Research has shown that prosody constitutes the one of the first characteristics of a language acquired in infancy (Hilton 2022). Very quickly during their development, fetuses perceive the intonation patterns of their first language and their developmental implications (Mehler and Dupoux 1990; Di Cristo 2002). Once acquired, the prosody of the first language can have a major influence on speakers’ competence in the additional language. Yet the teaching and learning of prosody in additional languages has long been relegated to the background. Indeed, the focus has often been on the study of segmental phenomena, at the expense of rhythm and intonation (Diana 2010). Indeed, it appears that in the Common Framework of Reference for Languages assessment grids (Conseil de la coopération culturelle 2001), these phenomena are dealt with only from level B2 upwards, and their absence in the lower proficiency thresholds underlines the fact that it would be irrelevant to address prosody, rhythm, accentuation and intonation at more rudimentary levels of mastery of an additional language. However, Yates and Zielinski (2019) emphasize the role of intonation in speaker intelligibility, whether in English as a first or additional language. In the field of oral language teaching and learning (Granger 2003; Hawkins and Buttery 2009), more and more phonological corpora focus on suprasegmental phenomena (Tortel 2008; Gut 2010; Delais-Roussarie and Yoo 2011; Herment, Tortel et al. 2014). Among them, many corpora are composed of learners' oral productions. This paper will present the phonological corpus of IPAC-UJM learners (Université Jean Monnet - Saint-Étienne) and explore the phenomena of linguistic transfer amongst French-speaking students during a sentence reading task. I will assess the ways in which the influence of the French intonation system can lead learners to transfer some prosodic characteristics from their L1 to LX English (Herry-Bénit et al. 2021). In addition, I will analyze the extent to which these interphonological phenomena are likely to influence intelligibility in oral production.
This study explores the development and spread of are as the present tense plural form of the verb “be” in the indicative across the various dialectal areas of medieval English. The aim is to shed light on the origin of forms of this type, which then came into linguistic competition with other variants, and whose gradual development has sometimes been associated with the influence of Scandinavian populations who had settled in parts of the English territory at that time. The combined use of the York-Toronto-Helsinki Corpus of Old English Prose and the Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English provides the opportunity of tackling this issue both from a quantitative and a diachronic perspective, allowing for a precise measure of the frequency of are across a large number of texts, and for a reliable assessment of its importance within the time periods and the areas in which they were written. The data we put forward, as well as the spreading movement they reflect, are quite consistent with the hypothesis that the Scandinavian presence played an important role in the development (and eventually the dominance) of are as the present tense plural form of the verb “be” in the indicative. Our study is part of a broader project aimed at further describing the dynamics at work in the diffusion of various linguistic features that have been associated with Scandinavian influence in medieval English, as well as correlating these linguistic data with the sociohistorical information available for that period.
This paper studies the syntactic and semantic functioning of constructions featuring the verb remember when it appears with a to-infinitive subordinate clause. The aim is to determine the reasons why a verb generally (though not invariably) referring to past and established facts can be complemented by clauses denoting an idea or a notion – in other words, something that is abstract and virtual. It seems that in these sentences, some conditions favour the compatibility between this verb and this type of clausal complement.The analysis of occurrences from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) shows that the structure remember to V is particularly used when a notion of necessity is expressed in the co-text. Moreover, the notion of volition sometimes mentioned in the literature is only perceptible in a very specific case and not intrinsic to the structure. Finally, the results suggest that the very meaning of the verb itself is altered by that of its complement.
This analysis will focus on [N1 of a/an N2] NPs in English, particularly those that are sometimes named “Evaluative Binominal Noun Phrases (EBNP)” (ten Wolde, 2023) (ex. my fool of a husband, this palace of a house). Although their constrained syntax and evaluative semantics are often highlighted in the literature, their place within the [N1 of a/an N2] paradigm is not clearly defined. Indeed, the latter includes EBNPs but also binominals involving different semantic relations between the two nouns (ex. a bit of a mess, a ghost of a chuckle). Thus, based on the analysis of an electronic corpus of examples (COCA, Davies 2008- ) focused on N2 smile, which presents diverse semantic relations with N1, this study aims to better understand what distinguishes EBNPs from other [N1 of a/an N2] binominals. Antoine Culioli’s utterer-centered approach to grammar (i.e Théorie des Opérations Énonciatives), especially the concepts of “notion”, “notional domain”, “quantity” and “quality”, will be helpful to provide a detailed analysis of the examples in the corpus and set specific limits to EBNPs.
This article deals with the the-N-is construction and its lexico-grammatical variants (the thing is, the idea is, the funny thing is etc.) in spoken English and focuses in particular on the way it functions from a syntactic, prosodic and discursive point of view. Through the study of a corpus of spoken British English, prosody is used to question the traditional categories this construction is associated to. A particular attention is paid to tonality and the impact the position of the tone unit boundary has on the discursive function of the construction.The construction is organised in two parts linked by a form of the copula be, and, as such, is sometimes associated to specificational copular sentences. The aim of the construction would then be to specify the referent of a weakly referential noun. This analysis has however already been questioned (Keizer, 2013). This has led to new approaches to the construction, which has been analysed as a projective construction following interactional approaches (Auer, 2009). The study of the corpus through the lens of prosody shows that prosody can be used to foreground a specificational reading of the construction, or, on the contrary, to background this specificational reading, thus giving way to other discursive functions. This article shows that the position of tone unit boundaries plays a central role in this construction and contributes to its discursive functions.
