Because many of the forms participating in inherent variability are not attested in the standard language, they are often construed as evidence of change. We test this assumption by confronting the standard, as instantiated by a unique corpus covering five centuries of French grammatical injunctions, with data on the evolution of spontaneous…

An analysis of some of the historical rules of consonant deletion, vowel deletion, nasalization, and initial h-deletion--all recapitulated synchronically within the transformational generative accounts of French linking--showing that they have undergone morphologization in the form of inversion, and that h-aspire words have been assigned the…

Shorter version of this paper read at the First California Linguistics Conference, Berkeley, May 1971. (VM)

The phonological rule that assigns stress at the word level in Modern French is examined in an effort to show how a consideration of productivity, morphological relatedness, and grammatical conditioning motivates a phonetically determined stress rule for Modern French. (Author/RM)

Shows that evidence exists for a rule of neg-raising in French. Neg-raising and its domain are then reconsidered from a functional perspective, whereby the transformation is shown to be hedging device. (Author/RM)