The relation between perception and production in social meaning is often taken to be transparent, with social meaning associations learned from observations of language use. However, recent work has suggested that this relation is often more complex than previously thought. Here, we present new data comparing the social meaning of realized variable liaison in spoken French, couched within the framework of the pragmatic sociology of critique. We recall data from a recent matched guise experiment showing that listeners associate the realization of liaison with meanings like “professionalism”, specifically in social situations where efficacy and expertise are at issue. Basing ourselves on this finding, we use a production task, presenting these same social situations to amateur and professional actors. We find that our participants do not exploit the social meaning potential of variable liaison, producing liaison at lexically-determined rates on a par with previous corpus studies. We discuss this discrepancy between perception and production, which suggests that the link between the two is dependent on the linguistic variable under investigation.

This article focuses on the problem of the categorization of the adverb sans doute as an epistemico-modal marker or an evidential marker. Starting from a critical appraisal of an analysis proposed by Bourmayan et Ashino, in which sans doute is considered fundamentally epistemico-modal, three hypotheses are presented, which depart from theirs. First, sans doute has as its main lexical element an inferential evidential value: it signals that the content qualified by the adverb is the result of a defeasible type of inference from clues/premises. Second, due to the defeasibility of the inference, the statement containing the adverb takes on, invariably, a pragmatic value of non-certainty, not lexically coded, however. Sans doute is thus not an epistemico-modal marker by itself in contemporary French. Third, the adverb combines these values with an epistemic value of what we call “posture of certainty”. Different from epistemic modality, which refers to an evaluation in terms of certainty, and/or to the epistemic cognitive state linked to that, posture of certainty refers to what can be called the tone or epistemic behavior of confidence the speaker shows. Sans doute therefore indicates without contradiction, a defeasible and, thus, uncertain hypothesis, presented with a tone of full confidence.

Ces dernières décennies, certains travaux ont cherché à montrer que le plus-que-parfait tend à développer des emplois de passé perfectif dépourvus de toute notion d’antériorité. Le but du présent article est de reconsidérer ces analyses, en accordant davantage d’importance à l’anaphoricité de ce temps verbal. Après avoir rappelé les principales propriétés du plus-que-parfait, l’auteur note que les exemples discutés dans ces travaux concernent essentiellement deux contextes d’emploi. Plusieurs de ces exemples sont ici repris et réanalysés. L’auteur en conclut que ces travaux sous-estiment le rôle de l’implicite dans le fonctionnement anaphorique du plus-que-parfait, en exigeant inutilement la présence d’une expression temporelle susceptible d’interpréter l’anaphorique (antécédent). Il en résulte que l’hypothèse parfois avancée d’une aoristisation de ce temps verbal, outre son coût théorique, s’avère inappropriée.

In this article I begin by presenting some examples from Early-Modern French of how, using a large multi-genre database (Frantext), it is possible to track the spread of change and how it embeds across different genres (the genres in Frantext ranging from correspondence and first-person travel narratives to essays and poetry). These case studies allow us to explore a number of questions, including which changes seem to diffuse “from above” and which rather come “from below”; and which textual sources best reflect “authentic” usage or indeed are closest to reflecting spoken usage. They also raise questions as to whether it is possible to create a continuum of genres with those that are more “progressive” or are early adopters of change at one end, and those which are more resistant to change at the other. I then discuss some of the challenges surrounding this work, including the theorization (or lack of theorization) of text types and genres in various corpora and the privileging of other factors when they are elaborated. Consequently, there is currently a lack of comparability between different corpora in the way they categorize and calibrate different text types and genres.

The present study constitutes a first contribution to the understanding of the French pronoun que dalle (‘nothing’). First, we looked at its syntactic flexibility, its semantic strength in conveying zero quantification, and its pragmatic role in informal language. Then we compared que dalle with its near synonym rien and analysed its development. The results can be summarized as follows. On a descriptive level, we can conclude that, in spite of their different diaphasic distribution, que dalle functions in much the same way as rien, but the former differs from the latter in terms of syntax (subject position, attributive adjective), stylistics and especially pragmatics. On a methodological level, we hypothesized that que dalle originates in the exceptive structure ne…que (‘only’) but the corpus data were insufficient to demonstrate this assumption. On a theoretical level, different processes, i.e. lexicalization and grammaticalization, could be distinguished. We acknowledge that individual quantifiers can be very different in nature and have different diachronic paths: the development of que dalle differs from that of rien in its postverbal use, and it tends toward inherent negativity in fragment answers.

Comme arriver, atteindre, aboutir et accéder, notamment, parvenir relève de la catégorie des verbes spatiaux dynamiques dénotant un changement de relation final précédé d’un déplacement antérieur présupposé. En dépit de ce schéma spatio-temporel commun, les verbes intransitifs ou transitifs indirects de cette classe semblent manifester un comportement hétérogène vis-à-vis de certaines constructions, comportement qui distingue, en particulier, arriver de aboutir, accéder et parvenir. Basé sur une analyse approfondie en corpus, cet article examine les constructions auxquelles donnent lieu les emplois spatiaux de parvenir. Concomitamment, l’étude qualitative des exemples s’attache à dégager les propriétés conceptuelles qui sous-tendent le contenu du verbe et ses situations d’emploi, et le singularisent au sein de sa classe d’appartenance : obstacle ou difficulté du déplacement, intentionnalité, « déplacement réglé », processus perceptifs. L’hypothèse est également faite que certaines constructions minoritaires de parvenir (exclues par aboutir et accéder) sont rendues possibles par des facteurs sémantico-pragmatiques liés aux propriétés préalablement mises en évidence.

Languages in contact commonly leave an imprint on one other. The most straightforward of these imprints to identify is MAT-borrowing, which results in clearly identifiable lexical items of one language (the donor language) being used in utterances of another language (the recipient language). This stands in contrast with PAT-borrowing, which does not involve any such incorporation of “other language” material but rather results in the reshaping of existing structures of the recipient language on the model of the donor language. This type of language change is therefore arguably more “invisible” to speakers since no easily identifiable “other language” material is present.

This study presents a detailed examination of PAT-borrowing in Guernésiais, the Norman variety spoken in Guernsey (British Channel Islands), which is now at an advanced state of language shift. It also highlights a major difference between MAT- and PAT-borrowing, namely that, whereas MAT-borrowing can only be explained with reference to the dominant language, PAT-borrowing can on occasion admit an internal explanation.

Despite growing interest in African varieties of French, few attempts have been made to examine them from a variationist perspective. This contribution aims to use phonetic variation as a vantage point for exploring language ideologies surrounding the use of French in postcolonial contexts. The study focuses on the French variety spoken in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and draws on a bilingual Lingala–French dataset elicited from L1 Lingala speakers. The sample reflects a key social distinction in Kinshasa: that between long-term urban residents and recent rural migrants. Are there multiple phonetic varieties of Kinshasa French? To what extent do their forms merely reflect variation in Lingala? The study finds that the most focused variety of Kinshasa French is strongly associated with urban women and is approximated to varying degrees by rural migrants, particularly women. In addition to features with likely origins in either rural or urban Lingala, Kinshasa French exhibits hypercorrect forms and features that may mirror variation trends in Parisian French.

This article focuses on French espèce de + NP! ‘you + NP!’ to make a case that impoliteness can be conventionalized in linguistic form beyond the level of the lexicon. We argue that the pattern can be considered a construction in its own right and also that it is strongly conventionalized for impoliteness in particular. To support this claim, we adopt both a corpus-based and a questionnaire-based approach. The corpus study reveals not only that espèce de + NP! mainly serves impolite purposes in actual usage but also that it tends to force an impolite interpretation onto noun phrases that do not themselves express negative evaluation. Our questionnaire study complements these findings by showing, inter alia, that the construction is generally judged to be ill-formed when combining with positively evaluative or evaluatively neutral nouns and, at the same time, that such nouns are indeed rated as impolite in the construction. It also points to a difference between calling someone espèce d’idiot! ‘you idiot!’ and calling them just idiot!. We conclude the article with some reflections on why espèce de + NP! is an impoliteness construction.

This article re-examines the literature on the evidential uses of French tenses, and evaluates what distinguishes French from languages that are said to possess fully grammaticalized evidential systems. Based on corpus analyses, semantic testing, and crosslinguistic comparisons, this study argues that the French passé composé and imparfait do not carry any inherent evidential meaning, unlike the futur and conditionnel. The evidential interpretations of the former two tenses are simply conveyed by the context, while those of the latter two are indeed due to their intrinsic semantic make-up. We conclude that although French encodes evidentiality with verbal inflections only infrequently, it is no different from languages usually cited to illustrate advanced evidential paradigms from a formal and semantic standpoint.

Lorsque des locuteurs produisent des néologismes à l’écrit, ils peuvent utiliser des marqueurs typographiques ou linguistiques pour mettre en saillance ces derniers. Cette étude, centrée sur des néologismes dénominaux suffixés en -ien, -ique et -esque, combine une analyse de corpus et une étude expérimentale de type questionnaire en ligne afin d’examiner, d’une part, le type et la proportion de ces marqueurs et, d’autre part, leur influence sur les jugements de néologicité. En production, les locuteurs marquent environ 23 % des néologismes, principalement avec des guillemets, puis avec des motifs syntaxiques et enfin avec des commentaires. En réception, la présence de ces marqueurs (guillemets et commentaires) augmente les taux de détection des néologismes. L’identification des néologismes est influencée par le cotexte. De plus, d’autres éléments semblent expliquer les variations des jugements de néologicité, tels que le suffixe du néologisme lorsque ce dernier est morphologiquement dérivé, et l’âge des locuteurs.