This article discusses il y a-clefts in spoken French. In the linguistic literature, only one function of il y a-clefts is widely acknowledged, namely presenting a new event in the discourse. By studying corpus examples in their wider context, we found however that many occurrences do not easily fit in the properties described in the literature. We make a distinction between presentational il y a-clefts, which can be event-presenting or entity-presenting, and specificational enumerative il y a-clefts, which give an example of a class that was implicitly or explicitly evoked in the context.

Used at first with their original (definite) article, the phrases exception française and fin de l'exception française gained instant notoriety after the publication of Furet, Julliard and Rosanvallon's 1988 book La République du centre: La fin de l'exception française. Before too long, the shorter phrase, which (contrary to what is sometimes asserted) was already in existence, also started occurring without the article, with other determiners, and in the plural. This paper details some of the splendeurs et misères (including progressive trivialization) of both the longer and the shorter phrase, thought of as exponents of a single formula.

This study investigates the hypothesis of young people having the multi-skills required to switch between formal and informal communication. We collected samples of the written output of students across different media and communication situations. The results obtained through dictation tests show that the students’ level is relatively low, with a majority of grammatical errors. The analysis of linguistic forms common to the corpora indicates that all the participants use traditional spelling in at least one of them. Lastly, we present a qualitative analysis of spelling variation and an overview of the teenagers’ linguistic representations.

Cet article s'inscrit dans l'hypothèse de l'encadrement développée par Charolles (1997), et réexaminée ultérieurement sous divers angles. Une condition syntaxique est mise au jour par Fuchs et Fournier (2003), à laquelle nous portons une attention particulière : à savoir, l'antéposition nécessaire du sujet (S) par rapport au verbe (V), suivant un terme initial cadratif. Nous réinterrogeons le lien entre encadrement et position du sujet à la lumière d'un corpus de contes oraux. Nous défendons l'hypothèse que dans certains cas, lorsqu'ils apparaissent dans des sections stratégiques du conte, les syntagmes spatio-temporels suivis de l'ordre VS peuvent être regardés comme proprement cadratifs.

Current research on conceptual and semantic representations is mainly based on prototypical word classes, such as nouns and verbs. Hence, most models of language processing and language representation rely on experimental investigations on these word classes. Until today, only a few psycholinguistic studies centre on the processing of pragmatic markers and hedges and their effect on speech comprehension. The present article aims to give experimental evidence for the processing of semantic meaning patterns and pragmatic functions of pragmatic markers. The focus will be on the question, if pragmatic markers and hedges play a role in sentence processing. This main problem will be illustrated and discussed by means of experimental data. In a monolingual sentence verification task with lexical decision, the meaning patterns and functions of the partially equivalent pragmatic French markers comme and genre are investigated in Canadian and European French. The results of the sentence word verification task provide evidence for an impact of pragmatic functions and semantic meaning patterns of pragmatic markers on sentence processing.

This study examined how native and near-native speakers of Hexagonal French make reference to future events in a corpus of informal conversations. A concept-oriented analysis reveals that no fewer than 13 different finite verb forms appeared in future-time contexts. A qualitative analysis of the use of the present in future-time contexts in the two portions of the corpus points to similarities in the native-speaker and near-native-speaker use. This analysis contributes to the understanding of future-time expression in Hexagonal French and to discussions concerning near-nativeness in second language acquisition.

This article presents the results of a corpus analysis of the information structure properties of il y a clefts (e.g. Il y a Claude qui chante ‘There is Claude who is singing’ / ‘Claude is singing’). I will show that il y a clefts and existential sentences introduced by il y a can express the same three information structure articulations. Furthermore, it will be argued that il y a clefts and existential sentences function as focus markers, and that this hypothesis is further supported by psycholinguistic findings concerning constructions related to il y a.

Much has been written about the use of French in medieval England. However, with one or two exceptions, relatively little has been written about the language in early modern England. This article aims to provide an account of the use of French as an emigrant language in one of the leading provincial cities in early modern England, Norwich. From 1565 onwards thousands of people from the French-language area migrated to England as a result of economic necessity and religious persecution. Many of them settled in Norwich. As well as these immigrants and their descendants, there were Dutch immigrants in Norwich who spoke French as well as several well-educated individuals from the local English population such as Sir Thomas Browne. This article describes the varieties of French used in Norwich, including Picard, the emerging standard French and Law French. It then discusses how French operated in the multilingual environment of early modern Norwich under the headings of language competition, language contact, bilingualism, code switching, translation, and finally, language shift and recession. It adds not only to our understanding of French in early modern England but also to the literature on French as an emigrant language.