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Qu'il s'agisse de temps verbaux, d'auxiliaires, d'adverbes ou de conjonctions, la plupart des marqueurs temporels et modaux font preuve d'une grande flexibilité sémantique, qui se manifeste à travers leurs emplois dans des contextes différents. Les contributions réunies dans ce volume s'intéressent en majorité aux emplois d'une série de marqueurs du français (« hexagonal » ou non), mais aussi au fonctionnement de marqueurs d'autres langues (par exemple de l'espagnol ou du birman). Elles s'efforcent de décrire d'une façon détaillée les différentes interprétations de ces marqueurs, en privilégiant souvent des usages moins fréquents ou atypiques (le présent « prototypisant », les emplois postmodaux de pouvoir, etc.) et des contextes d'emploi moins fréquemment analysés dans la littérature (rubriques nécrologiques, reportages sportifs, articles législatifs, etc.). Les auteurs apportent ainsi des mises au point éclairantes sur la relation existant entre les emplois temporels, modaux ou évidentiels des temps verbaux (comme le futur simple ou le conditionnel), mais aussi sur la relation entre emplois temporels et emplois discursifs ou argumentatifs d'adverbes dits « temporels ». Le volume contribue de cette façon à une meilleure compréhension de la polyvalence sémantique en général et en particulier à celle des marqueurs temporels et modaux étudiés dans ce volume.

The pervasive use of dislocations (as in Le chocolat, c’est bon) is a key characteristic of spoken French. This book offers various new and well-motivated insights, based on tests conducted by the author, on the syntactic analysis, prosody, and the interpretation of dislocation in spoken French. It also considers important aspects of the acquisition of dislocation by monolingual children learning different French dialects. The author argues that spoken French is a discourse-configurational language, in which topics are obligatorily dislocated. She develops a syntactically parsimonious account, which maximizes the import of interfaces involved with discourse and prosody. She proposes clear diagnostics, following a reexamination of the status of subject clitics and a reevaluation of the characteristic prosody of dislocated constituents. The theoretical arguments throughout the book rest on data that comes from corpora of spontaneous production and from various elitication experiments. This book throws new light on French syntax and prosody and makes an important and original contribution to the study of linguistic interfaces. Clearly expressed and tightly argued it will interest scholars and advanced students of French and of its acquisition as a first language as well as linguistic theorists interested in the interfaces between syntax, discourse, and phonology.

Several studies on L3 lexicon, and recently also some on L3 syntax, have convincingly shown a qualitative difference between the acquisition of a true L2 and the subsequent acquisition of an L3. Some studies even indicate that L2 takes on a stronger role than L1 in the initial state of L3 syntax (e.g. Bardel and Falk, 2007; Rothman and Cabrelli Amaro, 2010). In this article we further investigate syntactic transfer from L1/L2 to L3 in learners at an intermediate level of proficiency in the target language. Data have been obtained from 44 learners of German as L3, testing the placement of object pronouns in both main and subordinate clauses in a grammaticality judgement/correction task (GJCT). The learners constitute two groups (both n = 22): One group has English as L1 and French as L2 and the other group has French as L1 and English as L2. This particular combination of background languages allows us to pinpoint the source of transfer, since object placement is pre-verbal in French and post-verbal in English, this being applied in both main and subordinate clauses. In target language (TL) German, however, the object placement varies between pre-verbal in the sub clause and post-verbal in the main clause. The two groups behave differently as to both acceptance and rejection of the test items (60 grammatical and ungrammatical main and sub clauses with object pronouns). This difference is significant and can be ascribed to their L2s, respectively. Our results thus show that the L2 transfers into the L3 even at an intermediate level, and on the basis of this we claim a strong role for the L2 status factor.

The late-acquired French subjunctive–indicative contrast conveys important information about event realization and is characterized by bound morphology, form ambiguity, contextual restrictedness, and the infrequency of the subjunctive. This study contributes underrepresented adverbial-clause interpretation data and incorporates lexical effects to extend what is known about why French mood is late-acquired. We assess interpretation of four adverbial conjunctions which primarily co-occur with subjunctive or indicative mood in corpus searches. Analysis of 77 participants revealed a statistically significant interaction between mood and proficiency, with more proficient learners affected by mood, whereas clause order influenced less proficient learners. Moreover, lower-proficiency learners treated adverbs within a particular class of co-occurrence more similarly across the 32 items than our advanced learners or native speakers, who were sensitive to lexical effects, attributable to the roles of frequency and semantics. The study contributes to the growing body of research on late-acquired structures, for which learners attend to evolving cues across acquisitional trajectories.

Nonnative processing has been argued to reflect either reduced processing capacity or delayed timing of structural analysis compared to the extraction of lexical/semantic information. The current study simultaneously investigates timing and resource allocation through a time-frequency analysis of the intrinsic neural activity during syntactic processing in native and English-speaking nonnative speakers of French. It involved structurally constrained anaphora resolution in bi-clausal wh -filler-gap dependencies such as Quelle décision à propos de lui est-ce que Paul a dit que Lydie avait rejetée sans hésitation ? ‘Which decision about him did Paul say that Lydie rejected without hesitation?’. We tested the hypothesis that nonnative speakers may allocate greater resources than native speakers to the computation of syntactic representations based on the grammatical specifications encoded in lexical entries, though both native and nonnative processing involves the immediate application of structural constraints. This distinct resource allocation is likely to arise in response to higher activation thresholds for nonnative knowledge acquired after the first language grammar has been fully acquired. To examine this bias in nonnative neurocognitive processing, we manipulated the wh- filler to contain either a lexically specified noun complement such as à propos de lui ‘about him’ or a non-lexcially specified noun phrase modifier such as le concernant ‘concerning him’. We focused on processing at the intermediate gap site, that is, the point of information exchange between the matrix and the embedded clauses by adopting a measurement window corresponding to the bridge verb dit ‘said’ and subordinator que ‘that’ introducing the embedded clause. Our results showed that structural constraints on anaphora produced event-related spectral perturbations at 13-14Hz early into the presentation of the bridge verb across groups. An interaction of structural constraints on anaphora with group was found at 18-19Hz early into the presentation of the bridge verb. In this interaction, the nonnative-speaker activity at 18-19Hz echoed the concurrent general patterns at 13-14Hz, whereas the native-speaker activity revealed distinct power at 18-19Hz and at 13-14Hz. There was no evidence of delay of structural constraints on intermediate gaps with respect to lexical access to the bridge verb and subordinator. However, nonnative speakers’ allocation of power in cell assembly synchronizations of fillers and gaps at the intermediate gap site reflected the grammatical specifications lexically encoded in the fillers.

Recent research has focused on bilingual children’s performance on non-word repetition (NWR) and sentence repetition (SR) tasks, but it remains unclear how their scores can be expected to vary as a function of language exposure, which creates challenges for developing age-appropriate performance expectations. With the goal of examining the impact of limited language exposure on these tasks, French NWR and SR performance from 33 first graders (mean age 6 years, 10 months) in early total French immersion in English-speaking Canada was compared to prior work on bilinguals acquiring French in France. With a mean length of exposure of 1 year, 7 months, but a mean cumulative length of exposure of only 3 months, the children in immersion have much less daily exposure to French than the bilinguals in France. The results showed that children in immersion patterned with the other bilinguals for NWR, but had much weaker SR performance. Within-subjects analyses revealed that, for SR, the children in immersion had stronger scores on wh- questions and relative clauses, which suggests that these structures may be less sensitive to language exposure.

Relative clauses (RCs) are considered islands for extraction, yet acceptable cases of overt extraction from RCs have been attested over the years in a variety of languages: Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Japanese, Hebrew, English, Italian, Spanish, French, and also in Lebanese Arabic and Mandarin Chinese, where covert extraction from an RC is observed. The possibility for extraction has often been presented as evidence against a syntactic theory of locality, and in favor of constraints defined in terms of information structure, or processing limitations and constraints on working memory. Another possibility, still hardly explored, is that locality is determined syntactically, combined with a more fine-grained structure for RCs and a theory of how extraction from this structure interacts with the theory of locality. I argue in favor of the latter approach. I assume the structural ambiguity of RCs and argue that while externally headed RCs do block extraction, extraction is possible, under certain conditions, from a raising RC, and is formally similar to extraction from an embedded interrogative.

Attitude role shift is a sign language strategy to report someone else’s utterance or thought. It has been analyzed either as a kind of demonstration or, alternatively, as a complex construction involving subordination plus a context-shifting operator. The present work reports the results of a sentence-to-picture matching task developed in three different sign languages (Italian Sign Language, French Sign Language and Catalan Sign Language) with the aim of providing experimental evidence about the nature of role shift. The task assessed the comprehension of indexical first-person pronouns in various syntactic contexts with and without role shift. We showed that constructions with role shift, which require context-shifting for the first-person pronoun, are never easier to comprehend than constructions without role shift that do not require context-shifting. In some cases, they are even more difficult. Additionally, we show that, in Italian Sign Language only, sentences in which the role shifted first-person pronoun is in object position are more difficult than sentences in which it is in subject position. We argue that this can be interpreted as an intervention effect and that this is an argument in favor of positing a context-shifting operator in the periphery of the role shift clause. Considering that the population of adult Deaf signers includes, besides native signers, a majority of individuals with a more or less severe delayed first language exposure, the second goal of this paper is to study the effects of age of exposure on comprehension of sentences with role shift. In the three languages under investigation, we found that native signers generally outperformed non-native signers in sentences with role shift and in subordinate clauses without role shift. This confirms that delayed language exposure has a lasting impact on adults’ comprehension of subordinate clauses of various degrees of complexity.

It has often been observed that parasitic gaps fare better in untensed adjunct clauses than in tensed ones. García Mayo & Kempchinsky (1994) argue that this contrast emerges in Romance languages, but not in English. We present an acceptability judgment experiment to investigate the tense effect in different varieties of French and Spanish, and American English. While the main effects of tense and parasitic gaps in the Romance languages were significant, we did not find super-additivity. We did find super-additivity in the English data, although the experimental design prevents us from comparing the datasets. Our results do not support García Mayo & Kempchinsky’s analysis. Furthermore, we compare our results with earlier experiments. We tested different language varieties for the sake of representation, but also because language contact with Germanic languages or Quechuan languages and Shawi may lead to transfer effects, reducing participants’ sensitivity to the tense contrast compared to Metropolitan French and European Spanish. The patterns in the Spanish datasets corroborate this hypothesis. Finally, we find variation between the adjunct types we tested in the Romance subexperiments (after-, before-, and without-clauses). Our findings thus provide an empirical basis for future research into the phenomenon.