Previously, no single analysis has accounted for all three subtypes of the English double genitive construction: the indefinite (a book of John’s), the definite (the book of John’s that you read), and the demonstrative (that book of John’s). Phonetic and pragmatic evidence discussed in the literature—for example, stress and familiarity/importance to the discourse participants—indicates that the demonstrative construction is a focus construction, bringing the possessed item into a prominent position in the discourse. The application of the Focus Hypothesis to all double genitives is empirically supported and is consistent with theoretical considerations having to do with the function of relative clauses and distributional differences between double genitives and standard partitives.

This article describes the realization of nasal vowels in the southeast of France. Southeastern French retains four nasal vowels , contrary to more innovative varieties of French. The perceptual analysis based on eight participants shows that, for most of the instances of each of the four nasal vowels, the pronunciation is different from that of Reference French. Additionally, these nasal vowels are followed by a nasal closure in about 10% of cases, especially in front of a pause or stop. The perceptual analysis is supplemented by an acoustic description, based on two speakers, one male and one female. The acoustic description gives support to the perceptual analysis, showing the existence of the nasal closure and the realization of /ã/ as [ã], as [ẽ], and /õ/ as .