Cette étude porte sur le changement linguistique en lien avec la référence temporelle au futur en français québécois du 21e siècle dans les données du Corpus de français parlé au Québec (CFPQ), qui couvrent la période 2006–2019. Trois variantes sont analysées: le présent du futur (PDF), le futur fléchi (FF) et le futur périphrastique (FP). Bien que plusieurs contraintes identifiées précédemment jouent un rôle semblable dans la variation (p. ex. la polarité, la présence de locutions adverbiales temporelles), la présente étude montre les taux les plus élevés de PDF en français québécois parmi les études antérieures consultées. Selon une interprétation en temps apparent, il y a une augmentation du PDF en contexte affirmatif et négatif qui n’est pas attribuable à un effet lexical. Ce résultat suggère que le PDF jouerait un rôle important dans le changement en cours par rapport à la référence temporelle au futur en français québécois.

Le présent article propose une caractérisation du phénomène linguistique de la distanciation, qui permet au locuteur de se désengager d’un premier contenu discursif, à partir de l’examen d’un certain nombre de propriétés constitutives. Nous prendrons comme témoins trois marqueurs de discours du français contemporain, formés sur le verbe dire: c’est vite dit, c’est beaucoup dire, c’est toi qui le dis. Notre conviction est que l’étude en parallèle des caractéristiques spécifiques permettant de distinguer une relation discursive, d’une part, et, de l’autre, du fonctionnement sémantico-pragmatique des marqueurs de discours, apportera un éclairage fructueux sur la question.

The E(xtended) P(rojection) P(rinciple) (specifically, in its guise as a movement-triggering feature in designated syntactic heads), has been a thorn in the Minimalist side since the mid-1990s. Recently, in the context of attempts to reduce syntactic mechanisms to their minimal expression, the generative operation Merge has been defined as unordered set formation (“Simplest Merge”), and the EPP has been pronounced dead in favour of conditions over labelling which force phrasal movement in order to dissolve ‘symmetry points’. This article compares several theoretical analyses and shows that very simple cases of {XP, YP} copular constructions in Spanish satisfy all requirements for labelling without the need to resort to Internal Merge (IM). Therefore, if there is IM of a DP it must be motivated by reasons other than labelling. Once such a reason exists, the elimination of EPP on labelling grounds becomes dubious.

This squib brings attention to a longstanding puzzle regarding the mechanism driving the strong polarity effect on future temporal reference in French. Our study presents new findings from two corpora of Parisian French, where negative contexts with n-words significantly favour the usage of synthetic future compared to contexts with the negative marker pas, in contrast to Laurentian French, where synthetic future is predominantly used in all negative contexts. We suggest that these differences pattern with another variation phenomenon, negative concord, and that the solution to the puzzles lies in the syntactic and semantic properties of negative expressions.

Verb doubling constructions in Mandarin such as CHI, wo (shi) chi le ‘As for eating, I (did) eat’, where the first verb is stressed, are perceived as incomplete if not followed by a continuing clause, but only when the copula shi is present do these constructions require a contrastive continuation marked by the coordinator keshi or buguo ‘but’. This article addresses these two puzzles by (i) analyzing verb doubling constructions as contrastive topic constructions where the initial stressed verb is a contrastive topic triggering a set of polar questions, and (ii) taking the copula shi to be a marker associated with contrastive topic. In particular, shi in a verb doubling construction presupposes that (a) there is at least one polar question Q which is an alternative of the current question under discussion, CQ, and entails CQ, and (b) Q has a negative answer. It is shown how the proposal accounts for the puzzles, and how it can be extended to VP doubling and object preposing constructions, both of which demonstrate similar incompleteness effects.

This article discusses the grammatical role played by the interpretation of an action as either intentional or accidental. It focuses on two grammatical restrictions that exhibit sensitivity to such interpretation. The first concerns so-called subject obviation, whereby, in many European languages, the subject of the subjunctive clause cannot refer to the same individual as the subject of the matrix clause. For the purpose of this article, an important property of subject obviation is that it is weakened in the case of accidental actions. The second restriction pertains to an aspectual restriction in negative imperatives and desire statements in Slavic, which disallows the perfective aspect in these constructions. As is the case with subject obviation, the aspectual restriction in Slavic is lifted when the action is interpreted as accidental. This article argues for a unified semantic-pragmatic account of the weakening of subject obviation and aspectual restriction. It also shows that this weakening of obviation and of aspectual restriction is part of a larger picture where the interpretation of an action as intentional versus accidental plays a central role.

This article argues that post-syntactic feature insertion is insufficiently motivated at present and should therefore not yet be accepted as a morphological process within the theory of Distributed Morphology. Post-syntactic feature insertion has been proposed for Nimboran verbal morphology (Noyer 1998), Kiowa agreement prefixes (Harbour 2003a), Leísta Spanish doubled clitics (Nevins 2007), and Romanian gender agreement (Farkas 1990). I show that these datasets can be analysed without invoking post-syntactic feature insertion, and discuss what a dataset would have to look like to motivate it. Such a dataset would have a number of parallel circumstances, each with a true elsewhere exponent and a specific environment in which another exponent behaved like an elsewhere one, exponing two feature bundles that are the polar inverse of each other. A theory of morphology that does not allow for post-syntactic feature insertion predicts such data to be impossible.