This article investigates the evolution of bare nouns, used without a determiner, through the history of the French language. The loss of bare nouns is charted through calibrated corpora of non-fictional prose texts from the same genres and region, ranging from the 12th to the 19th century. The change is first completed with nouns in subject function, significantly advances with direct objects, and progresses with obliques. The extensive quantitative documentation demonstrates that the change is impacted by the syntactic function of the noun, along the Accessibility Hierarchy. The speculation is examined that the more accessible functions encourage expression of (definite) determiners, thus explaining the pattern of change.

Gender inclusive writing, a term that refers to a wide range of feminist linguistic practices aimed at reducing linguistic androcentrism, has been the topic of heated debates in France. Recent experimental studies have investigated its interpretation and showed that inclusive forms with the point médian (“étudiant·e·s”) and repetition (“étudiants et étudiantes”) feminize participants’ mental representations compared to the generic masculine (“étudiants”). In this article, we bring novel results from three experiments investigating the interpretation of these two inclusive forms in a more detailed context (university brochures). We find that the point médian is subject to “context dilution” effects: its meaning disappears in rich contexts, while repetition consistently changes readers’ mental representations, provided it is used systematically. We argue that our results show the necessity of looking at more ecological contexts in experimental (socio)linguistics for understanding the interpretation and processing of socially important linguistic variants.

In this article, we document the gender of the noun “COVID-19” in a database of more than 76,000 tweets and in traditional media (approximately 500,000 articles) in French as spoken in Africa, (North) America and Europe. We find that North American media comply near-categorically with the recommendations of the feminine by the World Health Organization and local linguistic authorities in March 2020. The majority of North American tweets follow suit soon after. The African data show an increase of articles and tweets adopting the feminine after the Académie française's recommendation in May 2020. Finally, the feminine is negligible in the European data. We argue that among the factors at play are dialect-specific differences in French gender and loanword adaptation; the complex relationship among linguistic authorities, the public, and local media; and the relative delay in the Académie française's recommendation of the feminine.

Cet article questionne la nature des troubles phonologiques à travers le prisme de la notion de complexité phonologique chez des locuteurs francophones atteints d’aphasie. Si de nombreux travaux ont été consacrés aux erreurs phonétiques portant sur la réalisation des phonèmes, plus rares sont les études qui prennent en compte la dimension phonologique, i.e. l’environnement contextuel. Toutefois certains auteurs montrent que la structure syllabique du mot, ou encore la position des segments au sein des syllabes influencent les réalisations des locuteurs atteints d’une aphasie (Wilshire & Nespoulous, 2003; Buchwald et Miozzo, 2012; Buchwald, 2017). Ces facteurs renvoient à la notion de complexité phonologique.

Cette étude présente une analyse des erreurs phonologiques dans l’aphasie à partir d’un corpus de données empiriques récoltées auprès de huit locuteurs. Plusieurs facteurs de la complexité phonologique sont ici analysés afin de comprendre s’ils jouent un rôle dans la réalisation des erreurs. L’hypothèse est que la présence de séquences consonantiques, la position de ces séquences dans les items (initiale vs médiane), la nature de ces séquences (hétérosyllabique, tautosyllabique) ainsi que la longueur des items (bi vs trisyllabique) influencent la production des erreurs. À travers cette recherche, nous espérons accroître les connaissances sur la nature des déficits phonologiques.

In this article, we explored the pitch contour patterns of the French discourse marker donc in realizing different pragmatic functions from native and non-native oral corpora in French. Statistical analyses using generalized additive mixed modeling revealed that even though Mandarin Chinese L1 speakers learning French also used the pitch cue to realize pragmatic functions, their prosodic pattern is different from the native pattern. Their L1 Chinese seemed to influence their usage of the pitch cue significantly. In addition, women were shown to be better than men in using the pitch cue in conveying pragmatic functions with a closer pattern to the native pattern. Overall, our study sheds new light on the relationship between speakers’ L1 and L2 regarding the interaction between pragmatic and prosodic features. It also provides new reflections on the acquisition of socio-pragmatic competence.

L’objectif de cette étude était d’introduire un processus de traduction et de validation de l’Ambivalent Ageism Scale en français. L’Ambivalent Ageism scale (AAS) est la première échelle de mesure qui prend en compte l’âgisme bienveillant. Notre étude a suivi trois grandes étapes : la traduction, l’enquête et la validation. L’enquête transversale a été réalisée auprès d’étudiants de master en Sciences de la santé publique de la Faculté de santé publique de l’UClouvain lors de l’année académique 2019–2020 : sur 544 inscrits, 111 étudiants ont participé. L’échantillon était majoritairement composé de professionnels de la santé, avec un âge moyen de 31,47 ans (écart type = 7,48 ans). En conclusion, la version française de l’AAS est composée de douze items et est subdivisée en trois nouveaux facteurs : la surprotection (six items), l’infantilisation (quatre items) et le contrôle (deux items) auprès des personnes âgées. La nouvelle mesure de l’âgisme paternaliste (MAP) est une échelle de mesure simple et courte qui identifie des stéréotypes et des attitudes paternalistes à l’égard des personnes âgées.

Il est essentiel d’utiliser des tests cognitifs ayant été validés et détenant des normes de référence auprès de la population cible, puisque les réalités culturelles et linguistiques différentes entre l’échantillon de validation ou auprès duquel les normes ont été créées et la population cible peuvent affecter les résultats. Cette revue systématique vise à recenser et décrire les tests cognitifs (incluant tests, questionnaires et grilles d’observation) validés et/ou présentant des normes sur la population âgée canadienne francophone. Au total, 46 articles ont été sélectionnés. Cette revue recense 9 tests validés, 20 tests avec normes de référence et 18 tests validés et avec normes, couvrant la majorité des domaines cognitifs (fonctions mnésiques, attentionnelles, exécutives, perceptivo-motrices et langagières), excepté la cognition sociale. La quasi-totalité des échantillons ont été recrutés au Québec. Les tests relevés présentent majoritairement des indices psychométriques satisfaisants et généralement des normes considérant l’âge, le sexe et l’éducation. Cette revue systématique permettra aux cliniciens et chercheurs canadiens en vieillissement d’orienter optimalement leurs choix de tests cognitifs.

This article examines the rise of vernacular consequence marker ça-fait-que (CFQ), often realized as [fɛk] or [fak], at the expense of its standard counterparts donc and alors in Montreal French. The apparent-time analysis is based on a 2012 corpus of semi-directed interviews collected in Montreal. Previous studies treated the CFQ/donc/alors alternation as a purely lexical sociolinguistic variable. Our analysis shows how a vernacular variant (CFQ), initially associated with the working class and stigmatized, comes to compete, develop as a default form, and eventually crowd out forms at the other end of the social prestige scale (alors and donc). We rely on new socio-phonetic considerations to unveil a reconfiguration of the variable. The integration of the sociophonetic dimension sheds light on a complex process of diffusion, where a change from below is propelled by an additional change, but from above. Our article shows the key role played by women in both changes.

A previous panel study of 59 speakers of Montreal French showed an increase in inflected futures (IF) at the expense of periphrastic futures (PF) as this population aged, running counter to the direction of historical change: reduction of IF. Matching two samples of speakers across the same time interval by age and social characteristics, the current trend study investigates whether or not this increase reflects retrograde change in the speech community. Results show community stability over the same period, confirming the earlier age grading interpretation and disconfirming any possibility that the disappearance of IF may be reversing. We propose that this pattern of retrograde lifespan change may emerge from a combination of social forces typically found in late stages of language change, with concomitant stylistic effect. Further, such a pattern may suggest the mechanism that creates a very long tail for retreating variants.

It is commonly noted that standard French is losing the contrast between its two low vowels /a/ and /ɑ/, due to the fronting of the back vowel. The difference in length, which accompanied the qualitative difference of this pair, is affected as well. In mainland France, this tendency can be found to various degrees across the country, and is spreading throughout the speech community. This article further develops the picture of the current status of the low vowel contrast by investigating Belgian and Swiss French, where length is known to play overall a far more prominent role in the vowel inventories than it does in standard French. Are Belgian and Swiss French also affected by the merger of the two low vowels? To what extent can a difference in length and/or timbre still be found? And how do the patterns of contrast neutralisation/preservation relate to the developments in France?

This article is devoted to the emergence of a new paradigm in French and Romance: that of nominal determiners. Latin had no articles, and although possessives, demonstratives and indefinites could determine the noun, they could also be used as pronouns or adjectives, so that the morpho-syntactic category of nominal determiners did not exist as such. We first examine the diachronic evolution of French, where a far-reaching grammaticalization process took place. Syntagmatically, all determiners end up in the NP-initial position as the only available syntactic slot, contributing to the highly configurational NP pattern characteristic of Modern French. From a paradigmatic viewpoint, determiners no longer correspond to a syntactic function, but to a separate morpho-syntactic category. We also evaluate to what extent this evolution took place in two other Romance languages, Italian and Spanish. Through the analysis of this particular evolution, based on parallel corpora consisting of a Latin text and its translations in Old, Middle, and Modern French on the one hand, and in Spanish and Italian on the other, our study also provides evidence for more general mechanisms, analogy in particular, at work in the creation of new paradigms.

This article adds a Caribbean perspective to the analysis of futurity by presenting a quantitative variationist investigation of the competing forms used by speakers to encode future time in the French département et région d'outre-mer of Martinique. The two variants under investigation are the inflected future (je partirai ‘I will leave’) and the periphrastic future (je vais partir ‘I am going to leave’). In this variety, the periphrastic future is identified as the most frequent variant. Fixed-effects and mixed-effects models furthermore tease apart the complex set of constraints governing variant selection and demonstrate the repercussions of considering speaker and lexical effects when analysing sociolinguistic data. Indeed, once individual speaker and word-level variation are controlled for, the future variable in Martinique French is constrained purely by temporal distance: while the periphrastic future acts as the default option in the majority of time contexts, the inflected future functions as the marker of distal time.

This article examines future temporal reference (FTR) in the French spoken in Vimeu, a rural area of France where French evolved alongside Picard, a Gallo-Romance regional language. Unlike most French varieties, which favour periphrasis, Vimeu Picard favours the inflected form. By comparing French data from Picard–French bilinguals and French monolinguals, we assess the potential effect of Picard contact on Vimeu French. We hypothesized that bilinguals may favour the inflected form more than monolinguals, a hypothesis that was not verified. Instead, education is the best social predictor: speakers with a baccalauréat or higher disfavour the periphrastic future. Regarding linguistic constraints, we expected sentential polarity to constrain FTR (negation favours the inflected form), as in many varieties. Surprisingly, only temporal distance constrains FTR in our data: proximate events favour periphrasis, and do so even more strongly with events to occur within the minute. These results suggest that Vimeu French marks imminence through periphrasis.

This study seeks to advance understanding of second-language (L2) acquisition of future-time reference in French, by comparing the developmental trajectories of learners living in and away from the target-language setting. Study-abroad learners in France (n = 45), foreign-language learners living in the US (n = 37), and native speakers of Hexagonal French (n = 30) participated in this study. They completed a written-contextualized task, a language-proficiency test and a background questionnaire. For each written-contextualized-task item, participants selected from among three responses that differed with respect to the form (inflectional future, periphrastic future, present). Items were designed to test for the influence of three factors on the form selected: presence/absence of a lexical temporal indicator, temporal distance, and (un)certainty. Additionally, two extra-linguistic factors were examined: learning context and proficiency level. The analyses of frequency and the multinomial logistic regressions suggest that, despite developmental similarities between learning contexts, acquisitional paths of study-abroad and foreign-language learners were not identical.

This article focuses on whether determiner omission by two-year-old children isconstrained at the level of the prosodic foot or whether it is a function of thedifferent levels of the prosodic hierarchy. Nine French-speaking children aged2;0 to 2;7 were asked to repeat 54 four- or five-word sentences of the form“Pronoun V NP” with three conditions: a) det + monosyllabicnoun; b) det + bisyllabic noun; c) det + monosyllabic adjective+ monosyllabic noun. The results show 1) more determiner omission incondition b than in a; 2) more determiner omission in c than in b. It is shownthat determiner omission is not accounted for by a low-level stress-alternationconstraint and that the level of prosodic structure to which the determiner isattached plays a role in determiner omission.

This article investigates the role that the phonetic parameters of duration and voicing play in shaping asymmetric patterns of Romance stop-liquid cluster realization. Based on acoustic analysis of experimental data from Quebec French and Argentine Spanish, we demonstrate the existence of an asymmetry in the proportional duration of the stop and a following epenthetic vowel or lateral: sonorants are shorter after voiceless stops in stop-liquid clusters. Rhotics do not participate in this process. The Spanish tap does not vary significantly in length, and the French dorsal fricative is longer in voiceless clusters. We propose that compensatory adjustments of the following sonorant are the result of the interaction of coarticulatory constraints, both universal (shorter sonorants after voiceless stops or fricatives) and language-specific (voicing in dorsal fricatives in French). Parallels are drawn between the synchronic variation attested and well-known patterns of diachronic change in Romance.