Quebec has a tradition of language columns, articles discussing questions related to the French language produced by a single author and published regularly in the periodical press. This study examines the content and discourse of a sample of these language columns produced by six authors in Quebec during the twentieth century to explore possible…

This study investigates "Prateritumschwund," one of the most salient developments in the Upper German dialect area during the Early Modern period. Drawing on a wide range of text types originating in Nuremberg and its surrounding areas from the 13th to the 17th centuries, this study tests various hypotheses put forward as alleged causes…

"Ouh que c'est laid!" "Oh this is ugly!" is one of the comments among the 11,800 hits on Google for the sequence "la fille que je sors avec" [the girl I go out with]. Often the comments include the idea that the whole expression has been taken from English as a direct calque. The authors of the present keynote…

The authors of "Phrase-final prepositions in Quebec French: An empirical study of contact, code-switching and resistance to convergence", Poplack, Zentz & Dion (2011, this issue), henceforth cited as PZD, make a strong case for showing that, in spite of surface similarities, preposition stranding in Canadian French relative clauses…

Provides evidence from a small northern U.S. city for Canadian raising, a Canadian phenomenon that heightens the onset of diphthongs in /ai/ and /au/ relative to the low central onset in neighboring dialects. Findings suggest that the Canadian diphthong varieties may not be conforming to the U.S. norm, but instead that the two varieties are…

The main assumption in this article is that the pragmatics of the variety of South African English commonly referred to as black South African English (BSAE) have been shaped, over time, by educated bilinguals, through a transfer of features from African languages. Transfer of syntactic forms, now firmly established in the variety, is evidenced…