This article investigates the assignment of grammatical gender to foreign nouns codeswitched into French, where gender assignment is required. Contrary to other studies, this study is based on a questionnaire of 75 words filled by both monolingual French speakers and native speakers of French bilingual in English. The results are analyzed in the light of criteria for gender assignment that are established both for borrowed words (from previous studies on borrowings in French as well as Spanish and German) and for native French words (from studies in French morphology). Comparisons between the groups show that there is little agreement between monolinguals and bilinguals as well as among monolinguals, showing that the meaning of a word is of primary importance in assigning grammatical gender. Results also show that the majority of words are assigned to the masculine gender. The analysis of factors influencing gender assignment reveals that bilingual participants rely on semantic criteria (biological sex and semantic analogy) and/or formal (morphological endings, phonetics, and orthographical factors) criteria to assign gender to the words in the questionnaire.

This article describes the realization of nasal vowels in the southeast of France. Southeastern French retains four nasal vowels , contrary to more innovative varieties of French. The perceptual analysis based on eight participants shows that, for most of the instances of each of the four nasal vowels, the pronunciation is different from that of Reference French. Additionally, these nasal vowels are followed by a nasal closure in about 10% of cases, especially in front of a pause or stop. The perceptual analysis is supplemented by an acoustic description, based on two speakers, one male and one female. The acoustic description gives support to the perceptual analysis, showing the existence of the nasal closure and the realization of /ã/ as [ã], as [ẽ], and /õ/ as .

OPTIMALITY THEORY: CONSTRAINT INTERACTION IN GENERATIVE GRAMMAR. Alan Prince and Paul Smolensky. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Pp. xi + 289. $69.95 cloth, $39.95 paper.This book is very similar to the manuscript (written by the same authors and bearing the same title) that has been circulating among phonologists since 1993. As mentioned by the authors in the preface, “those familiar with an earlier version of the text will not find new notions and notations here” (p. ix). For this reason, the 2004 publication date may seem anachronistic, as it does not reflect the state of Optimality Theory (OT) in 2004, but rather in 1993. The most notable difference between the two versions of this text is the disappearance of two sections (on variable rules and stochastic grammars and on declarative phonology) that were to be added in the manuscript form.

No abstract

No abstract