This dissertation investigates language-specific acoustic and aerodynamic phenomena in language contact situations. Whereas most work on second language and bilingual phonology has focused on individual consonants and vowels, this project examines patterns of coarticulation in the two languages of Spanish-English and French-English bilingual…

Word order is one of the earliest aspects of grammar that the child acquires, because her early utterances already respect the basic word order of the target language. However, the question of the nature of early syntactic representations is subject to debate. Approaches inspired by formal syntax assume that the head-complement order,…

Explores the hypothesis that the meaning of a word, especially a noun, relates directly to the types of relationships that the speaker has to the various referents that the word lets him construct, and that the referents have with their environment. Polysemic, metonymic, and metaphoric uses then tend to become confused with the actual lexical…

The nominal imperative, which serves to give an order in nominal rather than verbal form (e.g., "Silence!") presents a little-studied case of alternation between presence and absence of determiner in a nominal syntagm. Analysis of a French language corpus allows development of hypotheses on the meaning of certain types of determiners, or…

If it is immediate, definite anaphoric reference of an indefinite syntagm "'un'+noun" in French (e.g., "un chien...l'animal") seems appropriate for an "unfaithful anaphor" (e.g., "un chien...l'animal") but not a "faithful" anaphor (e.g., "un chien...le chien"). This rule helps to identify…

Much of the confusion surrounding the meaning and distribution of "(i)ci and la" and other partially cognate deictic terms in French can be dissipated if the terms are assumed to be related to the three grammatical persons: "(i)ci" is confined to the first person, "la" has taken over the second person, and…

Analysis of the French verb prefix "re-" finds its occurrence characterized not, strictly speaking, by meaning but by the variety of ways in which the verb itself and its prefixed form interact. Occurrences of "re-" are classified into five categories. Verbs not compatible with the prefix and several unusual cases are also discussed. (MSE)

An explanation of the ordering and co-occurrence constraints operating within French complement clitic sequences is proposed. It is argued that these template-formed syntactic constituents result from interaction of two features in conjunction with certain phonological constraints, and that once explained, the clitic sequence can be seen as an…

Reports three studies of comprehension of French subject relative clauses and two forms of object relative clauses. The first tested the hypothesis that competition between noun phrases, memory load, and perspective maintenance determine difficulty of role assignment in reversible relative clauses; others compared subject relatives and inverted…

A study of French "wh" questions, particularly questions using "que" and "quoi," looks at conventional syntactic explanations and presents a new analysis. Relevant facts and pertinent claims about these questions are reviewed, the researcher's assumptions about the working of Wh questions are explained, the new…

An investigation of interrogative structures in French examined the extent to which variation in the structure of the questions was conditioned by their function. Data are drawn from a corpus containing 177 yes/no questions and 117 WH- questions. Findings suggest the following: (1) in identifying the communicative function of interrogatives, it is…

Clitics are explained through the interplay of different levels of language in performance. It is shown that clitic movement can be blocked on phonological ground, and accusative marked by "shwa" follows, rather than precedes, a clitic segment containing a back vowel--"vous le" or "nous le". (SCC)

This article discusses the nature of the syntactic-autonomy in French, that is, the absence of a correlation between the position of an element in a sequence of discourse and its relative function. (Text is in French.) (CLK)

This article discusses Aronoff's (1976) theory of the lexicon and states that the theory must be modified to describe a more richly inflected language, such as French. A more comprehensive theory of the lexicon is then outlined. (NCR)

Beginning portion of an article based on the author's 1970 doctoral dissertation at the University of Frankfurt, West Germany. (WB)