French Accent Research Articles

A Comparison of the Attitudes of Learners, Instructors, and Native French Speakers About the Pronunciation of French: An Exploratory Study

The stereotype has it that native French Speakers are annoyed by foreign Speakers' errors in pronunciation. The purpose of this pilot study was to assess beliefs about the importance of accurate pronunciation in French held by three afferent groups: (1) 73 second‐ and third‐semester students of French at a large midwestern research university in the United States, (2) 16 nonnative‐speaker instructors of French at the same institution, and (3) 24 native Speakers of French living in France. In a fall Semester, each of the three groups received near mirror‐image versions of a questionnaire, ranging from 33 items (for the learners) to 29 items (for the instructors) to 26 items (for the native French Speakers) in true/false format. Acknowledging that attitudes toward foreign accents might be language‐ and nationality‐specific, all questions pertained to Americans speaking French. Percentages were calculated, and corresponding questions on all three questionnaires were grouped according to theme, then compared and cross‐referenced with participants' backgrounds. Generally, this study revealed a gap between the attitudes of hypothetical native Speakers, promoted in teaching on the one hand, and the attitudes professed by real native Speakers on the other hand. The results of this study discredit the myth that native French Speakers have a low tolerance for an American accent in French. Instructors, and nonnative Speaker instructors specifically, need to project more realistic goals and refrain from misinforming their students that a perfect native‐like pronunciation is vital to successful communication with native Speakers.

Psychoanalysis With a French Accent

Psychoanalysis With a French Accent

Geneses, genealogies, genres, and genius: the secrets of the archive

Jacques Derrida argues that the feminist and intellectual H l ne Cixous is the most important writer working within the French idiom today. To prove this, he elucidates the epistemological and historical interconnectedness of four terms: genesis, genealogy, genre, and genius, and how they pertain to or are implicated in Cixous's work. Derrida explores Cixous's genius (a masculine term in French, he is quick to point out) and the inspiration that guides and informs her writing. He marvels at her skillful working within multiple genres. He focuses on a number of her works, including her extraordinary novel Manhattan and her lyrical and evocative Dream I Tell You, a book addressed to Derrida himself and one in which Cixous presents a series of her dreams. Derrida also delves into the nature of the literary archive, the production of literature, and the importance of the poetic and sexual difference to the entirety of his own work. For forty years, Derrida had a close personal and intellectual relationship with H l ne Cixous. Clever, playful, and eloquent, Geneses, Genealogies, Genres, and Genius charts the influence these two critical giants had on each other and is the most vital work to address Cixous's contribution to French thought.

Texas Gothic, French Accent: The Architecture of the Roman Catholic Church in Antebellum Texas

Texas Gothic, French Accent: The Architecture of the Roman Catholic Church in Antebellum Texas

Characteristics of Psychotic Patients With Foreign Accent Syndrome

Characteristics of Psychotic Patients With Foreign Accent Syndrome

Femina (Trinity College, Cambridge MS B.14.40) by William Rothwell

MLR, 102. I, 2007 227 which come about without deliberate intervention (see Chapters I-4), and changes where there is intervention, i.e. deliberate attempts to influence the formor status of a linguistic variety (see Chapters 5-7). Marn C. Jones is a French specialist, with a par ticular interest inChannel Islands French, onwhich she isprobably now the foremost academic authority,and has also published a researchmonograph on language contact in Wales, while Ishtla Singh is anAnglicist whose research has focused on English based creoles. They also look insightfullyat awide range of other linguistic fields. Each chapter consists of a general discussion illustrated by case studies. Chapters I and 2, 'InternallyMotivated Changes' and 'ExternallyMotivated Changes', assess the contribution to the topic of language change made by different schools. Chapter 3, 'Language Birth', is illustrated by such contrasting case studies as 'Proto-Indo European, Proto-Germanic and (Old) English', Tok Pisin (a New Guinea pidgin), and Scots. Chapter 4, 'Language Death', also deals with thehitherto overlooked topic of 'dialect death'; thedeath of a language comes as theend of a period ofobsolescence (atwhich stage theprocess may be reversed by revitalization, as discussed inChapter 5); the socio-political and linguistic aspects of obsolescence are illustrated by case stu dies ofEast Sutherland Gaelic and Pennsylvania German; dialect death isexamined in the context of language standardization, with case studies of French andWelsh. The second part of the book makes an important distinction betweeen revitaliza tion,which is designed to strengthen the position of languages that in one way or another are (or are perceived as being) under threat, and revival, the attempt to 're vive' a language thathas ceased tobe used as a spokenmedium. Chapter 5, 'Language Planning and Revitalisation', is illustrated by three highly contrasting case studies: in theUSA, the perceived threat to the position of English has led tomoves tohave English adopted as the official language; in Jersey, the aim is tomake Jerriais (the perhaps moribund local Norman French dialect) 'an attractive and "useful" resource formodern users' (p. I09); and in the Seychelles, measures to enhance the pres tige, codification, and range of usage of the local creole, Seselwa, are being officially adopted and implemented. Chapter 6, 'Language Revival', is largelydevoted to a case study ofCornish which explores the theoretical problems that arise in theprocess of revival and provides an admirably balanced assessment of the half-dozen different (and sometimes mutually antagonistic) schools of thought advocating 'revived' forms of the language. A finalchapter on 'Language Invention' examines the reasons forthe success, or the lack thereof,of invented languages. There are informative treatments of Esperanto and Volapiik but more space is devoted to an unsuccessful feminist language, Laadan, than to any of the other twenty case studies in the book except Cornish. If,as itfullydeserves, thebook goes into a second edition, theauthors could perhaps consider replacing this section with one or more additional case studies. These might include the adaptation of Latin over many centuries for the treatment of subjects unknown to theRomans (such as the contraceptive pill and global warm ing), and 'Rumantsch Grischun', an overarching officialwritten form drawing on the differentRomansh dialects of Switzerland but not intended to serve as a spoken medium. This is an erudite and user-friendly volume which presents awealth of new data. It is likely tobe widely welcomed. UNIVERSITY OF WALES ABERYSTWYTH GLANVILLE PRICE Femina (Trinity College, Cambridge MS B.I4.40). Ed. by WILLIAM ROTHWELL. Aberystwyth and Swansea: The Anglo-Norman Online Hub. 2005. xii+ iI8 pp.; (http://www.anglo-norman.net/texts/femina.pdf). Not on general sale. ISBN 978-O-9552124-0-6. This new edition of the single copy of the early fifteenth-centuryFemina is one of a number of freelyavailable online publications emerging from theproject atwhose 228 Reviews centre lies thepreparation of a revised version of theAnglo-Norman Dictionary. The edition ispresently available inPDF, but a searchable XML-derived version was due in 2006. Written inAnglo-French with aMiddle English translation, and comple mented by rubrics in Latin and footnotes indicating the pronunciation of French terms, the text consists principally of an abridged copy of one of themanuscripts of Bibbesworth's Tretiz, followed by extracts fromUrbain leCourtois and Bozon's Proverbes de...

Romance Linguistics: Theory and Acquisition (review)

Reviewed by: Romance linguistics: Theory and acquisition ed. by Ana Teresa Pérez-Leroux and Yves Roberge Natalya I. Stolova Romance linguistics: Theory and acquisition. Ed. by Ana Teresa Pérez-Leroux and Yves Roberge. (Current issues in linguistic theory 244.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2002. Pp. viii, 388. ISBN 1588114309. $150 (Hb). This volume contains a selection of papers presented at the 32nd Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (University of Toronto, April 2002). The first part is entitled ‘Theory’. Six of its contributions analyze specific properties of Romance at the syntax/semantics interface. Gabriela Alboiu discusses the asymmetrical behavior of Romanian operators. J.-Marc Authier and Lisa A. Reed offer a structural analysis of the French faire-par construction. Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach and Chad Howe argue for a reconsideration of Spanish discourse connectives. Marie Labelle addresses the French sequences [End Page 691] of verbs in the imperfect where the events are understood as following one another. Karen Lahousse analyzes the types of adverbs that license NP subject inversion in French and the structural difference between VS and SV word order. Marie-Thérèse Vinet compares the distribution of the deficient form ça in Swiss French to the distribution of other French object clitics. Four of the theoretical articles address morphosyntactic issues. Susana Béjar and Milan Rezac present a minimalist approach to Romance person licensing. Ana Castro and João Costa corroborate the hypothesis that tripartite classification of pronominal forms is transcategorical, amplifying this typology and extending it to the possessive and adverbial systems of European Portuguese. María Cristina Cuervo provides an analysis of Romance ‘seem’+ experiencer constructions in terms of control structures. Heloisa Maria Moreira Lima-Salles compares the interaction between the syntax of (inflected) infinitives and finite subjunctive/indicative clauses in Brazilian and European Portuguese. Two of the articles focused on theory explore Romance morphophonology within the framework of optimality theory. Gary K. Baker and Caroline R. Wiltshire discuss palatal fortition in Argentinian Spanish, and Jean-Pierre Montreuil looks at the interaction of prosody in Central Romansch with the phenomenon of obstruentization. The theoretical part of the collection also takes up historical issues. The focus of Andrea Calabrese’s contribution is the evolution of the short high vowels of Latin into Romance and Paul Hirschbühler and Marie Labelle employ the diachronic perspective when addressing clitic distribution in French dialects. The second part of the book concentrates on first, second, and bilingual language acquisition. Larisa Avram and Martine Coene examine the early omission of articles and auxiliaries in child Romanian. Bernadette Plunkett focuses on data from European and Canadian varieties of child French in which the majority of null subjects occur with morphologically finite verbs. L2 acquisition is addressed by Barbara Bullock and Gillian Lord regarding the role of analogy in the case of Spanish stress, as well as by Philippe Prévost who writes on the nature of root infinitives in adult L2 French. Juana M. Liceras compares the processes that lead to native-like and nonnative competence in Spanish. Bilingual language learning is discussed by Julia Berger-Morales and Manola Salustri, who present German/Italian evidence to support the separate systems hypothesis, and by Aafke Hulk, Janneke Peet, and Leonie Cornips, who discuss the acquisition of beaucoup in the ‘quantification at a distance’ constructions by bilingual French/Dutch children. Natalya I. Stolova Colgate University Copyright © 2006 Linguistic Society of America

Translator’s Introduction: “Italy in Translation”

The publication of Germaine de Stall's l'Esprit des traductions in Milanese journal Biblioteca italiana in 1816 was most dramatic event in saga of Romanticism. The essay exhorts Italians to free themselves from their pedantic isolation by translating northern European literature, specifically the new poetry of Germans and English. In de Stall's view, cultural exchange of this nature would connect Italians to intellectual currents that, throughout Europe, were transforming dated mythological and neoclassical forms treasured in Italy into a suitably Romantic idiom. De Stall's contribution drew responses from principal voices in so-called Question of Romanticism, including Giovanni Berchet, Pietro Borsieri, Ludovico Di Breme, and a precocious adolescent from Recanati who became modern Italy's most acclaimed lyric poet, Giacomo Leopardi. The subsequent years of national and cultural soul-searching occasioned by this quest to define Italian brand of proved to be as energetic as they were inconclusive. Summarizing debates stimulated by de Stael, Alessandro Manzoni writes that, though word Romanticism came to mean an unimaginable muddle of witches, specters, systemic disorder, [...] and abuses of common sense, ideas suggested became no less than basis of nineteenth-century European aesthetic theory. (1) It is tempting to view cataclysmic effect of de Stall's essay as further proof of a French hegemony over thought stretching back to Enlightenment, which in Italy was a tenuous, fragmented affair limited mostly to Milan and philosophes associated with journal Caffe (1764-66). Such interpretation, however, does justice neither to de Stall's intentions nor context in which her work appeared. In reality, both de Stall and Italians were victims of Napoleonic upheavals, and she had no wish to impose a French accent on cultural expression. France had controlled parts of Peninsula as early as Norman stronghold on southern Italy in eleventh century, and Napoleon's invasion in late 1790s had a notorious precedent in many minds: French occupation of Italy after Charles VIII's incursion in 1494. Politically, Napoleonic presence in Italy combined with other foreign occupiers, especially Austria, to keep Italy a mere geographical expression (Metternich) that did not achieve national unity--and then a most fragile one--until 1861. The opening sentence of a popular novel of age, Ugo Foscolo's Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis, 1798), sums up desperation felt by many of Italy's public intellectuals, a great number of whom (including Foscolo) faced imprisonment or exile for their controversial writings. Il sacrificio della patria nostra e consumato (The sacrifice of our nation is complete [11 October 1797]), fictional Ortis writes to his friend Lorenzo after learning of Napoleon's ceding control of Venice to Austrians in Treaty of Campoformio in 1797. (2) The surprise and anger Italians felt after Campoformio stemmed from misplaced hopes they had placed in Napoleon, who had led many to believe that he would be great liberator. Like much other contemporary literature, Foscolo's novel oscillates between, on one hand, a burning desire to forge nation free from foreign yoke; and, on other, anxious sense that, without these foreigners, Italians would struggle to define their identity and run their country. This unease reached its apotheosis in celebrated remark by patriot Massimo d'Azeglio just after unification: We have created Italy, now we must create Italians. Perhaps nowhere is quest for a national culture responsive to progressive international trends--yet also respectful of Italy's centuries' worth of creative, linguistic, and scientific traditions--more prominent than in heated polemics inspired by publication of l'Esprit des traductions by de Stall. …

Leaders for the Liturgical People: Shaping Students for Ministry in the Twenty-First Century

In my first year of undergraduate studies at the University of Toronto, I enrolled in a course entitled “The Christian Imagination.” It introduced the students to Christian art across the ages, and it was taught by a very clever and energetic woman with a French accent. It was a mind-bending experience. In the course of the semester, Dr Langan showed us hundreds of slides of sculpture, painting and architecture. Quite apart from the incredible amount of material, it was the challenge to appreciate the great variety of expressions of the Christian experience that took my breath away. At the end of the semester, I vowed never to take another course in the Christianity and Culture program. It was just too stressful. Yet the next semester I found myself signing up for more of the same and after four years graduated with a major in the program. I have reflected upon what it was about this program which caught and held me. I believe that I was fascinated by the challenge to see Christianity from new and varying perspectives, to understand and evaluate the ways in which the Christian faith has been and continues to be lived in differing situations, and to imagine how the church might faithfully and creatively live the faith in the future. It was this fascination that brought me to the study of liturgy and which I dream of passing on to others.

Thomas mcevilley: The missing dimension

Massive similarities exist between ancient Greek and ancient Indian philosophy, and a massive study such as Thomas McEviliey's was needed to assemble the materials and grapple with them. One has to applaud the scope and ambition of the book. Naturally, anyone who undertakes an interdisciplinary study on a grand scale risks making mistakes and misjudgments, and McEvilley sensibly anticipates criticism (2002: xxxi)?which has not been lacking. For instance, at the lowest level, the diacritics are appallingly slapdash, and the French accents are little better.1 However, my aim is not to criticize the book piecemeal, but rather to respond to it constructively at a level commensurate with the scale of its undertaking. I shall address a systemic problem that is built into the initial assumptions.

Bioinformatics with a French accent

A report on the bioinformatics conference 'JOBIM: Journées ouvertes biologie informatiques mathématiques', Lyon, France, 6-8 July 2005.

La langue française: obstacle ou atout de l'«État-nation»?

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, French is not a national language. This article studies the phases of the evolution of the French language towards the homogeneity that will prevail at the beginning of the seventeenth century. The idea of a single French language, around the year 1525, is in a context of competition with Latin and French dialects; yet it becomes the political instrument of the royal power which uses the French language in order to reinforce itself and the unity of the French nation. Paradoxically, the development of the French language throughout the rediscovery of its national roots will also lead to the new emergence of political as well as linguistic regional identities.

A Foreign Speech Accent in a Case of Conversion Disorder

Objective: The aim of this paper is to report the psychiatric, neuroradiological and linguistic characteristics in a native speaker of Dutch who developed speech symptoms which strongly resemble Foreign Accent Syndrome. Background: Foreign Accent Syndrome is a rare speech production disorder in which the speech of a patient is perceived as foreign by speakers of the same speech community. This syndrome is generally related to focal brain damage. Only in few reported cases the Foreign Accent Syndrome is assumed to be of psychogenic and/or psychotic origin. Method: In addition to clinical and neuroradiological examinations, an extensive test battery of standardized neuropsychological and neurolinguistic investigations was carried out. Two samples of the patient's spontaneous speech were analysed and compared to a 500,000-words reference corpus of 160 normal native speakers of Dutch. Results: The patient had a prominent French accent in her pronunciation of Dutch. This accent had persisted over the past eight years and has become progressively stronger. The foreign qualities of her speech did not only relate to pronunciation, but also to the lexicon, syntax and pragmatics. Structural as well as functional neuroimaging did not reveal evidence that could account for the behavioural symptoms. By contrast psychological investigations indicated conversion disorder. Conclusions: To the best of our knowledge this is the first reported case of a foreign accent like syndrome in conversion disorder.

Processus de création et valeur d'emploi des insultes en français populaire de Côte-d'Ivoire

In each and every culture, the popular language is a privileged linguistic field of creation as far as insults are concerned. The popular French of Ivory Coast (“nouchi”) is no exception and the stock of insults are renewed by a permanent dynamics in urban communication, where quarrels are frequent and where nouchi is vividly in use. The practice of verbal insult in the Ivory Coast urban context is presented and set within the larger perspective of (Socio)Linguistics (i.e. Labov, Lagorgette, Ruwet). The mechanisms of this continuous creation (lexical items, periphrases used as direct vocative insults) are then established. Insistence is placed on linguistic processes (borrowing from local languages; lexical hybridisation or paraphrase between French and local languages; reactivation or reanalysis of French idioms) as well as stylistic and rhetorical processes (formulaic speech figures, motivation by the immediate environment of the metaphoric creation: news, manufactured products, TV soaps, etc.). This is followed by a consideration of the main themes of the corpus and of their contextual meaning. Finally, hypotheses are formulated on the reasons for the dominance of certain themes in the urban, popular community of Ivory Coast.

Language and brain injury

In the patient described by Dr Coughlan and her colleagues (May 2004 JRSM1) the French accent that developed after a stroke turned out to be a disturbance of native speech patterns. I was reminded, however, of a case of head injury in which several languages were lost and serially regained. On a visit to London the patient, a Belgian who lived in Greece and was fluent in many languages, looked the wrong way and was knocked over by a passing car. For three days her whereabouts were unknown, and the Belgian Embassy eventually traced her to the National Hospital, Queen Square. It emerged that, on admission to the hospital, she had spoken a language that no-one recognized. This was Flemish. As she improved, she reacquired English and later Greek. She made a full recovery from the head injury, and the languages returned in the order she had learnt them.

Processus de création et valeur d'emploi des insultes en français populaire de Côte-d'lvoire

In each and every culture, the popular language is a privileged linguistic field of création as far as insults are concemed. The popular French of Ivory Coast ("nouchi") is no exception and the stock of insults are renewed by a permanent dynamics in urban communication, where quarrels are fréquent and where nouchi is vividly in use. The practice of verbal insuit in the Ivory Coast urban context is presented and set within the larger perspective of (Socio)Linguistics (/.e. Labov, Lagorgette, Ruwet). The mechanisms of this continuous création (lexical items, périphrases used as direct vocative insults) are then established. Insistence is placed on linguistic processes (borrowing from local languages; lexical hybridisation or paraphrase between French and local languages; reactivation or reanalysis of French idioms) as well as stylistic and rhetorical processes (formulaic speech figures, motivation by the immediate environment of the metaphoric création: news, manufactured products, TV soaps, etc.). This is followed by a consideration of the main themes of the corpus and of their contextual meaning. Finally, hypotheses are formulated on the reasons for the dominance of certain themes in the urban, popular community of Ivory Coast.

Remarks on the diachronic reconstruction of intonational patterns in Romance with special attention to Occitan as a bridge language

This paper approaches Romance intonation from a diachronic point of view. The position that is adopted is that this is an area open to investigation. Comparative techniques can be fruitfully employed for investigating the evolution and diversification of the intonational patterns of the Romance languages. The focus of the paper is on Occitan. This is an important bridge language whose study may elucidate how French diverged prosodically from the systems found in Ibero and Italo-Romance. It is argued that, since Occitan was retained contrasts in the position of wordaccent (lexical stress), any prosodic features that French shares with Occitan are logically independent from the lack of contrastive accent in French.

Claude Lenfant, MD: retiring NHLBI director looks ahead. Interviewed by Brian Vastag.

HE HAS SEEN SIX NATIONAL INSTItutes of Health (NIH) directors come and go, but at the end of this month, Claude Lenfant, MD, director of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), will be absent from his office at 5 AM on a weekday for the first time since 1982. His career at NIH began a dozen years earlier, when he launched the institute’s division of lung diseases after leaving a faculty position at the University of Washington School of Medicine, in Seattle. Before steering NHLBI through a five-fold budget boost—Congress appropriated $2.6 billion for fiscal year 2003—Lenfant investigated, among other topics, how the lungs respond to high altitude and pressure. Outside of the NIH, he has spent his weekends editing 178 volumes of Lung Biology in Health and Disease, with 30 more monographs in the pipeline. A native of Paris, where he earned his medical degree, the slim, 74-year-old Lenfant still carries a broad French accent. JAMA caught up with him after he returned from a more personal investigation of altitude effects—a hiking vacation in the Italian Alps with his wife. They logged a rugged 85 miles during the trip, which Lenfant timed to avoid the reaction to his announced retirement. JAMA: Why did you choose to retire at this time? Dr Lenfant: I hate that word, retiring. I’m going to do something else, you see. But there are several reasons I’m leaving. There are a lot of changes here and there are more changes to come. And I think it will be good for the organization. Also, 3 years ago, I was elected president of the World Hypertension League, [which] has tremendous potential to do lots of good. And so I would like to lead the World Hypertension League to do some work in foreign countries. Of course that’s predicated on two things. One is that I’m going to be reelected. And two, that I can generate some support to do that, which I cannot do in my position here. If I am successful, I think we can do lots of good. And if it does not work,

A French accent after corpus callosum infarct

An accent is a feature of speech that characterizes certain people or regions. The foreign accent syndrome (FAS) is a rare disorder in which persons develop a speech pattern perceived by listeners to be foreign.1,2⇓ FAS has typically been observed after anterior cortical or subcortical lesions in the hemisphere dominant for language,1,2⇓ and a disruption of linguistic prosody has been implicated.1 We report a patient in whom a French accent appeared after an ischemic infarct in the corpus callosum (CC). A 53-year-old right-handed (+4 on the modified Annett handedness inventory3) English-speaking office worker had the sudden onset of difficulty speaking. Examination on the day of the event showed fluent speech with a staccato quality, and several observers then and later noted that her speech had acquired an accent in English resembling that of a native French speaker. There was a prominent disturbance of melodic line, with altered intonation, stresses, and pauses that imparted the impression of …

Citizens and citoyens: republicans and liberals in America and France

Preface Acknowledgments A Brief Chronology of French Political Regimes 1. Republiccanism and/or Liberalism? Past and Present Republics Ancient and Modern Tocqueville's Return Trip 2. Talk in American and French Accents The Presistence of Talk in America From the Old Talk to the New The General Will and Individual Rights Rights in France: Liberals vs. Republicans Atlantic Crossings 3. The Institutions and Ethos of Freedom Political Institutions, Liberal and Republican Mainstream vs. Backwater Republicanism France: the Search for a Liberal Ethos America: the Search for a Civic Ethos 4. The Uses of Republican Rhetoric in America Down with the Monarchists Down with the Aristocrats Republics and Democracies Corruption and Conspiracy 5. The Strange Career of Liberalism in France From Liberal to Conservative From Solidarist to Conservative From Politique to Mystique 6. Liberal, Illiberal, and Antiliberal Republics The Illiberal Republic The Antiliberal Republic The Liberal Republic Notes Index