William J. Ashby

The syntax, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics of left- and right-dislocations in French

Abstract Aspects of the syntax, pragmatics and sociolinguistic distribution of left- and right-dislocations in a corpus of spoken French are treated. Most tokens of both types have clear pragmatic motivation, two functions being common to both, with other functions particular to one or another type. The social distribution of weakly motivated tokens does not support the view that, as French moves toward verb-initial typology, dislocated subjects are being grammaticalized as ordinary subjects.

The loss of the negative morpheme, ne, in Parisian French

Abstract Data from a corpus of upper-middle class Parisian French demonstrate that the omission of ne in negative structures is most frequent among certain demographic segments of the population. This finding, together with historical evidence, suggests that the optional deletion of ne represents a continuing linguistic change, presaging theeventual total loss of ne . This change is most advanced in certain syntactic and phonetic contexts and in informal style.

Preferred Argument Structure in Spoken French and Spanish.

This article uses the quantitative methodology of goldvarb to examine the variable distribution of lexical noun phrases representing core arguments of the verb in a corpus of spoken French and a corpus of spoken Spanish. It is shown that this distribution is not random, but instead conforms to a grammatically and pragmatically motivated pattern known as Preferred Argument Structure.

When does variation indicate linguistic change in progress

It is argued that two variables of Modern French (the negative particle ne and the consonant l of clitic pronouns such as il ) are indeed indices of ongoing linguistic change, even though this change appears to be of long duration. This conclusion is based not only on the distribution of the variables in a corpus of natural French discourse, but also on independent linguistic evidence, together with the available historical record. In the absence of adequate ‘real-time’ data, variationist analysis yielding synchronic, “apparent-time” data provides a useful means of charting the drift of the language.

The drift of french syntax

Abstract Recent speculation about the drift of French syntax is evaluated against data from a socially diverse corpus of modern French. While the data do not support the theory that French is becoming a VSO language, they do suggest that French is developing a ‘topic prominent’ sentence type.