent in particular languages. In this article it will be argued that the distribution of esse-reflexes is determined by a hierarchy of unaccusativity based on the semantic distinctions concreteness/abstracteness and movement/staticity, and that habere-reflexes have been spreading systematically from the periphery of this hierarchy towards the core. This process has affected Italian and French to different degrees: Italian has largely retained a syntactically and semantically consistent auxiliary system, whereas the French system, at a more advanced stage of the evolution, shows greater variation and inconsistency.

Evidence is presented from the linguistic intuitions of very advanced Italian non-native speakers of French and French non-native speakers of Italian about equivalent unaccusative verbs, and it is argued that the unaccusative hierarchy conditions both the degree and the directionality of difficulty in second language acquisition. The findings reveal an asymmetric pattern: it is easier for the French learners to fully acquire the facts of essere-selection than for the Italian learners to internalize the facts of être-selection, and the degree of difficulty experienced by the Italian learners with individual unaccusative verbs is correlated to their position along the hierarchy.

I consider variation within French and its status in speakers’ mental grammars. I start with Massot's (2008) claim that, within relevant grammatical units, speakers in contemporary metropolitan France do not combine socio-stylistically marked L and H features, and his explanation of this in terms of diglossia (Ferguson, 1959), that is, the idea that speakers possess two (in this case massively overlapping but not identical) ‘French’ grammars which co-exist in their minds: one (français démotique, FD: acquired early, well, and in a naturalistic environment) comprises one set of grammatical features which generate unmarked forms and the marked L forms; the other (français classique tardif, FCT: learnt later, often unreliably, in a more formal context and under the influence of literacy) comprises a (partially) different set of grammatical features which generate the same unmarked forms as well as the marked H forms. Speakers switch between FD and FCT but do not use them both simultaneously, at least not within the context of an individual clause. While Massot's claim is controversial (see Coveney, 2011), I provisionally accept that it is correct, and move on to consider his explanation. I review instances of variation for which I suggest Massot's model needs to be revised in order to account for the phenomenon of surface forms which can be generated by both putative grammars, and which are therefore superficially part of the overlap, but which have a different linguistic status in each and underlyingly are not therefore part of any overlap. I then reconsider Massot's two-grammar hypothesis, raising issues surrounding the extent of the overlap between them, the nature of the differences between them, and their respective statuses in the minds of speakers. I suggest that in view of their massive overlap, their non-random differences, and their contrasting cognitive statuses, it does not make sense to view both FD and FCT as autonomous grammars. Rather, I suggest that only FD is an autonomous grammar. Since the differences between FD and FCT are instantiations of naturally occurring developments usually conceptualised in terms of cyclic grammaticalisation and renewal (the L features of FD are innovations with respect to the H features of FCT), I suggest that FCT should be seen as a dependent grammatical ‘bolt on’ which encodes its conservatism in an abstract and economical way.

The Paris corpus was financed by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche, in the context of two research programmes entitled ‘Acquisition du Langage et Grammaticalisation’ (2005–2008, http://anr-leonard.ens-lsh.fr/) and ‘Communication Langagière chez le Jeune Enfant’ (CoLaJE, 2009–2012, http://colaje.risc.cnrs.fr). The aim of the two programmes was to collect new French data and add five new longitudinal corpora to the international database of the CHILDES project (http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/, MacWhinney, 2000), improve researchers’ transcription and coding systems to enable them to study the emergence and development of grammatical patterns used by children between age one and seven, and compare child and adult speech. The programmes brought together specialists from various fields of language acquisition in order to study language development in the same longitudinal corpus from a multimodal and interdisciplinary perspective. The analyses aimed to find regularities in acquisition for each child and across the children.

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.

This article presents a comparative analysis of five quasi-experimental studies involving close to 1,200 students, ranging in age from 7 to 14, in 49 French immersion classrooms in Canada – a content-based instructional context where learners develop high levels of communicative ability yet demonstrate a levelling-off effect in their grammatical development. The studies investigated the effects of form-focused instruction on four areas known to be difficult for anglophone learners of French: perfect vs. imperfect past tense, conditional mood, second-person pronouns and grammatical gender. Findings suggest that effective form-focused instruction in immersion contexts, at least with respect to interlanguage features that have reached a developmental plateau, includes a balanced distribution of opportunities for noticing, language awareness and controlled practice with feedback. Less effective instructional options overemphasise negotiation for meaning in oral tasks where message comprehensibility and communication strategies circumvent the need for learners to move beyond the use of interlanguage forms.

This article presents a corpus analysis designed to determine the extent to which noun endings in French are reliable predictors of grammatical gender. A corpus of 9,961 nouns appearing in Le Robert Junior Illustré was analysed according to noun endings, which were operationalised as orthographic representations of rhymes, which consist of either a vowel sound (i.e., a nucleus) in the case of vocalic endings or a vowel-plus-consonant blend (i.e., a nucleus and a coda) in the case of consonantal endings. The analysis classified noun endings as reliably masculine, reliably feminine, or ambiguous, by considering as reliable predictors of grammatical gender any noun ending that predicts the gender of least 90 per cent of all nouns in the corpus with that ending. Results reveal that 81 per cent of all feminine nouns and 80 per cent of all masculine nouns in the corpus are rule governed, having endings that systematically predict their gender. These findings, at odds with traditional grammars, are discussed in terms of their pedagogical implications.

We know very little about the French vocabulary that is learned in school and this paper reports a study which measures learners' vocabulary size and progress in secondary school. The methodology for estimating vocabulary size in French is comparable with vocabulary size testing in other foreign languages, and this makes comparison with vocabulary learning in French and other languages possible. Results suggest that learners learn about 170 words per year up to GCSE and about 530 words per year in ‘A’ level study and are influenced by word frequency. On average, learners take GCSE with under 1000 words of French vocabulary and ‘A’ level with about 2000 words. These results appear modest compared with historical data and when compared with other language exams pitched at the same CEF levels as GCSE and ‘A’ level. Vocabulary size predicts ‘A’ level grade particularly impressively. There is a worrying period where progress, even of the best learners, appears to halt for several years.

Nous proposons d'effectuer dans cette étude un large tour d'horizon des problèmes liés à l'interprétation de l'accent en général et de l'accentuation du français contemporain en particulier. Cet « état des lieux » (première partie) débouche sur l'esquisse d'une modélisation du cadre accentuel du français (seconde partie) fondée sur une classification fonctionnelle des catégories d'accentuation et la mise en œuvre généralisée du principe de bipolarisation accentuelle qui permet, selon nous, de rendre compte du caractère probabilitaire de l'accentuation du français et de la variabilité de ses des motifs rythmiques attestés dans les formes prosodiques de surface.

In this article we present some results showing the decline in radio speech in the use of the French negative particle ne over the last forty years or so. These results derive from a comparison of two radio corpora: an archival corpus recorded by Ågren (1973) in 1960–61. The second, contemporary corpus was recorded and analysed by one of the present authors (Smith) in 1997. Having described the variable in question, we present these corpora in turn and analyse results deriving from them. We then examine some of the linguistic constraints that endorse the progressive decline of ne in some contexts while hindering the process in others. Finally we consider some elements of the social context within which the decline of ne has been occurring.

La signification lexicale est souvent conçue, au moins partiellement, en termes de description ou, dans notre terminologie, de propriétés intrinsèques (PI). Nous explorons ici l'hypothèse inverse que le mot (notamment le nom) renvoie directement aux types de relations, 1° que le locuteur entretient avec les référents variés que tel mot lui permet de construire, 2° que ces référents entretiennent avec leur environnement. C'est sans doute le sens même des noms qui doit être identifié avec ces rapports ou propriétés extrinsèques (PE). Du coup, les emplois polysémiques, métonymiques ou métaphoriques sortent complètement de leur marginalité pour tendre à se confondre avec la signification lexicale elle-même, les usages dénominatifs masquant plutôt cette signification.

Cet article défend l'hypothèse que le français (toutes zones géographiques confondues) présente aujourd'hui les propriétés caractérisant la situation diglossique, selon la définition classique de ce concept formulée par Ferguson (1959): la variété H est incarnée par la grammaire standard, et les variétés L par les grammaires appelées ici dialectales, activées par les locuteurs en situation informelle. Dans une optique générative de la grammaire, il est proposé de représenter la compétence linguistique des francophones par deux grammaires en intersection, schéma rendant compte de l'intuition que les deux algorithmes génèrent “la même langue”. L'article s'emploie à justifier pour le français l'hypothèse diglossique et la formalisation proposée, et à en explorer quelques avantages et implications pour la description et l'enseignement de cette langue.

The present contribution presents an overview of studies in French as a second (L2) and/or foreign language that consider the effects of extralinguistic variables (mostly instructional, experiential and situational factors) on the development of sociolinguistic competence. It focuses specifically on variation between informal and formal variants in phonology, morphology, morpho-syntax and the lexicon.

This study explores ne use in a previously unexamined variety of French: Swiss French. Based on a corpus of conversation among friends and family recorded at home, the results of this study show the lowest ne use reported for adult, middle-class speakers of European French, 2.5%. It also shows that ne functions micro-stylistically to effect micro-shifts in register allowing speakers to enact the institutional talk of public discourse. Finally, a new function appears to emerge: the use of ne as an emphatic, where it tends to appear in foregrounded clauses often with other emphatics, functioning as speaker evaluation or involvement.

Nous proposons d'effectuer dans cette étude un large tour d'horizon des problèmes liés à l'interprétation de l'accent en général et de l'accentuation du français contemporain en particulier. Cet état des lieux (première partie) débouche sur l'esquisse d'une modélisation du cadre accentuel du français (seconde partie) fondée sur une classification fonctionnelle des catégories d'accentuation et la mise en óuvre généralisée du principe de bipolarisation accentuelle qui permet, selon nous, de rendre compte du caractère probabilitaire de l'accentuation du français et de la variabilité de ses motifs rythmiques attestés dans les formes prosodiques de surface.

Nous étudierons l'hypothèse selon laquelle le E caduc précédé d'une seule consonne — (V) C_C — serait en train de se stabiliser dans le français non-méridional, surtout en syllabe initiale de mot, mais aussi en monosyllabe et en syllabe médiane. A l'aide de deux corpus de français parlé parisien, rassemblés en 1972–1974 et en 1989, nous montrons d'abord que cette stabilisation ne peut pas être confirmée dans la langue parlée de Parisiens cultivés. Le E caduc étudié semble être une variable sociolinguistique stable, variant avec le style et avec 1'âge des locuteurs. La deuxième partie de notre analyse fait apparaître en outre un conditionnement lexical important en syllabe initiale (0% de maintien dans semaine, 100% dans relation). Nous examinerons le rôle joué par la fréquence du mot, par la présence du préfixe re-, et par la relation articulatoire entre les consonnes qui entourent le E caduc.

Des études récentes, essentiellement fondées sur des expérimentations, ont précisé les relations entre l'usage enfantin des liaisons, les erreurs commises par les enfants et la segmentation des mots nouveaux. Alors que les auteurs s'accordent sur les faits, ils divergent sur les facteurs explicatifs susceptibles de rendre compte des étapes développementales. Chevrot, Dugua et Fayol (2005) défendent une approche basée sur l'usage alors que Wauquier-Gravelines (2005) et Wauquier-Gravelines et Braud (2005) soutiennent une conception dans laquelle le développement est guidé par les principes universels de la grammaire. Les données issues de trois études de cas confirment et clarifient les résultats expérimentaux. Deux types d'effets de fréquence soutiennent l'approche basée sur l'usage.