Variation in Phonology

Japanese learners of English often say that they have learned American English, and high schools use American English textbooks and recordings. This study was carried out to find out which varieties of English influence Japanese learners' pronunciation. Five short news stories were recorded by 65 university students from the Kanto region. Seven features of pronunciation, which are characteristically different in British and American English, were examined for American, British, Australian and Japanese influence. The students answered a questionnaire about their exposure to varieties of English and which one they were aiming at. A majority of students wanted to learn American English pronunciation, but a large minority wanted to learn British English, and a smaller number said they just wanted to be easily understood. The pronunciation of most of the students was judged to be influenced by American English where it was not influenced by Japanese, and the pronunciation of a few students was judged as sounding predominantly British. A small amount of Australian influence was found in the recordings of some of the students.

In this paper, we examine the frequency of phonological units and patterns in two oral corpora of European Portuguese: the corpus TA90PE, containing interviews from different regions of Portugal, and the corpus TQT, containing oral samples collected in Terra Quente Transmontana. The results contribute to determine the scope and limits of frequency variation, showing that the distribution of some of the phonological units and patterns examined is influenced by geographical and social factors, such as education and age. It is suggested that these later aspects, together with other linguistic data, may contribute to draw linguistic profiles in forensic analyses.

As one of the Language system, good pronunciation is really needed to improve in mastering English. A Competent Employee needs English to communicate in a variety of situations with colleagues, clients, and business partners, moreover for someone who works in Logistics industry, whereas a Shipping Agent, a Custom Broker, or a Freight Forwarder. This paper is based on the data which attempt to present how pronunciation practices in the English for Logistics in Speaking Class of Port and Shipping Department of PIP Semarang. It described some methods and activity carried out in the classroom that deal with teaching pronunciation. The research may contribute to make a better understanding about the teaching of speaking class especially pronunciation of teaching English Logistics at PIP Semarang. This paper consists of four parts; Introduction, second is the method, third is finding and discussion, and fourth, conclusion and suggestions. The data was taken from Speaking Activities of English for Logistics i.e. Introduction to Logistics, Logistics Services, and Shipping Goods. The third semester class of Port and Shipping Department students has done these activities, before they do their Land Projects. The finding suggests that it is necessary to consider theoretical knowledge, practical classroom skills, and having access to good ideas for classroom activities.

Les commentaires publiés sur YouTube représentent un espace discursif ouvert et extrêmement diversifié où l'on assiste au déploiement de différents styles de communication en lien avec des appartenances et des répertoires discursifs multiples. Dans cet article, nous tâcherons de montrer que l'authenticité socio-discursive dont cet espace est éminemment investi en fait une excellente ressource pour l'enseignement, dès qu'il s'agit d'initier les apprenants aux différences entre styles formels et informels en français. À cet effet, un parcours méthodologique à trois étapes sera suggéré pour organiser l'exposition des apprenants à cet ordre de variation dit stylistique.

Alveolar flaps are non-contrastive allophonic variants of alveolar stops in American English. A lexical decision experiment was conducted with Japanese learners of English (JE) to investigate whether second-language (L2) learners are sensitive to such allophonic variations when recognizing words in L2. The stimuli consisted of 36 isolated bisyllabic English words containing word-medial /t/, half of which were flapfavored words, e.g. city, and the other half were [t]-favored words, e.g. faster. All stimuli were recorded with two surface forms: /t/ as a flap, e.g. city with a flap, or as [t], e.g. city with [t]. The stimuli were counterbalanced so that participants only heard one of the two surface forms of each word. The accuracy data indicated that flap-favored words pronounced with a flap, e.g. city with a flap, were recognized significantly less accurately than flap-favored words with [t], e.g. city with [t], and [t]-favored words with [t], e.g. faster with [t]. These results suggest that JE learners prefer canonical forms over frequent forms produced with context-dependent allophonic variations. These results are inconsistent with previous studies that found native speakers' preference for frequent forms, and highlight differences in the effect of allophonic variations on the perception of native-language and L2 speech.

Dans le cadre de cet article nous nous proposons d’etudier la realisation des liaisons dans le discours non spontane des apprenants hellenophones du FLE. Nous nous concentrerons principalement sur les apprenants grecs et nous proposerons par la suite une analyse contrastive avec les apprenants chypriotes, qui ont deja ete etudies dans le cadre d’autres publications. Nous analyserons les parametres suivants : le nombre de liaisons, le type de liaison (categorique, variable ou erratique) et le contexte syntaxique de la liaison.

This paper looks at the different hiatus resolution strategies in potential cases of /r/-liaison in nonrhotic English. Potential contexts of /r/-liaison were identified in a corpus of BBC newscasts and analysed auditorily and acoustically for the occurrence of /r/-liaison, glottal stops, creaky voice or hiatus. The results show that /r/-liaison is a common hiatus-breaking strategy although there are significant differences between linking /r/ and intrusive /r/. They also show that glottal hiatusbreaking strategies are common and that creaky voice is more frequent than true glottal stops while hiatus is not very frequent. The discussion focuses on the reason why glottal strategies seem to be gaining ground as opposed to the use of /r/.

In this paper, we examine the frequency of phonological units and patterns in two oral corpora of European Portuguese: the corpus TA90PE, containing interviews from different regions of Portugal, and the corpus TQT, containing oral samples collected in Terra Quente Transmontana. The results contribute to determine the scope and limits of frequency variation, showing that the distribution of some of the phonological units and patterns examined is influenced by geographical and social factors, such as education and age. It is suggested that these later aspects, together with other linguistic data, may contribute to draw linguistic profiles in forensic analyses.

Most Indonesian people master at least two languages, Bahasa Indonesia and mother tongue. Both of them can give impact into the phenomena of language, like code mixing, interference, and etc. Linguistics is divided into two parts those are micro linguistic and macro linguistics. Micro linguistics, the sub-discipline linguistics; consist of phonology and phonetic, morphology, syntax, and semantics. While macro linguistic consists of: psycholinguistic, anthropolinguistics and sociolinguistic. In this research, the writer analyzes about The interference of Bataknese language in spoken English of beginner. The data which are used are primary and secondary sources. The method of data collection are metode simak, and metode simak bebas libat cakap. To analyze the data, the writer uses metode padan and metode agih. The method of data presentation use formal method and informal method. Interference of language is a form of irregularities in the use of language of the norms that exist as a r...

Michaël Abecassis & Gudrun Ledegen présents autant dans des écrits libres que fortement contraints. Par ailleurs, la littéracie universitaire révèlera ses effets particuliers, oscillant entre technolecte et insécurité linguistique. L'article d' Anne-Caroline Fiévet & Alena Podhorná-Polická propose un regard sur les enjeux identitaires des jeunes lors de leur participation aux émissions de libre antenne à la radio. Un corpus de messages (SMS ou site internet de la station) envoyés par les auditeurs à la radio Skyrock est analysé, plus particulièrement sous l'angle de l'appropriation territoriale à travers les dédicaces et les pseudonymes à composante toponymique. Ce corpus datant de 2005, elles questionnent également l'évolution de ces pratiques à l'heure de la convergence numérique et du débat autour de la réforme territoriale. L'article de Gudrun Ledegen et Chantal Lyche qui suit étudie la particule négative ne dans divers français d' Afrique et un français de l'Océan Indien, à savoir le français de La Réunion : en confrontant ces différents terrains africains et le terrain réunionnais par le biais des enquêtes du programme PFC (Phonologie du Français Contemporain) d'une part, et les pratiques innovantes des SMS d'autre part, il tente de cerner les convergences et divergences entre ces différentes variétés de français, et d'étudier les influences possibles du contact linguistique. Les analyses révèlent un maintien élevé pour le terrain africain versus un alignement sur le système du français de référence pour le terrain réunionnais : la vernacularisation, le contact de langue, la prosodie et la phonologie, les modalités de l'oral face à l'écrit, se révèlent des facteurs explicatifs qui viennent, ensemble, éclairer les variations syntaxiques. « Le français : les mots et les structures » est l'objet du deuxième volet. La notion de variation lexicale est devenue d'un usage fréquent. François Gaudin examine sa compatibilité avec la notion d'invariant d'un point de vue linguistique, sociolinguistique et historique, en s'appuyant sur la tradition lexicographique de description du français. Il interroge également son caractère heuristique en croisant des exemples diversifiés, en posant le regard de sociolinguiste au centre de sa problématique. Partir à la recherche des mots de la langue française, comme le fait Jean Pruvost, en reconstituer l'histoire connue en examinant les dictionnaires disponibles, ceux encore irremplaçables sur papier, et ceux offert sur Internet ou sur cédérom, voilà un parcours qui ne va pas sans l'examen des possibilités offertes. Les bonnes et les mauvaises surprises y sont légions, d'où l'intérêt d'une bonne et le drame De rouille et d'os (Jacques Audiard, 2012). L'auteure considère la façon dont ces deux films traitent et représentent le SMS aux niveaux du langage et du vocabulaire du « texto » (surtout les acronymes comme « LOL » inscrit dans le titre du film LOL, et les néologismes comme « opé » dans De rouille et d'os), de la culture, et de la signification. Ainsi, comme l'indique le sous-titre de notre ouvrage, la variation est un fil rouge qui traverse les différentes contributions : observée en partant des productions pour ce qui est de la phonologie (Lyche), de la 10 Chantal Lyche 9 Voir également le substantif euros régulièrement réalisé [z]euros après un chiffre (vingt [z]euros) en français hexagonal. Références

The aim of this study is to improve automatic speech recognition performance when the speech material to be recognised is produced by non-native speakers and therefore prone to a foreign accent. A foreign accent generally causes a drop in recognition performance. In the this study, it is shown that adding modelling units from the native language into the phonetic pronunciation network can largely improve the recognition of non-native speakers without significantly degrading the performance of native speakers. Moreover, when some extra pronunciation variants are also added into the word phonetic transcription network, the recognition improvement becomes even larger. On the different corpora used in this paper, the error rate reduction ranged from 11% to 71%.

This research analyses English pronunciation based on the student speech community. It aims to find which speech sounds that are correctly and not correctly pronounced by student speech community. The design of the research was a case study in the form of qualitative research design with two subjects which were a man from Mee speech community and a woman from Javanese speech community. The subjects were chosen since they had distinctive feature which is ethnic accent and could actively spoke English. In eliciting the data, the recorder and dictionaries such as Cambridge application and Oxford online dictionary were used to record the subject utterance and transcribe it into phonetics symbol. The principle of contrastive analysis was used to analyze the data. As the findings, the speech sounds /ɪ/, /ʌ/, /ɑː/, /ə/, /uː/, /ɜː/, /eɪ/, /aɪ/, /ɔɪ/, /θ/, /ʃ/, /n/, /z/, /r/, /ʤ/, and /f/ were not correctly pronounced by Mee subject. Then, speech sounds /eə/, /əʊ/, /ð/, /ʃ/, /ʒ/, /z/, /ʤ/, /...

Michaël Abecassis & Gudrun Ledegen présents autant dans des écrits libres que fortement contraints. Par ailleurs, la littéracie universitaire révèlera ses effets particuliers, oscillant entre technolecte et insécurité linguistique. L'article d' Anne-Caroline Fiévet & Alena Podhorná-Polická propose un regard sur les enjeux identitaires des jeunes lors de leur participation aux émissions de libre antenne à la radio. Un corpus de messages (SMS ou site internet de la station) envoyés par les auditeurs à la radio Skyrock est analysé, plus particulièrement sous l'angle de l'appropriation territoriale à travers les dédicaces et les pseudonymes à composante toponymique. Ce corpus datant de 2005, elles questionnent également l'évolution de ces pratiques à l'heure de la convergence numérique et du débat autour de la réforme territoriale. L'article de Gudrun Ledegen et Chantal Lyche qui suit étudie la particule négative ne dans divers français d' Afrique et un français de l'Océan Indien, à savoir le français de La Réunion : en confrontant ces différents terrains africains et le terrain réunionnais par le biais des enquêtes du programme PFC (Phonologie du Français Contemporain) d'une part, et les pratiques innovantes des SMS d'autre part, il tente de cerner les convergences et divergences entre ces différentes variétés de français, et d'étudier les influences possibles du contact linguistique. Les analyses révèlent un maintien élevé pour le terrain africain versus un alignement sur le système du français de référence pour le terrain réunionnais : la vernacularisation, le contact de langue, la prosodie et la phonologie, les modalités de l'oral face à l'écrit, se révèlent des facteurs explicatifs qui viennent, ensemble, éclairer les variations syntaxiques. « Le français : les mots et les structures » est l'objet du deuxième volet. La notion de variation lexicale est devenue d'un usage fréquent. François Gaudin examine sa compatibilité avec la notion d'invariant d'un point de vue linguistique, sociolinguistique et historique, en s'appuyant sur la tradition lexicographique de description du français. Il interroge également son caractère heuristique en croisant des exemples diversifiés, en posant le regard de sociolinguiste au centre de sa problématique. Partir à la recherche des mots de la langue française, comme le fait Jean Pruvost, en reconstituer l'histoire connue en examinant les dictionnaires disponibles, ceux encore irremplaçables sur papier, et ceux offert sur Internet ou sur cédérom, voilà un parcours qui ne va pas sans l'examen des possibilités offertes. Les bonnes et les mauvaises surprises y sont légions, d'où l'intérêt d'une bonne et le drame De rouille et d'os (Jacques Audiard, 2012). L'auteure considère la façon dont ces deux films traitent et représentent le SMS aux niveaux du langage et du vocabulaire du « texto » (surtout les acronymes comme « LOL » inscrit dans le titre du film LOL, et les néologismes comme « opé » dans De rouille et d'os), de la culture, et de la signification. Ainsi, comme l'indique le sous-titre de notre ouvrage, la variation est un fil rouge qui traverse les différentes contributions : observée en partant des productions pour ce qui est de la phonologie (Lyche), de la 10 Chantal Lyche 9 Voir également le substantif euros régulièrement réalisé [z]euros après un chiffre (vingt [z]euros) en français hexagonal. Références

selon les termes de la licence Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Résumé : Cet article porte sur la forme de l'interrogative indirecte in situ, une structure vernaculaire qui est partagée dans de multiples zones de la francophonie (Ledegen 2007, 2016), dont la Suisse romande comme il sera montré ici, à partir du corpus OFROM (Avanzi, Béguelin & Diémoz 2012-2019). Nous approfondirons tout particulièrement la comparaison entre l'étude réunionnaise (Ledegen 2007) avec le corpus OFROM, par l'étude des structures indirectes non-standard (verbe introducteur, morphème interrogatif, prédicat), les caractéristiques des locuteurs suisses les employant, et enfin, la prosodie typique de la structure in situ, grâce aux riches données mises à disposition au sein du corpus OFROM.

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Alveolar flaps are non-contrastive allophonic variants of alveolar stops in American English. A lexical decision experiment was conducted with Japanese learners of English (JE) to investigate whether second-language (L2) learners are sensitive to such allophonic variations when recognizing words in L2. The stimuli consisted of 36 isolated bisyllabic English words containing word-medial /t/, half of which were flapfavored words, e.g. city, and the other half were [t]-favored words, e.g. faster. All stimuli were recorded with two surface forms: /t/ as a flap, e.g. city with a flap, or as [t], e.g. city with [t]. The stimuli were counterbalanced so that participants only heard one of the two surface forms of each word. The accuracy data indicated that flap-favored words pronounced with a flap, e.g. city with a flap, were recognized significantly less accurately than flap-favored words with [t], e.g. city with [t], and [t]-favored words with [t], e.g. faster with [t]. These results suggest that JE learners prefer canonical forms over frequent forms produced with context-dependent allophonic variations. These results are inconsistent with previous studies that found native speakers' preference for frequent forms, and highlight differences in the effect of allophonic variations on the perception of native-language and L2 speech.

The acquisition of a foreign phonetic contrast requires the second language (L2) learner to attend to those acoustic dimensions that are informative for the distinction and to manipulate values along those dimensions during production. The discovery of informative dimensions in L2 can be complicated by the contrasts present in the native (L1) language. A well-known example is the difficulty that native Japanese speakers have perceiving or producing the English /l/-/r/ distinction. Here, we attempt to systematically describe this L2 learning task by obtaining distributions of acoustic measures (formant frequencies and durations) from native English productions of word-initial /l/ and /r/. These distributions include inter-speaker (gender), intraspeaker, and phonetic (vowel environment) variance. These results reveal that F3-onset frequency provides almost complete discrimination between the distributions. Distributions of native-Japanese productions of /l/ and /r/ were also collected. The Japanese distributions can be partially separated on F2 and F3 onset frequency. All of these distributions are compared to a distribution of native productions of the Japanese rhotic flap. The flap distribution overlaps the native /r/ and /l/ distributions in F2xF3 space. Further measures of native productions reveal that the flap is contrasted with Japanese /w/ mainly by the onset frequency of F2. Thus, the Japanese productions of /l/ and /r/ appear to be influenced by both the informative variance in L2 distributions (F3) and by the informative variance in distributions of similar L1 categories (F2).

Eighty Japanese learners of English as a foreign language encountered 40 target words in one of four experimental conditions (three encounters, six encounters, three encounters with talker variability, and six encounters with talker variability). A picture-naming test was conducted three times (pretest, immediate posttest, and delayed posttest) and elicited speech samples were scored in terms of form-meaning connection (spoken form recall) and word stress accuracy (stress placement accuracy and vowel duration ratio). Results suggested that frequency of exposure consistently promoted the recall of spoken forms, whereas talker variability was more closely related to the enhancement of word stress accuracy. These findings shed light on how input quantity (frequency) and quality (variability) affect different stages of lexical development and provide implications for vocabulary teaching.

Teaching English in multicultural or in multiethnics situation presents a unique challenge as the question is often raised by English teachers as to which variety of English phonemes or pronunciation should be accurately accepted. Indonesia has approximately 757 languages to be spoken by the same number of their ethnic groups. Multicultural education is a very challenging issue to all aspects of study today, which has no exception in linguistics, where multiethnic students bear a unique perspective in the language repertoire, especially in the aspect of phonology. This paper (from the perspective of socolinguistics) is the result of a case study in teaching English of speaking class to secondary school students in multiethnics classroom where English phonetic transcription used as the data comparison to find phonemic variations among students’ pronunciation. There were twenty students taken as the subject of the study which represented four ethnic groups of Indonesian; Dayak Ngaju, ...

Phonological free variation describes the phenomenon of there being more than one pronunciation for a word without any change in meaning (e.g. because, schedule, vehicle). The term also applies to words that exhibit different stress patterns (e.g. academic, resources, comparable) with no change in meaning or grammatical category. A corpus-based analysis of free variation is a useful tool for testing the validity of surveys of speakers' pronunciation preferences for certain variants. The current paper presents the results of a corpus-based pilot study of American English, in an attempt to replicate Mompéan's 2009 study of British English.

Phonological and Morphological Free Variation in the Dialect of Nice-an Illustration. A project has been launched to make a dialectal dictionary of Nice and its surroundings. As an important amount of data is being gathered from various texts and in the field, the proportion of free variation in the Occitan dialect spoken in the city of Nice appears to be significantly greater than what studies (especially grammars and dictionaries) report. Using a substantial set of examples, this descriptive article shares with the scientific community some important features of phonological and morphological polymorphism in urban Niçois. In the phonological part, it also shows the links that tie together polymorphism and diatopic variation in a relatively homogeneous dialectal area.

This paper looks at the different hiatus resolution strategies in potential cases of /r/-liaison in nonrhotic English. Potential contexts of /r/-liaison were identified in a corpus of BBC newscasts and analysed auditorily and acoustically for the occurrence of /r/-liaison, glottal stops, creaky voice or hiatus. The results show that /r/-liaison is a common hiatus-breaking strategy although there are significant differences between linking /r/ and intrusive /r/. They also show that glottal hiatusbreaking strategies are common and that creaky voice is more frequent than true glottal stops while hiatus is not very frequent. The discussion focuses on the reason why glottal strategies seem to be gaining ground as opposed to the use of /r/.

This article presents the results of an empirical study on the phenomenon of /r/-liaison (i.e., linking /r/ and intrusive /r/) in non-rhotic English from the perspective of usage-based Cognitive Linguistics. The study looks into sociolinguistic, phonetic and usage-based factors that condition variability in /r/-liaison through the analysis of news archives from the BBC World Service website (years 2004 and 2005). The paper argues that a thorough understanding of the phenomenon of /r/-liaison requires an analysis of the di¤erent aspects that condition its use and the use of empirical methods to study it.

Variability in /r/-liaison usage in non-rhotic accents of English has been explained by reference to linguistic, sociolinguistic and phonetic factors. This paper looks at two phonetic factors that might condition such variability: a) the type of vowel phoneme at the end of the syllable likely to make the link; and b) the presence/absence of /r/ at the beginning of that syllable. A corpus of Received Pronunciation (RP) English newscasts from the years 2004 and 2005 available from the BBC Learning English website [16] was investigated. Potential contexts were detected and analysed auditorily. The results show that intrusive /r/ is more frequent after back vowels than after central vowels and that the presence of /r/ in the syllable that would make the /r/-link does not seem to have a great effect on the presence of /r/-link. Keywords: /r/-liaison, linking /r/, intrusive /r/, RP.

The primary goal of this paper is to investigate areal-horizontal as well as the social-vertical (morpho-)syntactic variation of subjunctive II in urban and rural areas in Austria. The data come from two different corpora that consist of spoken data gathered in two different projects on German in Austria, collected using the method of Language Production Experiments. The high degree of comparability of our data between the two studies highlights the success and reliability of this elicitation method. Beyond this methodological insight, the study has found a global tendency towards a decline of synthetic subjunctive II constructions, whereas periphrastic constructions show an increase, both in more dialect and more standard oriented registers. Our findings further suggest that the city of Vienna exerts a minor influence on neighboring locations regarding the use of subjunctive II forms. At the same time, our data provide evidence for a more decisive influence of the dialect region.

A series of arguments is presented showing that words are not stored in memory in a way that resembles the abstract, phonological code used by alphabetical orthographies or by linguistic analysis. Words are stored in a very concrete, detailed auditory code that includes nonlinguistic information including speaker's voice properties and other details. Thus, memory for language resembles an exemplar memory and abstract descriptions (using letter-like units and speaker-invariant features) are probably computed on the fly whenever needed. One consequence of this hypothesis is that the study of phonology should be the study of generalizations across the speech of a community and that such a description will employ units (segments, syllable types, prosodic patterns, etc.) that are not necessarily employed as units in speakers' memory for language. That is, the psychological units of language are not useful for description of linguistic generalizations and linguistic generalizations across a community are not useful for storing the language for speaker use.

The primary goal of this paper is to investigate areal-horizontal as well as the social-vertical (morpho-)syntactic variation of subjunctive II in urban and rural areas in Austria. The data come from two different corpora that consist of spoken data gathered in two different projects on German in Austria, collected using the method of Language Production Experiments. The high degree of comparability of our data between the two studies highlights the success and reliability of this elicitation method. Beyond this methodological insight, the study has found a global tendency towards a decline of synthetic subjunctive II constructions, whereas periphrastic constructions show an increase, both in more dialect and more standard oriented registers. Our findings further suggest that the city of Vienna exerts a minor influence on neighboring locations regarding the use of subjunctive II forms. At the same time, our data provide evidence for a more decisive influence of the dialect region.

ABSTRACTThis article will review the parameters of a grammatical variable within the putative variety ‘Multicultural Paris French’, i.e. its distribution and use within a group of young banlieue speakers. The structure in question stands out as it has rarely been found in previous corpora in France: indirect questions following verbs like savoir, where the question word is post-verb (je sais pas il a dit quoi). We discuss which groups use the new forms in Paris, referring briefly to some comparable changes in London. This structure appears to be an instance of ‘change from below’ (Labov, 2007), which seems to have emerged in the speech of young people of immigrant background. It might also, on the other hand, be a long-standing vernacular variant, which has re-emerged, with specific identity-related significance, in this particular group of speakers. Its exceptional character in the Paris context highlights a lack of evidence for the emergence of a more wide-ranging, distinct multie...

The paper presents the results of analysis of free phonemic variation in word phonemic structures in RP as its striking feature. Alternative pronunciation variants of words are created by vowels, consonants, and a combination of both when in free variation in a segmental composition of words. Free phonemic variation is conditioned by the position / phonetic environment of the alternating phoneme(s) in a word. The positional specification of free phonemic variation and the operation of a number of other factors substantiate the inner systemic character of free phoneme variation in the composition of English words in PR. EFL learners should be aware of existing alternative variants of words and their liability for change in the course of time.

We test both bottom-up and top-down approaches in learning the phonemic status of the sounds of English and Japanese. We used large corpora of spontaneous speech to provide the learner with an input that models both the linguistic properties and statistical regularities of each language. We found both approaches to help discriminate between allophonic and phonemic contrasts with a high degree of accuracy, although top-down cues proved to be effective only on an interesting subset of the data.

We test both bottom-up and top-down approaches in learning the phonemic status of the sounds of English and Japanese. We used large corpora of spontaneous speech to provide the learner with an input that models both the linguistic properties and statistical regularities of each language. We found both approaches to help discriminate between allophonic and non-phonemic contrasts with a high degree of accuracy, although top down cues proved to be effective only under an interesting subset of the data.

The authors argue for the necessity of anchoring authentic materials development in findings from corpus linguistics. In support of their claims, they present evidence from a corpus of Everyday Conversational European French that shows that the pronominal system of the everyday spoken language is drastically different from the typical textbook treatment, which does not take into account the increasingly wide gap between spoken and written French. Although in written French 'we' is still expressed by 'nous' and the generic 'one, you, they' by 'on', in conversation 'we' has come to be expressed by 'on' and the generic 'one, you, they' by 'tu' and 'ils' in addition to 'on'. Textbooks should stop leaving learners stranded in a 'no-speaker's land' if they are to acquire pragmatically appropriate, sociolinguistic competence in spoken French.

Get Ready to Interact! • This will not be a dry, pedantic lecture • If you are here, then you will be invited to participate! • Lock the doors! • Don't leave! • …And get ready for more than you were promised. This talk has evolved beyond just phonetics, for reasons that will soon become clear.

La publication du Francais elementaire en 1954, devenu un peu plus tard Francais fondamental, est a plus d'un titre un evenement marquant de la didactique des langues et de la didactique moderne du francais langue etrangere. C'etait un travail pionnier qui, dans le cadre de l'Ecole Normale Superieure de Saint-Cloud, sous la direction de Georges Gougenheim et de Paul Rivenc, et avec le concours de Rene Michea et d'Aurelien Sauvageot, ouvrait des voies fecondes tant a l'etude de l'oralite qu'a ...

RÉSUMÉCet article défend l'hypothèse que le français (toutes zones géographiques confondues) présente aujourd'hui les propriétés caractérisant la situation diglossique, selon la définition classique de ce concept formulée par Ferguson (1959): la variété H est incarnée par la grammaire standard, et les variétés L par les grammaires appelées ici dialectales, activées par les locuteurs en situation informelle. Dans une optique générative de la grammaire, il est proposé de représenter la compétence linguistique des francophones par deux grammaires en intersection, schéma rendant compte de l'intuition que les deux algorithmes génèrent “la même langue”. L'article s'emploie à justifier pour le français l'hypothèse diglossique et la formalisation proposée, et à en explorer quelques avantages et implications pour la description et l'enseignement de cette langue.

Le contexte est co-construit et reconstruit tout au long de l'échange. Dans cet article, une analyse est faite des modalités dont la variation stylistique fonctionne comme indice de contextualisation dans des situations marquées par divers degrés de formalité, à travers le trait de la jonction propositionnelle. La distinction est soulignée entre formel institutionnel et formel des locuteurs individuels. Il sera démontré que le degré d'intégration par subordination est élevé dans les contextes institutionnels, mais que la formalité chez les locuteurs non professionnels de la parole publique est marquée par d'autres traits linguistiques. Dans cette étude, la jonction propositionnelle s'avère être l'indice d'une variation stylistique qui passe par les registres et qui est inhérente au maltais.