Position In French Research Articles

The development of prosodic focus marking in French.

French is traditionally described as a language favoring syntactic means to mark focus, yet recent research shows that prosody is also used. We examine how French-speaking children use prosody to realize narrow focus and contrastive focus in the absence of syntactic means, compared to adults. We elicited SVO sentences using a virtual robot-mediated picture-matching task from monolingual French-speaking adults (N = 11), 4- to 5-year-olds (N = 12), and 7- to 8-year-olds (N = 15). These sentences were produced with narrow focus on either the subject or the object and contrastive focus on the object. Linear mixed-effects logistic regression modeling on duration, mean intensity, mean pitch, and pitch range of the subject and object nouns showed that the 4- to 5-year-olds did not use any of these prosodic cues for focus marking but the 7- to 8-year-olds distinguished narrow focus from non-focus through an increase in duration, mean intensity and to a lesser degree, mean pitch in the object nouns, largely similar to the adults, and tended to use mean pitch for this purpose in the subject nouns, different from the adults, who used duration. Our study corroborates previous findings that French-speaking 4- to 5-year-olds do not use prosody for focus. Further, it provides new evidence that 7- to 8-year-olds use prosody to mark narrow focus on the object in a more adult-like manner than narrow focus on the subject, arguably caused by a more dominant role of syntactic means in the subject position in French. Together, these findings show that syntax-dominance can influence both the route and the rate of acquisition of prosodic focus marking.

Number marking in Dagara and French

This paper examines how number is marked in Dagara (Gur, Nige-Congo) and French. It argues that number occupies a syntactic position in Dagara and French and that the difference between the two languages resides in the syntactic operation through which number is marked. Following previous studies, the paper mentions that the status of number in Dagara and French can be assumed to be similar to that in English and that the difference among the three languages is the operation involved in number marking and the syntactic position of number in the structure of nominal phrases. This difference is responsible for the morphological manifestation of number on all the constituents of a nominal phrase in French but on only one constituent in Dagara and English. Besides, the paper claims that the difference between Dagara and English in number marking is in the syntactic position of number and that this difference explains why the plural marker is always on nouns but not on adjectives in English. In contrast, nouns do not take the plural marker in the presence of an adjective in Dagara.

French and English lexical blends in contrast

Abstract Two sets of 97 French and 374 English lexical units identified as lexical blends are examined from a contrastive perspective. It appears that English displays a wider variety of patterns than French does – a larger number of marginal types of lexical input combination, of lexical shortening and of phonological splitting. Striking dissimilarities between the two languages also include an inclination for the pattern of double inner shortening in English and the pattern of left-hand-side inner shortening in French, as well as a preference for semantic and phonological right-headedness in English and the absence of a preferred lateral head position in French.

Exploiter un travail de corpus sur la place de l’épithète pour élaborer une progression didactique en FLE

This paper sets out the convergence between two approaches – a theoretical one and an applied one – aiming to tackle the problem of attributive adjective position in French. We show how the results of a corpus study contribute to the understanding of the issues faced by traditional descriptions designed for learners of French as a foreign language. This reflection leads us to create a learning progression that aims to give learners the keys to the linguistic skills that they lack. Even if the objectives of researchers in corpus linguistics and researchers in education are different, we think that the gap between usage and grammar requires learning sequences to be drawn up on the basis of current works based on corpora. This approach allows us to avoid learning sequences that either are unrealistic simplifications or necessarily non-exhaustive inventories.

Adjective placement in bilingual Romance‐German and Romance‐Romance children

AbstractWhile German requires prenominal position of attributive adjectives, Romance languages exhibit pre‐ and postnominal orders, with a predominance of postnominal order in Italian and Spanish and prenominal position in French. In light of the low frequency of adjectives in child speech, adjective order is rarely studied in acquisition. We investigated longitudinal corpora of 15 bilingual (German‐Romance, Romance‐Romance) children. Overall, the bilingual corpora almost perfectly reflect the input frequencies of pre‐ and postnominal adjective order. In contrast to monolinguals, bilinguals produce target‐deviant orders with an overuse of the prenominal order in Romance languages, irrespective of language combination and language balance. Our results are in line with Economy of Derivation. According to Kayne's (1994) Universal Base approach, postnominal adjective order is derivationally more complex than prenominal placement. Costly derivations appear to be even more costly for bilinguals than for monolinguals. Consequently, bilingual children use the most economical derivation in target‐deviant adjective placements.

La Syntaxe Des Réactions<BR> Etude comparée sur la complémentation des séquences fr. <I>première réaction fut</I> / it. <I>prima reazione fu</I> / pg. <I>primeira reacção foi</I> / esp. <I>primera reacción fue</I>

The aim of the present article is to provide a fine-grained description of predicative complements triggered by the Romance equivalents of the noun reaction in subject position in French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. The hypothesis underlying the study was that a collection of comparable data sets would reveal significant patterns of intralinguistic and interlinguistic variation in the realisation of the predicative complement function. This hypothesis was largely supported. Major findings of the study include the strong tendency in Italian to use constructions headed by a pronoun in this function, and the low rate of syntactic variability shown by French.

FORMS OF EVIDENCE AND GRAMMATICAL DEVELOPMENT IN THE ACQUISITION OF ADJECTIVE POSITION IN L2 FRENCH

The present study examines classroom learners' course of grammatical development in acquiring the interpretive correlates of variable adjective position in French. Eventual attainment of the target language system requires not only knowledge of linear word-order possibilities within the determiner phrase that differ from their native language (English) but knowledge of the interpretive differences between the two orders as well. Results from a contextualized acceptability judgment task administered to monolingual English-speaker controls, four groups of university-level learners of French, and native-French-speaker controls (N = 157) show that adjective position-interpretation pairings are eventually acquired, although with a high degree of between-learner variability in rate. Based on an analysis of both individual and group acceptance rates, I argue that eventual attainment of the second language system requires a priori knowledge of a specific representational format—supporting the notion of the domain-specificity of language as pursued in generative accounts of SLA—but that the course of grammatical development is affected by a number of group- and learner-specific variables that mediate depth of processing (following Gass, 1997).I am indebted to a number of individuals who helped me bring this manuscript to publication, including Laurent Dekydtspotter, the director of my 2002 dissertation at Indiana University, where the research presented in this manuscript was begun; several anonymous SSLA reviewers, who provided insightful and constructively critical comments; and the editorial staff of SSLA, who provided much encouragement and showed great patience.

An articulatory and acoustic study of /u/ in preboundary position in French: The interaction of compensatory articulation, neutralization avoidance and featural enhancement

This study presents acoustic and electro-magnetic articulography (EMA) data for the back rounded vowel /u/ in preboundary position in French. Five boundary types are examined: the Utterance, the Intonational phrase, the Accentual phrase, the Word and the Syllable. The three speakers studied produce similar acoustic output, with both F1 and F2 becoming lower before stronger prosodic boundaries. However, the Utterance boundary has a particularly strong effect on F1, which is particularly low before this boundary. To achieve the acoustic output observed, the speakers adopt different articulatory strategies at different prosodic boundaries. The strategies observed before the strongest boundaries are tongue dorsum backing (coupled with either raising or lowering, depending on the speaker); tongue tip retraction; and lip protrusion. Somewhat unexpectedly in light of acoustic considerations, lip constriction is observed to be greater before the weaker prosodic boundaries. This result, considered in conjunction with the tongue data and with the lip protrusion data, leads us to suggest that the French speakers in our study are actively aiming to prevent F2 from becoming too high before the weaker prosodic boundaries. We suggest that a high F2 for /u/ may lead to perceptual confusion with the front rounded vowel /y/, which is also present in the French phoneme inventory. This result echoes our previous results for the front unrounded vowel /i/ (Tabain & Perrier, 2005. Articulation and acoustics of /i/ in preboundary position in French. Journal of Phonetics, 33, 77–100), and suggests that the structure of a language's phoneme inventory has important effects on the articulatory strategies adopted by its speakers.

Articulation and acoustics of /i/ in preboundary position in French

This study presents acoustic and electro-magnetic articulometry (EMA) data for the vowel /i/ in preboundary position in French. The boundaries examined are the Utterance, the Intonational phrase, the Accentual phrase, the Word and the Syllable. Our results show that although durational effects of prosodic boundary are still very strong, the effects on supralaryngeal articulation and on spectral characteristics are not as clear as those for the vowel /a/ reported in our previous work (J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 113 (2003a, b) 516, 2834). For instance, no effects are observed on the jaw or on Fl or F2. However, differing effects observed on tongue body articulation for male and female speakers together with the same effect on F3 for all speakers suggest that speakers aim for an acoustic/auditory target rather than an articulatory target when producing /i/ at stronger boundaries. These articulatory and acoustic results are argued to reflect featural enhancement of /i/ in French at stronger boundaries, since French has a particularly crowded vowel space in the high front region.

On the Structure of the French DP

AbstractThis paper discusses and expands upon various ideas concerning the structure of nominals in general (DPs) and of French nominals in particular, with the underlying idea that CP and DP have parallel argumental and functional structure. The main topics discussed are: (i) the projection of arguments in French and English; (ii) the parameterization of N-movement, which accounts for some word order differences between French and English; (iii) the distribution of adjectives in event nominals, which reflects that of adverbs in clauses in both French and English; (iv) a peculiar case of rightward movement out of DP that provides further evidence for N-movement as well as for the claim concerning the prohibition on right adjunction of genitive nominals within DP; and (v) extraction facts that are a consequence of the status of [Spec, DP] as an A′-position in French.

The Semantics and Paradigmatics of Word Order

It is argued here that both semantic and paradigmatic analyses of word order are needed to understand the phenomenon. Attributive adjective position in French is explored in some detail, with an aim to defining the distinctive feature of meaning associated with pre-position of the adjective. To this end, the nature of modification is discussed, as against that of word order. It is argued that modification concerns the intersection of two different parts of speech, while pre-position involves a presupposition of the lexical meaning of the noun modified.*