This scholarly edition invites us to reconsider our assumptions about the French language, by showcasing the oeuvre of one of the pioneers of diachronic Spoken French corpus linguistics, William J. Ashby, and the ground-breaking findings to come out of his influential Tours corpora (1976 & 1995),… read more
Edited by John W. Du Bois, Lorraine E. Kumpf and William J. Ashby
Preferred Argument Structure offers a profound insight into the relationship between language use and grammatical structure. In his original publication on Preferred Argument Structure, Du Bois (1987) demonstrated the power of this perspective by using it to explain the origins of ergativity and… read more
Edited by William J. Ashby, Marianne Mithun and Giorgio Perissinotto
This volume presents a selection of the best papers from the 1991 Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages, held in Santa Barbara. In addition, the volume contains revised versions of three of the keynote papers. A welcome aspect of this collection, reflective of the conference itself, is the… read more
The subject clitic on ‘one’ has a surprising range of referential values, both indefinite (e.g., ‘one,’ ‘they-,’ ‘you-’) and definite (e.g., ‘we-’), that can be seen only when one examines the use of the pronoun in natural discourse. This paper proposes a partial typology of on ‘one’ derived from… read more
Negation in French can be marked redundantly – since a pre-verbal particle ne ‘old not’ may accompany a second, usually post-verbal, marker of negation. However, the pre-verbal particle is often deleted in spoken French. This deletion may be inconsistent with the usual typological… read more
This study provides an acoustic profile of the prosody of right-dislocations in French, using the computer hardware and software package known as CECIL. Twenty-eight right-dislocations occurring in a corpus of natural French discourse provide the data for the acoustic analysis. While… read more
Data from a corpus of upper-middle class Parisian French demonstrate that the omission of the negative morpheme ne in negative structures is most frequent among certain demographic segments of the population. This finding, together with historical evidence, suggests that the optional deletion of… read more
Recent speculation about the drift of French syntax is evaluated against data from a socially diverse corpus of modern French. While the data do not support the theory that French is becoming a VSO language, they do suggest that French is developing a ‘topic prominent’ sentence type. read more
It is argued that two variables of Modern French (the negative particle ne ‘old not’ and the consonant l of clitic pronouns such as il ‘(he); 3sg.m.nom-; 3.nom-; iprs-’) are indeed indices of ongoing linguistic change, even though this change appears to be of long duration. This conclusion is… read more
Aspects of the syntax, pragmatics and sociolinguistic distribution of left- and right-dislocations in a corpus of spoken French are treated. Most tokens of both types have clear pragmatic motivation, two functions being common to both, with other functions particular to one or another type. The… read more
Although the standard French norm prescribes that negation is marked twice in the verb phrase (ne…pas), contemporary usage prefers to drop the first element (ne) in Spoken French. In a 1981 article based on a corpus of Spoken French recorded in Tours in 1976, Ashby brought to light a significant… read more
This article uses the quantitative methodology of GoldVarb to examine the variable distribution of lexical noun phrases representing core arguments of the verb in a corpus of spoken French and a corpus of spoken Spanish. It is shown that this distribution is not random, but instead conforms to a… read more
