Lingvisticæ Investigationes - Volume 14, Issue 2, 1990

The two 'A' of Québec FrenchThe status of two 'A's, one of the major points of interest in the phonology of Québec French, is debated in this article. After the revision of the current literature on the subject, the authors propose a drastically new analysis which involves the whole structure of this particular variety of French.

This text shows the implementation of a lexical data base to deal with a complex morphology. The samples are from nahuatl, a meso american language.

The purpose of this study is to describe a class of sentences containing a noun in -ita, which are equivalent to an adjectival predicate. This set of sentences is of the form N0 W N1-ita (where -ita can be translated as one of the uses of être in French). Indeed, for this type of sentence:Léa-nín motín il-e (yôlsông + pulman)-itaLéa-Top everything-Pc (passion + discontent)-ita(Léa is (passionate about + discontented with) everything)we observe that N1-ita answers to the question ôtôha-(how), and not to nuku(who)/muôs(what). Further, N1-ita allows for an indication of intensity or comparison, but N1 can take no modifiers. This kind of predicate, with a human subject (noted Nsp-ita), shares some fundamental properties with an adjectival predicate. From this point of view, it is different from other types of N -ita predicates, such as:Max-nîn (haksäng + honsu-sangthä)-itaMax-Top (student + coma-state)-ita(Max is (a student + in a coma))i congi-nîn (semo-k'ol + pola-säk)-itathis paper-Top (triangle-form + violet-color)-itaThis paper is of (triangular form + violet color))The fact that Nsp-ita (like SC-cok-ita) resembles the derived adjectives N1-hata or N1-sîlôpta puts into question the current definition of -ita: if -ita, in Nsp-ita, is analyzed as a particle attached to a noun, we would have no adjective in -ita, but only nouns. Under the hypothesis of a support term (here, the adjective supporting the predicative noun), we whould have only the adjective (ita). Finally, if we analyze this kind of -ita as an adjectival suffix, the data Nsp-ita and SC-côk-ita would all make up the entire corpus of adjectives. We underline the fact that this problem is not a simple question of terminology when one is trying to set up a corpus of adjectives for constructing a lexicon-grammar, even though the present study is limited to the classification and description of the nouns that make up the predicate Nsp-ita.

In spite of the fact that phraseology, a discipline concerned with more or less fixed elements extant in all languages, owes its existence to preeminent French linguists (M. Bréal, Ch. Bally), it was quite a neglected area of French linguistic research for a long time. However, recent developments show a marked increase of interest in this particular field, manifest in the multiplication of publications as well. It is then all the more justified that the present international bibliography on the phraseology of the French language, a long-needed compilation of works published from 1900 to 1990 listing about 550 items at present that may well be enlarged in the future, has been published.

COREFERENCE AND ASPECTWe present some of the complex non-local dependencies between the elements of sentences in French, and especially their effect on coreference. Some of the parameters involved in these aspectual dependencies are listed and analysed. We then show that a more precise analysis including a simultaneous study of noun and verbal phrases is required.