The papers in this Special Issue present some of the results of the Multicultural London English/Multicultural Paris French project, supported by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) from October 2010 to December 2014 and by the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR) from 2010–2012. The project compared language variation and change in multilingual areas of London and Paris, focusing on the language of young people of recent immigrant origin as well as that of young people whose families had lived in London or Paris for many generations. Similar projects in other European cities have documented the emergence of new ways of speaking and rapid language change in the dominant ‘host’ language, which are attributed to the direct and indirect effects of language contact; see, for example, Wiese 2009 on young people's language in Berlin, Quist 2008 on youth language in Copenhagen, and Svendsen and Røyneland 2008 on Norwegian). In London, young children from diverse linguistic backgrounds tend to acquire English in their peer groups at nursery school rather than from their parents, many of whom do not speak English or are in the early stages of learning English. Since their peers speak a wide range of different languages, the only language the young children have in common is English; and since many of their friends are also acquiring English, there is no clear target model, a high tolerance of linguistic variation, and plenty of scope for linguistic innovation. By the time they reach adolescence, young people's English has stabilized, and many innovations have become part of a new London dialect, now known as Multicultural London English (Cheshire et al., 2013). New urban dialects and language practices such as these have been termed ‘multiethnolects’: they contain a variable repertoire of innovative phonetic, grammatical, and discourse-pragmatic features. In multiethnic peer groups, where local children from many different linguistic backgrounds grow up together, the innovative features are used by speakers of all ethnicities, including those of local descent such as, in London, young monolingual English speakers from Cockney families. Nevertheless they tend to be more frequent in the speech of bilingual young people of recent immigrant origin, and by young speakers with highly multiethnic friendship groups (see further Quist 2008 for an account of the use of features associated with a multiethnolect in conjunction with nonlinguistic ‘markers’ of style, such as tastes in music and preferred ways of dressing). Our project aimed to determine whether a similar outcome had occurred in multicultural areas of Paris.

Much recent work (e.g. Hansen 1994) is demonstrating that French schwa is becoming stable in many contexts where it formerly deleted freely. In this paper, I expand on Hansen's study of the new stability of schwa, extending consideration to the lexicalized conditioning of the stability as indicated in four contemporary pronouncing dictionaries of Standard French. This increasing stability also provides evidence for a reanalysis of schwa as underlying /œ/; the implications of this analysis for the distinction between lexical and post-lexical rules are briefly explored.

Cellard (1979: 19) avançait de façon quelque peu impressionniste que ‘le passé simple se rencontrait beaucoup plus souvent dans les comptes rendus de rencontres sportives de notre journal que dans toute autre catégorie de textes’. Même si un tel passé perfectif était le vecteur idéal du rapport d'un exploit sportif au déroulement chronologique, la réalité des textes nous offre un panorama nettement diversifié. Une compétition acharnée se joue avec d'autres tiroirs verbaux (passé composé, imparfait, présent) qui, chacun, offre une présentation différente des procès. Après une brève présentation théorique de chaque tiroir, nous entamerons une étude de corpus basée sur des textes de presse francophone. Nous conclurons que le panorama temporel du compte rendu sportif contemporain pourrait résulter de contraintes extra-linguistiques comme le type de publication et l'évolution des médias.

This article reports on two anglophone teenagers learning French – one exposed to a six-month stay in France, and the other exposed to an instructional environment. The corpus collected from six tape-recorded interviews shows an increase in the number of tokens and lexically distinct verbs produced, and in the percentage of correctly inflected verbs. The subjects' use of correct and incorrect forms supports a rote and rule model of morphology. L2 learners seem to make use of a coalition of resources – primary linguistic data as well as cognitive strategies for grammatical rule formation – to create their interlanguage grammar.

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.

In the last thirty years the development of the Cognitive Metaphor Theory (e.g. Lakoff, 1987, 2006; Lakoff and Johnson, 1999) has led to vast research into metaphor. The study of linguistic metaphor was followed by a body of work into pictorial metaphor (Forceville, 1994, 1996) and multimodal metaphor (Forceville, 2007, 2008, 2009). In the present contribution we explore the use of verbo-pictorial metaphors in advertising through a corpus of French print ads. Starting from the claim that adverts serve a persuasive purpose, it will be argued that multimodal metaphor contributes to that purpose. The paper addresses three issues: a) how multimodal metaphors are manifested in the French advertisements; b) how image and text interact in a concrete type of multimodal metaphor in French print advertisements, namely verbo-pictorial metaphor; c) how verbo-pictorial metaphor performs a pragmatic function in advertising.

This cross-sectional study in the acquisition of future temporality by English-speaking L2 French learners presents a descriptive account of the major contrastive features of the expression in futurity in English and French before considering learnability implications. A personal narrative and a cloze task were administered to L2 French learners (n = 34) at three proficiency levels and French native speaker controls (n = 14). Analyses revealed task and proficiency effects, but all learners used a variety of morphological forms to express futurity in their personal narratives, and appear to be acquiring temporal and modal values associated with the future.

This article compares and contrasts two related adverbs, enfin and finalement, in synchrony and diachrony. Both are polysemous in contemporary French, and largely intersubstitutable in many contexts. However, the functional range of enfin is much greater than that of finalement. Evidence is presented for the existence of a division of labour, such that speakers seem to favour finalement for more ‘literal’ functions, i.e. for the expression of temporal sequence, whereas enfin is preferred for more abstract, non-propositional functions. This is attributed to the respective formal properties and degree of grammaticalisation of the two expressions, which can also explain why enfin has developed a vastly greater range of abstract, non-propositional functions than finalement. The argument is supported by diachronic evidence that the functional extension of enfin has gone hand in hand with significant changes in the formal status of the expression, while functional extension of finalement stops at approximately the time when enfin begins to expand its range.

The present paper reports findings from a controlled large-scale (N = 1018) experimental study investigating how four different gender-fair forms influenced native French speakers’ estimated percentage of women compared to the masculine form (interpretable as generic) in 22 non-stereotyped French role nouns. The findings show that the masculine form generated lower perceived percentages of women compared to all other tested forms. In addition, gender-neutral and double forms were found equally efficient in resolving the male bias induced by the masculine form. Since the role nouns were non-stereotyped in terms of gender, these results suggest that the actual form of a role noun has indeed a strong influence on how the gender ratio of that role noun will be perceived. Moreover, the direction of the questionnaire’s response scale had a significant effect on the results, which entails methodological implications for future research. Finally, the provided ratios can be used for future studies investigating French role nouns in different gender-fair forms. In sum, our study suggests that gender-fair forms in French are an efficient tool for increasing the visibility of women, at least in nouns representing non-stereotypical activities.

Cet article présente les résultats d'une étude sociolinguistique sur la langue non-sexiste menée auprès des partis politiques en France. L'étude porte sur les publications externes de cinq partis (Le Front National, Le Parti Socialiste, Le RPR, L'UDF, Les Verts). Dans un premier temps, les réactions des équipes rédactionnelles envers le concept de la langue discriminatoire ont été recueillies au moyen d'entretiens semi-structurés. Ensuite l'analyse d'un échantillon de publications a révélé comment et dans quelle mesure la politique rédactionnelle se traduit dans la pratique écrite. Il existe différents niveaux de sensibilité parmi les partis concernant l'éventuelle discrimination linguistique envers les femmes. En ce qui concerne la pratique rédactionnelle l'on trouve parmi les différents partis un éventail d'usages allant de l'immobilisme linguistique jusqu'à l'innovation lexicale.

This article presents a synthesis of the sociolinguistic situation of what the authors refer to as the ‘contemporary dialects’ of French in the France of today. The introduction emphasises the methodological and conceptual problems attending any such definition and evaluation, attempting to clarify the complex situation and to identify the various kinds of ‘dialects’, ‘uses’ and ‘speakers’. We then concentrate on the regional ‘dialects’ of French in continental France, urban and rural, and summarise a series of important recent studies, concentrating on local variation. We also distinguish the sociolinguistic situations of the northern and the southern parts of the country. Even though France is known to be a highly centralised country, whose linguistic policy has been aiming at monolingualism for the past two centuries, the article offers some possibly surprising and nuanced results that show more variation than established opinion would generally admit about contemporary France.

This paper investigates the scale of vocabulary learning that appears to be common among British foreign language learners of French up to university graduation. These results are compared with historical data and the knowledge learners possessed in previous generations. This is done by comparing current students' vocabulary knowledge with students who studied more than 20 years ago. These comparisons provide very powerful evidence in support of claims made to the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority of a progressive decline in the knowledge of learners and the standard of school examinations over a period of decades.

This article examines the use of second-person pronouns in on-line French language discussion fora, with specific focus on Doctissimo and Meilleur du chef, two fora from which approximately 400,000 words were collected for this corpus. Two hundred discussion threads (i.e., series of linked postings), with a minimum of fifteen postings (i.e., messages) and a maximum of twenty per thread, were analysed in three different ways in order to determine whether tu, vous-singular, or neither could be considered the default address pronoun. The results of the analysis suggest that while tu is clearly preferred in many cases, its use has not become systematic.

This article discusses ne-variation in French sentential negation based on the phonologically transcribed corpus T-zéro (cf. Meisner, in preparation) which allows a new interpretation of the facts. In the last decades, sociolinguistic and stylistic approaches to linguistic variation in French (cf. Armstrong, 2001) have shown that extra-linguistic factors, such as the speaker's age, sex, social background or geographic origin as well as the communication situation may have considerable influence on variable ne-omission. However, in contrast to most sociolinguistic studies dedicated to this phenomenon (cf. Ashby, 1976, 1981, 2001; Armstrong and Smith, 2002; Coveney, 2002) we will focus on the linguistic factors influencing ne-variation, since their importance is empirically evident but not yet fully exploited on a theoretical level.

One leading assumption with respect to ne-variation in literature is that the particle ne is most frequently retained in combination with a proper name or a full DP and is commonly omitted when combined with clitic subjects. However, there are many exceptions to this rule which, as we argue, can be better explained by considering the phonological form of the involved subject. Ne-realisation is treated here as an inner-grammatical phenomenon that is triggered by context sensitivity with regard to the element to its left, i.e. usually the grammatical subject, and not as a consequence of ‘code-switching’ between two grammars nor as a sociolinguistic variable characterising certain groups of speakers in the Labovian sense (cf. Labov, 1972), since we seek to describe general variational tendencies, present in nearly all speakers of contemporary European French. Our analysis, which is implemented in a Distributed Morphology framework (Halle & Marantz, 1994), is compatible, however, with stylistic approaches to ne-variation, such as audience design (cf. Bell, 1984, 2001).

This article outlines the diglossic approach to intra-speaker grammatical variation (Ferguson 1959), wherein speaker-hearers acquire two grammars which are socio-stylistically distinct – one H(igh), the other L(ow) – but linguistically related (to the extent that users regard them as the same language), and then engage one or other of them (but do not mix them) in their active productions. It then sets out how a case could be made for such a model to capture variation in contemporary France, in place of the variationist model which envisages a single, flexible grammar, e.g., the bipolarity, strength and non-random nature of the sociolinguistic H–L distinction, the differing pattern of acquisition of H and L forms, the tendency for L forms to encroach on H terrain (rather than vice versa), and the internal coherence of each of the H and L varieties. Finally, the article sketches the politico-moral dimension to the debate, extending beyond scientific objectivity, and relating to the treatment of non-standard linguistic behaviour in context of the socio-cultural status of the standard.

The aim of this study is twofold: first, to find evidence for additional advanced stages in L2 French. The continuum of Bartning and Schlyter (2004) is taken as a point of departure. It is hypothesized that a number of linguistic criteria will account for high-level proficiency. It was earlier found that besides morpho-syntax, formulaic sequences and information structure are interesting phenomena for highly proficient learners (Bartning, Forsberg and Hancock, 2009). Three more measures are now added, i.e. perceived nativelikeness, lexical richness and fluency.

The second aim of this study is to contribute to the debate on the possibility of nativelike attainment. The study shows that several measures are prone to characterise nativelike performance in highly proficient users among whom some attain nativelikeness.

In this paper, I propose to show how the analysis of episodes of laughter in French interaction can be approached from the theoretical perspective of Conversation Analysis. Delicate microanalysis reveals how laughter is very carefully placed by participants during the course of their talk to achieve a range of interactional tasks. Using extracts from my corpus of naturally occurring French conversation, I examine how the collaborative construction of episodes of shared laughter contribute to the achievement of affiliation between co-participants. How the laughter is initiated, where it is placed and who joins in that laughter are shown to be significant to the task of constructing and displaying social relationships between the participants.

In this paper, our aim is to analyze the relationship between the development of verbal forms and verbal functions. We examine all verbal forms produced longitudinally by two French children in terms of their morphosyntactic marking of tense, aspect, mood and situation type, and compare them to their contextually interpreted meanings. We introduce the main issues relevant to the unfolding of the verbal temporal system in children's data. Our data consists in two longitudinal corpora of French speaking children aged 1;06 to 3;01. The paper focuses on: 1) the relationship between form and function within the verbal system in the earlier stage of development; 2) the children's ability to mark a displacement between speech time and event time.

We analyse genre in the speech of young people with multi-ethnic friendship groups in Paris in order to address the as yet unresolved question of whether new quotatives equivalent in meaning to English BE LIKE result from simultaneous independent parallel developments in languages other than English or from a process of calquing. We conclude that French quotative genre results from independent internal developments, but that it enters the French quotative system in the same way that BE LIKE entered the English system, driven by the meanings of ‘similarity’ or ‘approximation’ that are shared by the lexical item genre in a range of syntactic categories. We propose that in order for a new similarity quotative to emerge, a lexical item with a meaning of ‘similarity’ or ‘approximation’ must become syntactically multifunctional, and that the use of that lexical item must reach a critical frequency threshold. In the case of genre we suggest that the necessary increase in frequency results from the development of the lexical item into a discourse marker. We also analyse another new French quotative, ETRE LA, a sequence that we find is used to highlight activity of many kinds (including, but not confined to, spoken behaviour). The trajectory followed by each of the new quotative expressions conforms to De Smet's proposals about how linguistic innovations spread through the grammar.

Our study presents a variationist analysis of lexical variation in L2 immersion in French. Two variables are considered: a) words referring to remunerated work, e.g. travail; b) verbs used to indicate one's place of residence, e.g. habiter. One linguistic factor, priming in the interviewer's question, is shown to condition both variables. A number of social factors are also considered. The only correlation that obtains with a social factor is speakers' home language for the ‘work’ variable. The main finding from our study is that in comparison to L1 Canadian Francophones, the immersion students make use of a limited number of lexical variants and show no knowledge of highly frequent non standard L1 forms.