European French Research Articles

Validation of the European French Version of the Consensus Auditory-Perceptual Evaluation of Voice (CAPE-Vf)

ObjectiveThis study aimed to validate the French adaptation of the Consensus Auditory-Perceptual Evaluation of Voice (CAPE-Vf) for assessing voice disorders in France. The CAPE-Vf addresses limitations of the GRBAS by providing a more sensitive, standardized approach to evaluating six vocal parameters (overall severity, roughness, breathiness, strain, pitch, and loudness) on three tasks (sustained vowels, sentence reading, and spontaneous speech). The study focused on investigating the intra- and inter-rater reliability, as well as the convergent and discriminant validity of the CAPE-Vf. MethodsThirty-four dysphonic and seven euphonic native French speakers participated in the study. Thirteen speech-language pathologists from France evaluated the voice samples using both the CAPE-Vf and GRBAS tools at a one-week interval. Intra- and inter-rater reliability were calculated using intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC), while convergent and discriminant validity were measured by correlating CAPE-Vf with GRBAS and Voice Handicap Index (VHI) scores, respectively. ResultsThe CAPE-Vf showed good intra-rater reliability for overall severity (mean ICC: 0.89), strain (ICC: 0.83), and pitch (ICC: 0.88), while roughness, breathiness, and loudness exhibited moderate reliability. Inter-rater reliability was low for most parameters, except overall severity, which demonstrated good reliability (mean ICC: 0.77). Strong correlations were observed between CAPE-Vf and GRBAS Grade (mean r: 0.84), supporting its convergent validity. Moderate correlations were found for roughness, breathiness, and strain. The CAPE-Vf’s correlation with the VHI was moderate (mean r: 0.53), reflecting its discriminant validity. ConclusionThe CAPE-Vf is a valid and reliable tool for perceptual assessment of voice disorders in French-speaking populations, with stronger psychometric properties than the GRBAS, particularly for intra-rater reliability and overall severity. While inter-rater reliability was lower, qualitative feedback suggested that improvements to the protocol, particularly for pitch and loudness ratings, could enhance its clinical applicability. The findings support the CAPE-Vf as a comprehensive tool for standardized clinical voice assessment.

Normative data on nasalance scores for French speaking children

IntroductionThe objectives of this study are to establish normative nasalance values in European French for children aged 8–10 years, to study the factors likely to influence nasalance values, and to ensure that the nasometer allows the differentiation of control subjects from subjects with velopharyngeal insufficiency. MethodsNasal balance scores were calculated using the Nasometer II 6450 (KayPENTAX) for 50 control subjects producing 31 verbal stimuli specifically designed for the French language. Nasalance scores were analyzed and compared with 7 subjects with velopharyngeal insufficiency. ResultsThis study provided nasalance norms for each verbal stimulus. The phonetic content of the stimuli (nasality, vowel height, voicing) was a major factor influencing the nasalance score. However, the characteristics of the speaker (gender and age) had a non-significant effect, with the major exception of the presence or absence of velopharyngeal insufficiency. ConclusionThis study confirmed the need to use established normative values in the patient's language and for each verbal stimulus. Although the effect of vowel height on the nasalance score has been demonstrated, this study is the first to show an effect of voicing. Once normative nasalance scores are established, a validation study with a larger pathological population will be necessary.This study establishes normative nasalance scores in European French in children.

Linguistic change in times of the COVID-19 pandemic: a corpus linguistic comparison of language contact phenomena in Romance languages

Abstract The radical social, political, and economic changes caused by the COVID-19 pandemic are clearly reflected in language use through the appearance of numerous neologisms, most of which can be considered borrowings from English. In this article, we take a contrastive linguistic approach and focus on the emergence of new lexemes in the press language of four Romance languages (European Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Italian and European French) with a special focus on language contact. Since no press corpora were available with specific data on the COVID-19 pandemic, we created our own corpora for the entire year 2020 using Python in order to compare how lexical innovation is dealt with in the four languages. Our results show that conceptual innovation, especially when it occurs abruptly, can lead to equivalent, often phonotactically adapted neologisms in the case of neighbouring languages. However, the integration of foreign words and the formation of neologisms also show language-specific peculiarities which are not only related to structural characteristics of the respective languages, but also to sociolinguistic and sociocultural factors. Our study elaborates on the relationship between these factors and shows the potential of contrastive and computational approaches for the study of lexical repercussions of language contact.

The French linguistic varieties of Gypsies and Travellers: an original diastratic variation perspective

Abstract For centuries, France and the French-speaking areas of Belgium and Switzerland have been home to a large minority of Gypsies and Travellers, comprising about 300,000 individuals who all speak a form of French as their native language and form a close-knit sociolinguistic community. Their French sociolect, hitherto never described by linguists, differs from other varieties of French through a wide array of phenomena at all levels of language structure: phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexical semantics and morphology. Diachronic and contrastive analysis shows that these features are either (1) non-standard, archaic or regional characteristics now lost in other varieties of European French, but kept by the Travellers as diastratic variants; (2) internal innovations within the diasystem of Traveller French; (3) outcomes of contact with heritage languages of some of these groups (Sinti Romani, Jenisch, and Alemannic and Gallo-Romance dialects). Using predominantly new fieldwork I provide here the first description of this important set of diastratic varieties of French, which represents an outstanding case of linguistic variation in a context of social separation yet with sustained contact.

Paradigm uniformity effects on French liaison

French liaison is a type of external sandhi involving the use of a special consonant-final allomorph before vowel-initial words. Consonants occurring at the end of these allomorphs are challenging for phonological theory because of evidence that their prosodic and segmental realization is intermediate between the realizations of word-final and word-initial consonants. This puzzling behavior of French liaison has been used to motivate new phonological and lexical representations, including floating consonants, lexical constructions and gradient symbolic representations. This paper proposes an alternative analysis: the variable realization of liaison is derived as a paradigm uniformity effect, assuming traditional phonological and lexical representations. In a Word1-Word2 sequence, the liaison consonant at the boundary between the two words ends up acquiring properties of both word-final and word-initial consonants because of a pressure to make contextual variants of Word1 and Word2 similar to their citation forms. The proposal is implemented in a probabilistic constraint-based grammar including paradigm uniformity constraints and is shown to account for the intermediate behavior of liaison both in terms of prosodic attachment and segmental realization. The paper provides evidence for two key predictions of this analysis, using judgment data on the prosodic attachment of liaison consonants in European French and phonetic data on the interaction between liaison and affrication in Quebec French.

OS VERBOS DE DIZER COMO ESTRATÉGIA PARA TRANSEDIÇÃO NAS TRADUÇÕES DO LE MONDE PARA O PORTUGUÊS VIA SITE DA AGÊNCIA RFI: UMA ANÁLISE BASEADA EM CORPUS

ABSTRACT This study looks at reported speech as a component of the RFI news agency’s translation procedures for the newspaper Le Monde . We examined the frequency of verb usage in a comparable-cum-parallel corpus (European French (EF) ↔ Brazilian Portuguese (BP)) named Le Monde Journalistic Corpus ( JOSTLE ), which was based on Corpus Linguistics, Corpus-based Translation Studies, and Journalistic Translation principles. We identified the most commonly used verbs in both languages. Any discrepancies in usage between the reporting verbs and other verbs employed in this discursive function were identified by applying the computer program Sketch Engine. Furthermore, a higher frequency of this discursive resource was observed in BP, with the following verbs having the highest statistical incidence in the corpus: dizer (106), lembrar (55), afirmar (42), escrever (35), and apontar (33). Our analysis discovered that these verbs are used in gatekeeping portions that translators and journalists choose, suggesting an expansion, compression, and elision of Source Texts (ST) throughout a t ransediting process.

A comparative corpus-based study of European Portuguese discourse markers bom and bem and French bon and bien

"A comparative corpus-based study of European Portuguese discourse markers bom and bem and French bon and bien. According to many authors, Discourse Markers (DM) serve as signals or triggers guiding the process of interpretation (Fraser 2006, Aijmer 2013, Maschler and Schiffrin 2015, among many others), thus having a more procedural than conceptual meaning. This study aims to investigate and specify the structural positions and the semantic-discursive functions of the DMs ‘bem’ and ‘bom’ in European Portuguese and of ‘bon’ and ‘bien’ in French, then to compare these positions and functions. The study relies on two European oral corpora for each language. The methodology is quantitative and qualitative. The analysis focuses primarily on the structural and modal levels, following mainly Oliveira and Silva’s (2020) proposal for the study of ‘bem’ and ‘bom’ and the proposal of Peltier and Ranson (2020) for ‘bon’. Results show that isolated DM ‘bom’ and ‘bem’ are equally frequent in the C-ORAL-ROM and that ‘bem’ is much more frequent than ‘bom’ in the local corpus Fala Bracarense. They also show that ‘bien’ is very rare as an isolated DM in both French corpora, while ‘bon’ is much more frequent than ‘bom’, ‘bem’ and ‘bien’. Regarding structural positions, these DMs occur mainly as turn medial, while structural and modal functions are more differentiated depending on the DM, the corpus and the language. Thus, the study shows that although these European French and Portuguese DMs share the same etymology, they differ in usage. Keywords: Discourse markers, European Portuguese, French, oral corpora, semantic-discursive functions"

Examining language and racial attitudes in an L2 French learning context

ABSTRACT This is a quantitative study on language and racial attitudes among learners of French in the English-dominant context of British Columbia (Canada). Such attitudes matter because they can have an impact on students’ learning outcomes in and outside the classroom and they reflect linguistic and racial ideologies that exist in society. A verbal guise test was used to gather data from 83 participants who were taking intermediate and advanced French courses at the University of British Columbia (UBC) at the time of this study. Five varieties of French (from Montreal, Moncton, Vancouver, Abidjan and Paris) and two races (Asian and White) were included. The objectives were to investigate the effect of accent and race on the participants’ language attitudes. The results revealed a clear preference for European French and Quebec French, but these findings can be challenged by the participants’ difficulty in distinguishing among the different varieties. Interestingly, L2 French was evaluated more positively than the L1 varieties from Moncton and Abidjan – a finding that points to the importance of having exposure to non-standard accents in order to enhance positive attitudes. Finally, the participants also demonstrated a preference for the accents of Asians (compared with Whites) in evaluating spoken French.

The Hierarchization of French Varieties in an English-Dominant Context of Canada

The following study focuses on learners of French in an English-dominant context and contributes to a better understanding of language hierarchization by investigating attitudes toward different varieties of French. It aims to identify a possible correlation between the evaluation of different varieties of French and the participants’ socio-demographic and linguistic backgrounds and examines how learners of French express their preferences regarding French varieties. One hundred and fifty-six learners of French participated in the online experiment, 17 of whom participated in a follow-up interview. The quantitative analyses of the online experiment revealed that participants who lived in more than one country gave higher scores to all accents, and that participants who had studied French longer tended to hold more favourable attitudes toward European French. The qualitative analysis of the follow-up interviews indicate that participants expressed a preference for learning and speaking European French compared to other varieties. These results point to the importance of exposing French learners to as many varieties, both local and international, as possible.

The awareness of injury prevention programmes is insufficient among French- and German-speaking sports medicine communities in Europe.

Evaluate the current state of sports injury prevention perception, knowledge and practice among sports medicine professionals located in Western Europe and involved in injury prevention. Members of two different sports medicine organizations (GOTS and ReFORM) were invited to complete a web-based questionnaire (in German and in French, respectively) addressing perception, knowledge and implementation of sports injury prevention through 22 questions. 766 participants from a dozen of countries completed the survey. Among them, 43% were surgeons, 23% sport physicians and 18% physiotherapists working mainly in France (38%), Germany (23%) and Belgium (10%). The sample rated the importance of injury prevention as "high" or "very high" in a majority of cases (91%), but only 54% reported to be aware of specific injury prevention programmes. The French-speaking world was characterized by lower levels of reported knowledge, unfamiliarity with existing prevention programmes and less weekly time spent on prevention as compared to their German-speaking counterparts. Injury prevention barriers reported by the respondents included mainly insufficient expertise, absence of staff support from sports organizations and lack of time. There is a lack of awareness regarding injury prevention concepts among sports medicine professionals of the European French- and German-speaking world. This gap varied according to the professional occupation and working country. Relevant future paths for improvement include specific efforts to build awareness around sports injury prevention. Level IV.

Adult Normative Data for the Adaptation of the Hearing in Noise Test in European French (HINT-5 Min).

Decreased speech-in-noise (SpIN) understanding is an early marker not only of presbycusis but also of auditory processing disorder. Previous research has shown a strong relationship between hearing disorders and cognitive limitations. It is therefore crucial to allow SpIN testing in subjects who cannot sustain prolonged diagnostic procedures. The objectives of this study were to develop a rapid and reproducible version of the Hearing in Noise Test (HINT-5 min), and to determine its adult normative values in free-field and monaural or binaural headphone conditions. Following an adaptive signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) protocol, the test used a fixed noise level, while the signal level varied to reach the 50% speech reception threshold (SRT50). The speech material consisted of five lists of 20 sentences each, all recorded in European French. The whole semi-automated procedure lasted 5 min and was administered to 83 subjects aged 19 to 49 years with no reported listening difficulties. Fifty-two subjects were retested between 7 and 8 days later. For the binaural free-field condition, the mean SRT50 was −1.0 dB SNR with a standard deviation of 1.3 dB SNR. There was no significant difference between the results obtained at test and retest, nor was there any effect of listening condition, sex, or age on SRT50. The results indicate that the procedure is robust and not affected by any learning phenomenon. The HINT-5 min was found to be both a fast and reliable marker of the ability to understand speech in background noise.

Language and Racial Attitudes toward French Varieties in a Second Language Learning Context

Language is a powerful social force that does more than merely communicate content. Language learners can show preference for certain varieties over others due to linguistic stereotyping and the awareness that accents can lead to an array of social and professional disadvantages. This study explores the hierarchization of different varieties of French within Canada and the interplay of variety and race. A modified matched-guise test was used to gather attitudinal data from 94 participants undertaking Frenchlanguage courses at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. The goals of this study were to unpack the perceived hierarchization of five different varieties of French (from Moncton, Quebec City, Vancouver [a non-native speaker], Abidjan, and Paris) and to identify a possible correlation between the evaluation of varieties of French and the racialization of speakers. Participants evaluated speakers on four dimensions: status, solidarity, understandability, and general perspective. The findings revealed a clear hierarchy based on attitudes. For most statements, the participants evaluated speakers of Quebec and European French more favourably. Interestingly, they also evaluated the non-native speaker of French more positively than the speakers of African and Acadian French. However, for each variety of French, the voices associated with Black speakers were evaluated more positively than those associated with White speakers.

Psychometric Properties of a European French Version of the PTGI

Purpose To validate a European French translation of the Posttraumatic Growth Inventory (PTGI). Methods This study examined the factorial and the convergent validity of the French version of the PTGI (PTGI-F). A first sample of 406 firefighters was used to test the psychometric structure of the PTGI. A second sample of 210 first responders was then used to test its convergent validity. Participants completed measures of growth, traumatic events, PTSD, anxiety and depression, and personality. Results The PTGI-F was unrelated to Anxiety, supporting the convergent validity of the PTGI-F. Additionally, there was a positive correlation between the PTGI-F and the PCL-C. Finally, the PTGI-F had the same five-factor structure as the PTGI. Discussion The PTGI-F appears to be a valid tool. However, the contradictions that were put froward by other translated versions suggest that the PTGI should be reconsidered and improved to better assess the growth process.

ЮРИСЛІНГВІСТИКА В ЕПІЦЕНТРІ ЗАХІДНОЇ НАУКИ: ПРОБЛЕМИ І ПЕРСПЕКТИВИ

The article presents a retrospective analysis of jurislinguistic knowledge in the context of Western science. The basic principles of legal linguistics as a neophilological direction of modern humanities are determined, the ideas of new scientific concepts that are dominant in the Western world are actualized, the key principles of jurisliguistics as a prospective field are determined. There were comprehensively analyzed the papers on jurislinguistics, linguoexpertology, linguoconflictology, which are authoritative in modern science. Emphasis is made, in particular, on the Canadian, American and Western European (French, German, Polish, Czech, etc.) schools of jurisliguistics as fundamental in the formation of neodirection. Thus, the American school is associated with the name of P. Tiersma, who introduced the concept of 'legal linguistics' into scientific area; for the Canadian school, the key aspect of the analysis was in the connection between social linguistics and law, which was realized in the works of J. Tori, D. Heller, etc.; in France at the initiative of progressive linguists A. Martin, J. Ray and others the International Society for Functional Linguistics was established, and it is also associated with legal linguistics development. In the Slavic world, jurislinguistics was especially actualized in Poland (J. Brzezki, A. Malinowski, etc.) and in Czech Republic (W. Knapp). Nowadays, jurislinguistics is actively developing in local fields – legal stylistics, forensic examination, legal translation, legal terminology, history of legal language, legal linguomethodology, etc. The authors analyze various studies and the publications of the most influential schools in this interdisciplinary field. The main achievements and prospects of development of linguistic approaches in connection with the needs of justice in the globalized world are discussed. Particular attention is paid to scientific problems that have not yet been considered in the modern jurislinguistics literature.

The Development of Gender Stereotypes about Academic Aptitude among European French and North African French Boys

ABSTRACT In most Western countries, girls outperform boys in academic engagement, scholastic achievement, and school completion. In the current study, researchers assessed the developmental trajectories of European French and North African French boys’ (N = 549; M age = 11.9 years) perceptions of girls’ and boys’ ability to succeed in school. Boys reported their perceptions of the academic aptitude of boys and girls annually across the four years of French middle school. Results indicated that both ethnic groups perceived girls to have greater school aptitude than boys in Grade 6, with a larger difference among European French than North African French boys. Boys’ perceptions of the school aptitude of boys declined over the four years among both groups, with no ethnic differences in the size of pro-female bias by Grade 9. Implications are considered for developmental theory, including the importance of cultural beliefs that youth experience in the home and school settings.

Revealing pragmatic processes through a one-word answer: When the French reply Si

Like many languages, European French has a contrapositive response option (Si) to reject the negative content of a question and to express accord with the questioner’s implicit affirmative. Consider the question “Barack does not eat meat?” (in French) where the response Si indicates that he does. Inspired by Gricean analyses, we view Si as an expression that includes a pragmatic component. Based on extant studies on pragmatic inference, we predicted that the Si response ought to appear cognitively costly compared to felicitous Oui and Non answers. We created an original task that enjoins a participant to remove a box’s cover (while searching for a candy) before hearing a puppet’s question. In the critical Negative-Si (NS) condition, the participant finds the candy in, say, a white box (when two boxes are under consideration) and the interlocutor-puppet’s negative question is It is not in the white box? Besides rates of accurate responses, our main dependent variable was Response Reaction Times (RRT’s), viz. the time to naturally voice an answer (Si in this case). Controls were the Affirmative-Oui (AO), Affirmative-Non (AN), and Negative-Non (NN) conditions. Importantly, the puppet began each trial with one of three kinds of prior belief, a) by declaring that the candy is surely in, or; b) surely not in, the to-be-presented box or; c) by saying “I don’t know where it is.” These were included to determine whether answerers consider the questioner’s prior epistemic state when responding. Experiment 1 compared 6-year-olds to adults and found that i) proficient uses of Si are costly with respect to the other three conditions and that; ii) answers in the wake of a “I don’t know where it is” prompt slowdowns when compared to the other two declarations. Both findings are consistent with our pre-registered predictions. Four-year-olds, investigated in Experiment 2, pattern almost identically with the 6-year-olds, with one major exception. Their fastest response occurs when answering Si, leading to a unique developmental effect. Our account for this finding is that four-year-olds rely on a minimally semantic representation of Si, which encodes disagreement between the negative content of the question and the facts. We propose that there are pragmatic processes intrinsic to Si – which ultimately signal agreement with the questioner’s implicit affirmative – and that mastering these requires greater maturity.

Revisiting subjunctive obviation in French: a formal acceptability judgment study

Even though the weakening of the subjunctive disjoint reference effect, also known as obviation, plays an important role in the research of subjunctives in (non-)Romance languages, to the best of our knowledge it has never been verified experimentally. The goal of our paper is to test how native speakers of (European) French evaluate sentences displaying factors that (according to Ruwet 1991) should weaken obviation using a formal acceptability judgment task. Our results show that we were unable to replicate Ruwet’s observations (when averaging over multiple participants): only one out of six factors described by Ruwet seems to clearly weaken obviation, namely Coordination. We conclude that (a) French may be a language for which formal experimentation of complex data is useful, (b) idiolects should not be ignored, and (c) our results challenge theoretical accounts of obviation weakening. Finally, we relate our study to the ongoing discussion on whether informal methods of collecting acceptability judgments (such as introspection by the author) need to be verified by formal methods.

French polar response particles and neg movement

I present new data from European French involving embedded polar response particles (a.k.a. yes/no particles) in response to negative questions and develop a novel proposal which integrates the insights of previous analyses (e.g. Holmberg in Lingua 128:31–50, 2013; Roelofsen and Farkas in Language 91(2):359–414, 2015). The main puzzle has to do with the interpretation of non ‘no’ (bare or followed by a clause), which may assert its antecedent or the negation of its antecedent. It is shown that the meaning of non-responses varies as a function of the scope of negation with respect to various operators in its antecedent. Polar response particles in French are analyzed as the spell-out of a Polarity head which has moved from a lower position. The various interpretations of polar response particles are modelled as being constrained by the interaction between the necessity of the movement of the Polarity head and a constraint on scope preservation. The ramifications of this proposal for related phenomena (e.g. ‘low negation’ in English, N-word responses) are then discussed.

The persistence of accountant beancounter images in popular culture

PurposeIn analysing the beancounter image's trajectory, from its birth to its persistence, in European French language comics between 1945 and 2016, this paper explores why artists continue beancounter image usage in popular culture.Design/methodology/approachBeancounter characters have been studied in an application of Iconology (Panofsky, 1955) in order to unravel how individuals make sense of cultural artefacts and how, in turn, the visuals shape cultural belief systems at a given time.FindingsThis study reveals that comics artists usage of the beancounter image results from their critical reactions to management and capitalism whilst at other times the usage is an indication of authenticity. Motivation for the usage is not constant over time nor is the impact of the beancounter image. Both appear dependant of the level of artistic freedom experienced by the artist.Research limitations/implicationsBased on a single media (comics) with a unique characters (European French language) this study deepens exploration of the ways in which accounting becomes entwined with the everyday and implies that further research is needed.Originality/valueExtends the work of Smith and Jacobs (2011) and Jacobs and Evans (2012) by focusing on a genre of popular culture over a long period, and by adopting a critical viewpoint. Also expands the possible applications of Panofsky's (1955) Iconology in accounting studies.

Suggesting Creoles as the Media of Instruction in Formal Education

Creole and Pidgin languages are spoken by not less than 50 million people around the globe, but literacy is usually acquired in other languages, especially those languages introduced by the former colonial powers. This paper suggests that Pidgin and Creole languages should be elaborated for use as the media of instruction in formal education, particularly in contexts where up to 85 per cent of the population speak them. Pidgins and creoles researchers have labelled pidgin and creole languages as “developing” and they highlight their capacity to perform the same functions as their developed European lexifiers, English and French. The central argument is that pidgin and creole languages have the potential to express complex realities and function officially in formal education despite the negative attitudes towards them by their speakers. The attitudes towards pidgin and creole languages in education, the part of political and linguistic entities in adopting Nigerian Pidgin and Mauritian Kreol as the medium of teaching literacy in their respective countries are the central issues of focus.