On March 2, 1807, President Thomas Jefferson signed a bill outlawing the African slave trade. Opponents of the traffic rejoiced that the bill was passed at almost the same time as a similar anti-slave-trade bill in Britain. As one Philadelphia newspaper put it, “Thus, will terminate, on the same day, in two countries of the civilized world, a traffic which has hitherto stained the history of all countries who made it a practice to deal in the barter of human flesh.” Efforts to end the African slave trade in the British colonies of North America dated back to the 1760s, proceeded in fits and starts, and resulted from a wide range of motives. In contrast to Great Britain, the United States 1807 bill was not the result of a long, hard-won, popular abolition campaign. However, despite a series of laws intended to curb the trade, eventually making the United States laws the world's toughest, smugglers continued to bring enslaved Africans into the South after 1808, and, more significantly, American vessels played a crucial role in the massive illegal slave trade to Cuba and Brazil during the nineteenth century. The impact on the United States economy was not inconsequential, but even more important was the trade's impact on the Atlantic economy, fueling the rapid economic growth of Cuba and Brazil in the decades that followed.

From 2008 Sicily’s president was Raffaele Lombardo, leader of the Movimento per le Autonomie (MpA), a party founded by politicians who were already well established in the city of Catania and its province. In the summer of 2012 Lombardo’s government was forced to resign following an investigation that exposed the connections between the president and Mafia families in eastern Sicily. This article draws on two ethnographic studies carried out in Catania between 2009 and 2013: in describing the political behaviour and power relations between voters, local councillors and MpA executive officers, the research examined the tendency to internalise the widely understood narrative about politics and patronage in Sicily that Lombardo and his colleagues embodied. By relating ethnographic data to the legal documents showing the links between MpA leaders and Cosa Nostra bosses, I argue that social and cultural support for the party will have included support from local Mafia members.

Cet article apporte un éclairage nouveau sur la dimension diatopique de la liaison en français, largement négligée dans la littérature par rapport à la variation sociale ou stylistique. L'analyse de données récentes du corpus PFC montre une variation importante dans l'espace francophone, au-delà d'un ensemble stable de contextes de liaison catégorique. Deux dimensions de la variabilité sont identifiées: (1) la réalisation de la liaison variable, reliée au contact avec des langues qui maintiennent l'autonomie prosodique du mot ; (2) la prégnance des liaisons non standard, associée au poids de la norme dans le développement historique des variétés.

L'acquisition des liaisons est bien documentée et a donné lieu à plusieurs théorisations, dont un modèle basé sur l'usage, essentiellement étayé sur des données expérimentales recueillies en contexte déterminant-nom. Notre but est d'examiner si ce modèle est généralisable à la liaison après les clitiques verbaux, deuxième grand contexte de liaison catégorique. Nous observons les productions de 205 enfants âgés de 3 à 6 ans recueillies dans le contexte de tâches expérimentales. L’étude permet de poser des repères sur l'acquisition de la liaison préverbale et de la comparer à la liaison prénominale.

La ‘meilleure’ prononciation française se trouve, selon les représentations des locuteurs, chez les présentateurs de télévision. Pour la liaison, cette étude montre, sur la base de plus de 8 heures de parole et 30 locuteurs, que ces locuteurs-modèles constituent un groupe homogène présentant un comportement hétérogène en fonction du médium et de la situation (lecture, présentation de nouvelles, parole spontanée). Les résultats suggèrent entre autres que la liaison entre adjectif et substantif au singulier ainsi quʼaprès préposition monosyllabique devrait toujours être enseignée comme obligatoire, et ce, même si les corpus de locuteurs ʻordinairesʼ présentent des exceptions.

The English future temporal reference system has long been recognized as a variable system undergoing change. The main variants in contemporary English (will and be going to) have both been argued to have gone through (and to potentially still be undergoing) grammaticalization. At the same time, be going to has been gradually increasing in frequency relative to will over the last 500 years. However, investigation of the ongoing development of this system has been sparse. This article makes use of a large contemporary sociolinguistic corpus of a mainstream variety of North American English and the apparent-time construct. Several factors that have been implicated in the development of this system (Sentence Type, Clause Type, Proximity, Verb Type, and the Animacy and Grammatical Person of the Subject) are considered and a multiplex series of changes are uncovered. Underlying an overall, albeit slow, change in frequency towards be going to, we find evidence for specialization of one or the other variant in different linguistic contexts, neutralization of a constraint consistent with ongoing loss of variant nuances through semantic bleaching, and the persistence of constraints consistent with morphological doublet competition.

The Journal of French Language Studies (Cambridge University Press) invites colleagues to submit proposals for a special thematic issue of the Journal, to be published in March 2019.