La plupart des études typologiques entreprises par les linguistes s’en tiennent généralement aux trois étapes citées par Bernard Pottier (1968:300): inventaire des traits typologiques; caractérisation d’une langue par ses traits; classement des langues du monde d’après certains de ces traits. Après un survol méthodique, mais bref, de tous les traits envisageables dans une telle investigation, Pottier conclut: “Les recherches actuelles s’efforcent d’introduire la notion de hiérarchie dans le fonctionnement de la langue” (1968:318).

C’est ce dernier point que j’aimerais envisager pour le français en comparant le rôle des voyelles par rapport à celui des consonnes dans le système de la langue.

Ross (1967) showed that in relative clauses, not only may the WH-phrase be fronted, but an NP or PP containing the WH-phrase may also be fronted, as shown in (1):

1. (1)

   1. a. This is the child [who]i I’ve been hearing stories about ti.

   2. b. This is the child [about whom]i I’ve been hearing stories ti.

   3. c. This is the child [stories about whom]i I’ve been hearing ti.

   Ross called this phenomenon “pied piping”. His statement of the pied piping convention is given in (2).

2. (2) Any transformation which is stated in such a way as to effect the reordering of some specified node NP, where this node is preceded and followed by variables in the structural index of the rule, may apply to this NP or to any non-coordinate NP which dominates it, as long as there are no occurrences of any coordinate node, nor of the node S, on the branch connecting the higher node and the specified node. (1967:114)

Notice that Ross’s statement applies to any transformation moving an element over a variable. Thus, the prediction is that WH-questions and relative clauses should behave similarly with respect to pied piping. This is not the case, as pointed out by Bresnan (1976:37). Questions seem to be much more limited in what can be pied piped than are relative clauses.

Les données présentées en (1) illustrent le cas des phrases dites “infinitives de narration”. De nombreux exemples sont attestés dans Sandfeld (1965), Le Bidois (1952), Grevisse (1961), Nyrop (1930), etc.

This paper has two purposes. The first is to focus attention on the gradient nature of sound change. This characteristic of sound change, although an important one, is often overlooked. King (1969: 122), for example, states: “Phonological changes tend to affect natural classes of sounds (p, t, k, high vowels, voiced stops) because rules that affect natural classes are simpler than rules that apply only to single segments.” This perspective obscures the generalization pattern of phonological processes, for a particular process typically affects a subsection of a natural class and then may (or may not) generalize to other members of the particular class or even to other classes. The second purpose of this paper is to account for selected cases of gradient phonological change in Italian and other Romance languages on the basis of a partial theory of syllable structure preferences.

A competence grammar of English must account for the English speaker’s ability to predict the shape of the regular past tense morpheme on the basis of the stem-final segment, faced, for example, with a neologistic verb like *rolk or *glag. But whether efficient processing of known words routinely utilizes this creative ability is another matter. Efficient on-line processing may favour selection from a store over computation. To what extent selection and computation are balanced in on-line production may even be different from the balance required in efficient comprehension.

It would appear therefore that not only is behaviour not a criterion for possession of knowledge — it is in fact only one kind of evidence for it — but also that the constructs required in characterizing competence cannot serve as the only criteria for determining the forms of processing. The evidence from both domains can support but not disconfirm the hypotheses of the other. Nevertheless, the grammars being produced within the generative paradigm are beginning to have the requisite richness of detail that must underly the capacity for language use. As such they provide independently motivated and sufficiently elaborate hypotheses regarding the structures and processes underlying production, allowing the production theorist a preliminary distinction between crucial facts and those best considered irrelevant.

Cet article porte sur des constructions françaises d’un type particulier. Ces constructions sont illustrées par les exemples suivants:

1. i) Jean a le plaisir de vivre à la campagne

2. ii) Jean a un plaisir vif à vivre à la campagne

3. iii) Jean a du plaisir à vivre à la campagne.

Ces constructions ne diffèrent qu’au niveau de l’élément prépositionnel introduisant la proposition infinitive et qu’au niveau du spécifieur, ou détermineur, du substantif.

In his study of consonant epenthesis, Wetzels (1985:285-286) recognizes the existence of two distinct types: “one type involves the appearance of an epenthetic consonant inside liquid-final clusters; the second type concerns intrusive stops which originate inside sequences of consonants which do not have liquids as their second member.” Following are some characteristic examples:

It has been argued extensively that children acquiring a second language (L2) simplify the target sounds of that language using the same phonological processes as children use in acquiring their first language (L1) (cf. Hecht and Mulford 1982; Piper, 1984a, 1984b; Garnica and Herbert 1979). Since these processes are generally thought to be universal, it is not surprising that this should be the case. Nevertheless, there are differences between L1 and L2 learners both in the simplification processes they use and in the way they use them. Some processes do not appear at all or appear unsystematically in L2 learners; some processes are retained much longer by L2 learners than would be expected given their early disappearance in L1 learners. In this paper, I take a closer look at the incidence, duration and systematicity of these processes in the developing phonology of ten ESL children, and attempt to demonstrate some ways in which normal acquisition of the L2 sound system by children differs from first language acquisition.

In the evolution of morphological studies, morphological features and markedness have come to play increasingly important rôles. Feature notation in morphology allows the development of the notion of natural morphological class, renders explicit much of the internal structure of paradigms and permits the exploitation, suitably adapted, of many of the results obtained in phonology. Markedness considerations, particularly when linked to general theories of morphology, again highlight morphological structure, constrain the variety of permitted analyses, and indicate, at least in part, the expected direction of historical change. In the sections to follow, I will present an analysis of Old French nominal and adjectival inflection which makes key use of morphological features and the differences between the marked and unmarked values of these features. This study will be particularly concerned with constraining the morphological analysis of Old French and conversely, with using Old French data to investigate more general properties of morphological systems.

This study examines the acquisition of a familiar and widely studied syntactic phenomenon, preposition stranding, within the framework of transformational generative grammar. According to Chomsky’s theory of Universal Grammar (UG), children begin the acquisition task with an innate knowledge of universal principles of grammar. Many of these principles have open parameters with marked and unmarked options which must be set by children on the basis of their linguistic input. The marked setting entails the unmarked setting in that if a language allows the marked structures it will also allow the relevant unmarked structures, but the reverse is not necessarily true.

This article gives a formalized description of aspect within the context of Reichenbach’s (1947) model of tense structures. Reichenbach’s primitive for the event, E, is further analyzed as consisting of a beginning, an end or both. This configuration is called Aspectual Structure. Its interaction with Tense Structure is used to verify this structure independently. Aspectual Structure distinguishes clearly between perfective and imperfective constructions on the one hand and progressive and stative constructions on the other. The former exhibit aspectual structure; the latter do not. My analysis presents independent evidence for or against various insights present in purely descriptive approaches to aspect that can be found in many places in the literature.

Une série d’articles sur les consonnes épenthétiques est apparue dans les pages de cette revue ces dix dernières années: Walker (1978, 1981), Morin (1980), Singh (1980), Wetzels (1985), Piggott et Singh (1985) et Picard (1987), passant progressivement d’un problème très particulier (le statut phonologique en ancien français des consonnes épenthétiques issues du gallo-roman) à des théories générales sur l’épenthèse. Un certain nombre de données et d’analyses antérieures n’ont malheureusement pas été utilisées par le dernier de ces auteurs, conduisant ainsi à des généralisations hâtives et probablement fausses. Il est peut-être temps maintenant de rappeler quelques-unes des analyses antérieures et de revenir sur certaines de ces généralisations.