Descriptions of regional pragmatic variation in French are lacking to date the focus has been on a limited range of speech acts, including apologies, requests, compliments and responses to compliments. The present paper, a systematic analysis of invitation refusals across regional varieties of French, is designed to add to the research on…

This article examines speakers' perceptions of and attitudes towards address pronoun usage in Paris and Toulouse. The data on which this article is based come from a comparative project based at the University of Melbourne, "Address in some western European languages, and were generated in focus groups in both Paris and Toulouse, as well as…

Suggests that a sociopragmatic approach to the study of forms of address may shed new light on address behavior in general and on the use of forms of address in French and Dutch in particular. "Form of address" is used to encompass not only second-person singular pronouns, but also other devices that can be employed to make reference to…

Discusses the language situation in the region of Brittany in France, where the Breton language, a Celtic rather than Romance language, is dying out but a Breton ethnic identity is growing. (Author/JL)

This article is one among a series of studies on the acquisition of patterns of linguistic variation observable in the speech of native speakers of Canadian French by French immersion (FI) students. The present study is centered on deletion of the central vowel schwa, a widespread feature of casual spoken French. In this study, FI students are…

English translations of articles in French in this issue include these: "Discourse Reported in the Print Media"; "Comparison of Register in Quebec and French Speakers"; "Method of Description of Specialized Verbs in View of Machine Translation Applications"; "Dialectal Areas in the Brazilian State of Rio Grande…