FRENCH BELLES-LETTRES LANGUAGE IN DIACHRONIC ASPECT (XVII-XXI)

Histories of Discoveries of Continuations: Belles-Lettres with Equivocal Tenses

The early sixties saw conventional labels \got rid of", and then reintroduced in a nuclear variant that was hoped to be so awesome that they would never be used again except for exceptions. But guilt-free remote control of dangerous instruments was already undermining the entente. This note is a very personal view of, and from, the rst half of that decade, with very close horizons. But there is...

PREFACE.............................................................................................. xvii FREQUENTLY USED SYMBOLS AND ABBREVIATIONS.......... xxi

Frequency effects in language acquisition, language use, and diachronic change

Recent work in psychology and linguistics has shown that frequency of occurrence is an important determinant of language acquisition, language use, and diachronic change. This paper surveys the effects of frequency on the use and development of language and considers the psychological mechanisms that underlie the various frequency effects. The paper shows that frequency has an impact on the eme...

Perfect Adjective Positions in French: a Diachronic Perspective

Introduction In a series of recent talks and papers, Denis Bouchard (1998, 1999, 2002) has challenged so-called 'transformational' analyses of adjective positions such as which involve movement of N to the head of some functional projection between D and N. In Cinque's analysis, the difference in the position of Ns relative to As in Romance as opposed to Germanic is due to an N-raising mechanis...

A diachronic study of prosody through French audio archives

This study makes use of advances in automatic speech processing to analyse French audiovisual archives. A 10-hour corpus covering five decades of broadcast news is investigated from the angle of prosody evolution. Two prosodic features are explored: word-initial stress (especially in the case of proper names) and penultimate vowel lengthening (especially penultimate nasal vowels before a pause)...