This paper presents a corpus-based investigation of Latin volo ‘to want’, arguing that it exhibits previously overlooked reportative uses from at least the 1st century BCE, whereby speakers attribute beliefs, opinions, or statements to an external source. Focusing on third-person present-tense forms (vult, volunt) across a corpus spanning from the 3rd century BCE to the 2nd century CE, the study analyses the semantic, pragmatic, and morphosyntactic properties of these constructions, as well as their diachronic development. Reportative volo is shown to emerge from ambiguous contexts where volition and doxastic stance overlap – especially in small-clause constructions with subject coreferentiality or passive infinitives of verbs of opinion. Diachronically, it is proposed that the doxastic component – implicit in volitional uses and anchored in the volitional subject – becomes explicit, when the anchoring of an external doxastic source shifts from outside (i.e. the opinion of others) to the volitional subject, who is then reinterpreted as an evidential source. Comparisons with German wollen (and to a lesser extent with French vouloir) contextualise this development within a broader grammaticalisation path from volition to evidentiality. While wollen is already grammaticalised as a reportative marker, Latin volo offers novel diachronic and structurally distinct evidence for this cross-linguistic trajectory.

Over the last few decades, linguistic gender-fair forms have become increasingly used by individuals and official institutions. In the French-speaking sphere, this has led to heated discussions among politicians and other stakeholders, some of whom claim that these forms render texts illegible and inaccessible to the general public. However, the processing of gender-fair forms in reading has been the topic of a few empirical studies. In the present paper, we add to this small body of research by reporting results from a pre-registered eye-tracking study where 58 native French-speakers read short texts which included a masculine form (voisins), complete double form (voisines et voisins), or contracted double form (voisin·es). Consistent with previous findings, the complete double forms were not more costly to process. In contrast, contracted double forms led to increased processing costs in intermediate and late stages of processing, but had no effect on the early stages of processing. Our data also indicate that the processing of contracted double forms becomes easier over time, and that it is facilitated by positive attitudes towards gender-fair language. These findings provide important insights that enlighten the current debate and should therefore be considered in the elaboration of official guidelines regarding gender-fair language.

In French, the members of a subclass of anticausative verbs are optionally marked with the clitic se, traditionally considered to be a reflexive marker. We show that this optionality is not a case of free variation. Rather, the presence or absence of se is influenced by lexical-pragmatic considerations: while by default, both variants are equally acceptable, in the context of a human subject, cooperative speakers strongly prefer the variant that in certain cases avoids and in other cases maintains ambiguity with the semantically reflexive interpretation that arises in parallel with the intended (anticausative) interpretation. Understanding these preferences requires taking into account the agent bias—that is, the tendency to interpret human nouns in subject position as agents whenever possible—and the multifunctionality of se, which is used to form both (nonagentive) anticausative predicates and (agentive) semantically reflexive ones. The preference for the presence vs. absence of se is predicted based on whether the alternative reflexive interpretation is in line with shared assumptions about the event. The interaction between the choice of form by the cooperative language user and individual verb subclasses is an example of what we call lexical-pragmatic effects.

The status of subject clitics in French has been heavily debated (Kayne 1975, Rizzi 1986, Roberge 1990, Auger 1994b, Miller & Sag 1997, De Cat 2007b, and many others). Distributional properties of French subject clitics have led Kayne (1975), Rizzi (1986), and others to analyze them as argument-bearing elements occupying canonical subject position, cliticizing to the verb only at the level of the phonology. While this hypothesis enjoys a wide following, a growing body of evidence suggests that it fails to capture patterns of subject-clitic use in colloquial French dialects/registers (Roberge 1990, Auger 1994b, Zribi-Hertz 1994, Miller & Sag 1997). Using new evidence from prosodic and corpus analyses, speaker judgments, and crosslinguistic typology, this article argues that (i) European Colloquial French exhibits differences from Standard French that impact how subject clitics are best analyzed, and more specifically (ii) subject clitics in European Colloquial French are affixal agreement markers, not phonological clitic arguments.

Because many of the forms participating in inherent variability are not attested in the standard language, they are often construed as evidence of change. We test this assumption by confronting the standard, as instantiated by a unique corpus covering five centuries of French grammatical injunctions, with data on the evolution of spontaneous speech over an apparent-time span of 119 years.

Reasoning that forms salient enough to have attracted the attention of grammarians were likely widespread in the speech of the time, we demonstrate how these materials may be used to (i) infer the existence of prior variability, (ii) trace the evolution of normative dictates associated with the variants, and most revealing, (iii) discern hints of prior linguistic conditioning of variant selection. These are then operationalized as factors in a multivariate analysis and tested against the facts of usage.

The linguistic focus is on future temporal reference, a notoriously variable sector of the grammar in which competing exponents have persisted for centuries. Systematic comparison of grammatical treatments with actual speaker behavior shows virtually no correspondence between the motivations offered in the literature and those constraining actual variant choice. Prescriptive efforts to explain variability, by ascribing to each variant form a dedicated reading or context of use, have had no effect on speech, which is shown to be governed by a powerful set of tacit variable constraints. These in turn are unacknowledged by the grammatical tradition. The result is a great and growing disconnect between the variable rules governing speech and the normative dictates that underlie the notion of the standard. We explore the implications of these findings for the use of grammarians' observations as data for linguistic analysis.

This study proposes a new qualitative method in historical pragmatics to extract politeness formulae for master-servant directives from nineteenth-century French advice literature. Whereas traditional politeness models study strategic face-saving, this study investigates non-strategic, routinized or conventionalized politeness by mapping explicit linguistic instructions in historical prescriptive metasources. Because etiquette and conduct books targeted middle-class households – typically defined as having at least one live-in servant – they routinely discussed interactions with servants. The self-built corpus comprises 43 sources: etiquette and conduct manuals, alongside servant manuals. Through close reading I manually extract politeness formulae, which are compiled into a formulary. Historians underline servants’ harsh conditions and social erasure, typically mirrored by bare imperatives. Advice on a kind prosody is widespread, but politeness formulae (e.g. voulez-vous? – je vous prie) only emerge in the 1870s, when the crisis of domestic service begins. This shift suggests that domestic service was increasingly viewed in transactional rather than purely hierarchical terms. Despite these changes, master-servant, servant-master and peer directives remain rigidly compartmentalized. The article addresses a notable gap in French historical im/politeness studies by showing how politeness formulae in prescriptive discourse reveal the persistence of caste-like social structures in nineteenth-century French domestic service.

High-vowel laxing in Laurentian French is notoriously variable and complex: while high-vowel tenseness is categorically predictable in final syllables, speakers seemingly apply distinct combinations of optional processes in non-final syllables (see, e.g., Dumas 1987 and Poliquin 2006). The current study investigates laxing in non-final syllables with two core objectives: (a) to determine which grammars individual speakers have acquired, and (b) to elucidate whether subgroups within the community have distinct grammars as suggested by Poliquin or instead these subgroups are superficial categorisations (e.g., emerging from a shared community with wide distributions of possible weightings for constraints). The results reveal that a larger number of superficially distinct individual grammars emerge than were proposed in existing literature, but that these patterns fall on a spectrum centred on a shared community grammar. They also provide new evidence for the importance of prosody in conditioning phonological processes in this variety of French.

In the analysis of free variation in phonology, we often encounter the effects of INTERSECTING CONSTRAINT FAMILIES: there are two independent families of constraints, each of which has a quantifiable effect on the outcome. A challenge for theories is to account for the patterns that emerge from such intersection. We address three cases: Tagalog nasal substitution, French liaison/elision, and Hungarian vowel harmony, using corpus data. We characterize the patterns we find as across-the-board effects in both dimensions, restrained by floor and ceiling limits. We analyze these patterns using several formal frameworks, and find that an accurate account is best based on HARMONIC GRAMMAR (in one of its two primary quantitative implementations). Our work also suggests that certain lexical distinctions treated as discrete by classical phonological theory (e.g. ‘h-aspiré’ vs. ordinary vowel-initial words of French) are in fact gradient and require quantitative treatment.

Inspired by Beddor 2009, this article explores whether and how trading relations between coarticulatory source and effect may serve as a precursor for sound change. It aims at extending the case of vowel nasalization examined by Beddor to the relationship between closure voicing (source) and co-intrinsic pitch (effect). Through four production and perception studies, we show that the inverse source-effect relation observed for vowel nasalization is not found in the voicing contrast of French, a true-voicing language. Instead, we propose that the phonologization of co-intrinsic pitch (a.k.a. tonogenesis) originates from spontaneous devoicing (a production bias), which subsequently triggers an upweighting of pitch (a perceptual adaptation strategy).

This article argues that an enhanced understanding of the dynamics of language change can be gained by uniting two perspectives whose intimate relationship has not previously been subject to linguists' attention: language change as a historical process, and language change as experienced by individual speakers. It makes the case that during language change in progress, there are three possible trajectory types that can be manifested across speakers' lifespans. I review one example of each, as analyzed in a longitudinal corpus of Québécois French. First, people may acquire patterns of variation reflecting the stage of the change at the time of childhood language acquisition and retain that pattern thereafter. Second, older speakers, continuing to receive input from the younger generations that form an increasingly large proportion of their speech community, may also change in that direction. Third, aging speakers may become more conservative, showing retrograde lifespan change in the face of community change in the opposite direction. In conclusion, I examine the likely etiology of each trajectory type and evaluate its consequences for language change.

This article investigates the ways children begin spelling from the start of grade 1 to the end of grade 2 in France. It presents the results of a longitudinal study with 676 children faced to the complexity of French orthography and asked to write words and sentences. The corpus was analysed with regard to phonogrammic and morphogrammic principles at work in the French orthography.

Based on the literature and the specific features of the French writing system, we hypothesized that both skill types would develop as early as Grade 1 of elementary school, with lexical spelling skills developing more rapidly. The findings suggest that the development of the phonogrammic, lexical morphogrammic, and grammatical skills of pupils may take into account different variables: consistency, frequency, syntactic context within which words are used, words that can feature different morphograms or not.

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.

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.

Research demonstrates that English- and French-speaking Canadians differ in a wide range of attitudes, including their political preferences, their vision of the Canadian federation and their national identity. In this article, we ask whether individual bilingualism is associated with a decrease in the attitudinal differences between anglophones and francophones. Using survey data collected in the summer of 2023, we attempt to determine whether knowledge of the French language is related to an increase in the responsiveness of English-speaking citizens toward issues that typically preoccupy French-speaking Canadians. Our analyses suggest that knowledge of French as a second language is strongly linked to the political preferences of Canadian citizens but does not bridge the attitudinal gap between Canada’s two main language groups. These results highlight the relevance of considering the different languages that people speak—and not just their mother tongue—to understand their political attitudes.