Après avoir examiné successivement l’usage de l’auxiliaire avoir ou être au passé composé et plus que parfait et l’usage de la préposition POUR (Mougeon et Carroll, 1976; Canale, Mougeon, Bélanger, Ituen, 1976), nous allons dans la présente étude décrire l’usage de SUR et DESSUS dans le français parlé et écrit d’élèves bilingues fréquentant des écoles secondaires de langue française à Sudbury, Welland et dans le canton de Rayside/Azilda. Notre description se fera par rapport à plusieurs normes: le français standard, le français de l’Ontario formel écrit et le français parlé par les jeunes Québécois unilingues, ce afin de mieux cerner les caractéristiques de l’usage des jeunes Franco-ontariens. Avant de rentrer dans le détail de notre étude, nous allons brièvement exposer certaines des règles d’usage du français standard concernant SUR et DESSUS. Ceci servira d’arrière plan à l’analyse des résultats de notre étude.

The kinds of rules found in the phonological components of generative grammars have been traditionally grouped into three types: (1) LEXICAL REDUNDANCY or MORPHEME STRUCTURE rules, which fill in redundant features of systematic phonemes within morphemes; (2) PHONOLOGICAL rules, which operate both within morphemes as well as across morpheme boundaries, and can either add or change features; (3) PHONETIC rules, which supply n-ary values to the binary distinctive feature specifications which are the output of the earlier phonological rules. It has furthermore been assumed that these three subcomponents are strictly ordered with respect to one another. Recent studies, however, have revealed a number of rules which do not conveniently fall into these categories, and still others have been found which contradict the assumed ordering relationship (Vennemann, 1972; Anderson, 1975; Daniels, 1973; Labov, 1972). Many of these rules exhibit articulatory phonetic regularities which are obscured at the level of binary distinctive features. Instead they apply at a level when scalar values have already been assigned to the individual features.

As Bott (1970: 217-19) points out, one of the most successful applications of computer to language research has been in the production of concordances—alphabetical lists of all the words in a written corpus followed by a reference system (i.e., page and line number) and a context (i.e., the line in which the word occurs). This valuable tool has greatly facilitated the description of the language of old texts.

The literature on the synchronic problems related to languages in contact is abundant. However, the effects of borrowing on the formation of a language have not been studied in any detail mainly because (in our opinion) of the lack of appropriate analytical tools. Clearly, the diagnosis and examination of interference mechanisms in old texts is important not only for a complete historical description of a language at a particular stage in its development, but also as a means of understanding the nature of contact phenomena. With the advent of computer concordances this lacuna may soon be filled.

The first part of this paper is devoted to an analysis of the basic concepts underlying Reich’s 1973 and 1970 complexity count for relational networks in a stratificational grammar. The second part treats of some problems arising in connection with optionality.

Rule reordering as a principle of phonological change has come under heavy criticism in the recent past. A number of articles, e.g. Iverson (1973), Picard (1974), Hogg (1976), Dinnsen and Koutsoudas (1976), have been devoted to this question, endeavouring to show in one way or another that the reordering of phonological rules does not constitute a type of linguistic change. Some of the better known cases of alleged reordering have been examined, and many of these have been judged to be deficient for two main reasons: implausibility, due to the unjustified degree of abstractness involved, and inaccuracy, due to the omission or misinterpretation of crucial data. Generally, at the very least, a reasonable and plausible alternative solution has been put forth in each case.

The Hispanic Peninsula immediately prior to Romanization was occupied by numerous tribes or clans representing diverse Indo-European and non-Indo-European populations. Basques resided in the north, Celts in the northwest and central regions, Tartessians in the south, Bastetanians in the southeast and Iberians in the east and northeast.

The region of the Iberians, extending from a little north of the Pyrenees south to Alicante and beyond, has consistently yielded a number of inscriptions in a language thus far unrelated to the other known languages of the Peninsula, or to the undeciphered languages underlying the inscriptions of the south. Iberian, a geographical and collective term, refers to the several cultures and dialects which appear connected in unknown degrees to two major groups: the Edetanos of the Valencian plains and the related Ilergetes who dwelt further north in Catalufña.

Many native speakers of American English show in their speech a phenomenon that could be called ‘consonant cluster simplification.’ This may be illustrated by examples such as:

Rule R1 below would account for the simplification of these CCC-cluster:

One of the principle aims of research in linguistic theory is to discover linguistic universals which may be represented as a part of linguistic metatheory. In phonological theory there are many examples of such attempts. For example, the formal conventions proposed by Chomsky and Halle (1968) in The Sound Pattern of English were to represent universal constraints for natural languages.

It has been shown on numerous occasions (for example, Labov, 1971) that phonological theory must be able to account for the systematic variability regularly present in all phonological systems. Although quantitative studies of phonological variability are still relatively new, it is important all the same to attempt to posit possible universal constraints, both formal and substantive, within the current formulation of variability theory in order to test the theory itself. Of particular interest are questions such as the following: What are universal constraints on the FORM of variable rules? Are there universal constraints on the types of environments in which variable rules may apply?

The Cowichan Dialect of Halkomelem, a Coast Salishan language, has a reduplication process in three morphological categories that copies stem-initial CV. When a stem-initial resonant (voiced sonorant) is reduplicated, a prefix hə- results. Two possible explanations for h instead of the predicted resonant support distinct, although not necessarily mutually exclusive, claims for the status of h in a universal classification. One possible explanation is that the reduplicated resonant devoices to h-lending support to Chomsky and Halle’s (1968) classification of h as a voiceless sonorant, since h would be functioning as the voiceless counterpart to Cowichan voiced sonorants. But an alternative is that the prefixed sonorant elides, with the subsequent insertion of h as a juncture phenomenon—suggesting that h functions here as a neutral nonsyllabic segment.