This article examines the sources for reconstructing Jesuit finances in China. While there are a multitude of anecdotal references in Jesuit letters and reports, only four in-depth accounting documents have survived. One of those four documents is “Les Biens de la Maison Française de Pékin en 1776–1778.” After 1773, both ecclesiastical and state agents took an interest in the Jesuit possessions. While multiple rulers had provided the funding to start up these missions, the fact that their keepers were no longer able to secure these substantial possessions explains why the account books and further documentation were painstakingly tracked down. When compared to other accounting sources, “Les Biens de la Maison Française” indicates that the local investments and revenue from these properties were the most important sources of income by the end of the eighteenth century. In combination with references to these properties in Jesuit letters, this particular set of accounting sources illustrates a central trend in Jesuit finances in the China missions: They became an increasingly regional and local affair after the Jesuits failed to secure sustainable global funding, transported from Europe to Asia along ever-changing, yet continuously insecure, networks.

The present study explores the perceptual similarity space of Serbian lexical pitch accents as perceived by speakers of a lexical pitch accent language (native Serbian speakers) and speakers of a language with no lexical prosodic contrast (French speakers). Some 40 Serbian and 60 French speakers carried out an online free classification task which required them to listen to nonwords and position digital icons representing them in proximity to each other based on their similarity. Given that Serbian is a pitch-accent language, each nonword carried a lexical pitch accent type patterned according to Serbian word-level prosodic rules. The accent types therefore consisted of a combination of length (long, short) and pitch (rising, falling). To interpret the results, we applied multidimensional scaling (MDS) and clustering analyses, which revealed length as a clear dimension of the perceptual salience of lexical pitch accent, while pitch movement distinctions varied.

We present a study in model comparison and model selection to explore cartographic theoretical proposals and test their generalization ability. Specifically, we test whether an asymmetry arises between stages of French with respect to the merge nature of topicalized elements, as proposed in Wolfe (2022). We explore quantitative and simple computational methods to test the model’s predictions compared to a series of control group models. In particular, we evaluate predictions with respect to intervention locality effects. We explore seven treebanks, representing three stages of French (Old French, Middle French, and contemporary French). Our results partially confirm Wolfe’s (2022) proposal. Additionally, two key elements emerge: one concerning the type of locality involved in movement, and the other relating to a cartographic approach to the syntax of genres/registers.

This study investigates evidential meanings, referring to the information sources available to the speaker (i.e., direct witnessing, report, or inference), expressed through syntactic and lexical strategies in French. Across three experimental studies, we examined French subordinate structures, including complement, relative, pseudo-relative, and infinitive ECM clauses, that encompass perception or reporting verbs. We used witness rating, information source identification, and discourse completion tasks administered to a total of 221 French speakers. The results show that (i) infinitive ECM clauses are unambiguously associated with direct witnessing; (ii) pseudo-relative and relative clauses with voir are, though less strongly than infinitive, associated with direct witnessing; (iii) although still being sometimes used in reference to direct witnessing, complement clauses with voir are primarily suitable in inferential contexts based on resultant states; and finally (iv) complement clauses of dire are associated with reported sources. Our results show that indirect evidentiality is marked by complement clauses only, whereas direct evidentiality distributes over infinitive ECM, pseudo-relative and relative clauses with no significant difference between the two types of relatives. We conclude that indirect evidentiality in French is syntactically associated with one type of subordinate structure, whereas direct evidentiality is not.

Cette contribution examine la production des voyelles nasales du français chez les apprenants néerlandophones belges. Elle innove en ce qu’elle allie l'« intelligibilité » des voyelles non natives, évaluée par des auditeurs représentant Paris et Liège, à une analyse acoustique centrée sur la « nativité phonétique ». Les stimuli sont des mots monosyllabiques de haute fréquence produits par 20 apprenants néerlandophones. Les résultats indiquent que l’intelligibilité des nasales non natives est plutôt élevée, exception faite de /ɑ̃/. En outre, les deux groupes d’auditeurs ne diffèrent pas dans leur compréhension des voyelles, à l’exception de /ε̃/, que les Liégeois identifient plus souvent. Cette différence peut être liée à l’impact de (i) la variation en L1 ou (ii) la familiarité des auditeurs belges avec la parole néerlandaise. Enfin, l’étude montre que ce n’est pas tant la nasalité même qui pose des difficultés de production aux apprenants néerlandophones, mais l’interaction avec le timbre vocalique.

The effect of sound change and analogy upon inflectional paradigms has been traditionally described through Sturtevant’s Paradox, which states that sound change is regular but generates irregularity, whereas analogy is irregular but generates regularity. While past work has explored trends in sound change and analogy qualitatively, quantitative investigation with large data sets remains underexploited. We tackle this by exploring the effects of sound change and analogy from Latin to French in large etymologically paired inflected lexicons containing the complete paradigms of 310 verbs with 11,593 total forms. We employ a novel method combining the automated application of historical sound changes and entropy-based quantitative analysis to examine separately the effects of sound change and analogy. The results confirm the role of some oft-cited predictors of analogy like token frequency and morphological regularity, but offer no support for others like markedness. Results also confirm the complexifying role of sound change, and the simplifying role of analogy, on aspects of morphological complexity like the number of inflection classes and the amount of allomorphy, but suggest that these forces have no comparable effect on more modern measures of complexity like average conditional entropies between inflected forms.

In this article, the forms and role of compliments in French are analysed to identify preferred behaviours in two types of discourse. Forty-five instances of compliments were extracted from everyday interactions and 83 instances from television programmes (talk-shows and talent shows). The linguistic-discursive approach used provides the key to understanding these corpora, revealing processes specific to each genre. In everyday interaction, the use of situational deictics, onomatopoeia, dislocated forms, elliptical structures or the intensifier ‘too’ in its high degree value is favoured, whereas in television programmes, it is rather the high degree of axiological praise, the repetition or successive use of adverbs, or the amplification of paraverbal and extraverbal signals (emphatic intonation or detachment of syllables in certain key terms) are preferred. It shows that ordinary interactions give priority to situational anchoring and a certain spontaneity, whereas television programmes tend to intensify the expression of compliments to capture the audience’s attention by turning exchanges into a spectacle.

This paper presents a corpus-based investigation of Latin volo ‘to want’, arguing that it exhibits previously overlooked reportative uses from at least the 1st century BCE, whereby speakers attribute beliefs, opinions, or statements to an external source. Focusing on third-person present-tense forms (vult, volunt) across a corpus spanning from the 3rd century BCE to the 2nd century CE, the study analyses the semantic, pragmatic, and morphosyntactic properties of these constructions, as well as their diachronic development. Reportative volo is shown to emerge from ambiguous contexts where volition and doxastic stance overlap – especially in small-clause constructions with subject coreferentiality or passive infinitives of verbs of opinion. Diachronically, it is proposed that the doxastic component – implicit in volitional uses and anchored in the volitional subject – becomes explicit, when the anchoring of an external doxastic source shifts from outside (i.e. the opinion of others) to the volitional subject, who is then reinterpreted as an evidential source. Comparisons with German wollen (and to a lesser extent with French vouloir) contextualise this development within a broader grammaticalisation path from volition to evidentiality. While wollen is already grammaticalised as a reportative marker, Latin volo offers novel diachronic and structurally distinct evidence for this cross-linguistic trajectory.

Over the last few decades, linguistic gender-fair forms have become increasingly used by individuals and official institutions. In the French-speaking sphere, this has led to heated discussions among politicians and other stakeholders, some of whom claim that these forms render texts illegible and inaccessible to the general public. However, the processing of gender-fair forms in reading has been the topic of a few empirical studies. In the present paper, we add to this small body of research by reporting results from a pre-registered eye-tracking study where 58 native French-speakers read short texts which included a masculine form (voisins), complete double form (voisines et voisins), or contracted double form (voisin·es). Consistent with previous findings, the complete double forms were not more costly to process. In contrast, contracted double forms led to increased processing costs in intermediate and late stages of processing, but had no effect on the early stages of processing. Our data also indicate that the processing of contracted double forms becomes easier over time, and that it is facilitated by positive attitudes towards gender-fair language. These findings provide important insights that enlighten the current debate and should therefore be considered in the elaboration of official guidelines regarding gender-fair language.

In French, the members of a subclass of anticausative verbs are optionally marked with the clitic se, traditionally considered to be a reflexive marker. We show that this optionality is not a case of free variation. Rather, the presence or absence of se is influenced by lexical-pragmatic considerations: while by default, both variants are equally acceptable, in the context of a human subject, cooperative speakers strongly prefer the variant that in certain cases avoids and in other cases maintains ambiguity with the semantically reflexive interpretation that arises in parallel with the intended (anticausative) interpretation. Understanding these preferences requires taking into account the agent bias—that is, the tendency to interpret human nouns in subject position as agents whenever possible—and the multifunctionality of se, which is used to form both (nonagentive) anticausative predicates and (agentive) semantically reflexive ones. The preference for the presence vs. absence of se is predicted based on whether the alternative reflexive interpretation is in line with shared assumptions about the event. The interaction between the choice of form by the cooperative language user and individual verb subclasses is an example of what we call lexical-pragmatic effects.

The status of subject clitics in French has been heavily debated (Kayne 1975, Rizzi 1986, Roberge 1990, Auger 1994b, Miller & Sag 1997, De Cat 2007b, and many others). Distributional properties of French subject clitics have led Kayne (1975), Rizzi (1986), and others to analyze them as argument-bearing elements occupying canonical subject position, cliticizing to the verb only at the level of the phonology. While this hypothesis enjoys a wide following, a growing body of evidence suggests that it fails to capture patterns of subject-clitic use in colloquial French dialects/registers (Roberge 1990, Auger 1994b, Zribi-Hertz 1994, Miller & Sag 1997). Using new evidence from prosodic and corpus analyses, speaker judgments, and crosslinguistic typology, this article argues that (i) European Colloquial French exhibits differences from Standard French that impact how subject clitics are best analyzed, and more specifically (ii) subject clitics in European Colloquial French are affixal agreement markers, not phonological clitic arguments.

Because many of the forms participating in inherent variability are not attested in the standard language, they are often construed as evidence of change. We test this assumption by confronting the standard, as instantiated by a unique corpus covering five centuries of French grammatical injunctions, with data on the evolution of spontaneous speech over an apparent-time span of 119 years.

Reasoning that forms salient enough to have attracted the attention of grammarians were likely widespread in the speech of the time, we demonstrate how these materials may be used to (i) infer the existence of prior variability, (ii) trace the evolution of normative dictates associated with the variants, and most revealing, (iii) discern hints of prior linguistic conditioning of variant selection. These are then operationalized as factors in a multivariate analysis and tested against the facts of usage.

The linguistic focus is on future temporal reference, a notoriously variable sector of the grammar in which competing exponents have persisted for centuries. Systematic comparison of grammatical treatments with actual speaker behavior shows virtually no correspondence between the motivations offered in the literature and those constraining actual variant choice. Prescriptive efforts to explain variability, by ascribing to each variant form a dedicated reading or context of use, have had no effect on speech, which is shown to be governed by a powerful set of tacit variable constraints. These in turn are unacknowledged by the grammatical tradition. The result is a great and growing disconnect between the variable rules governing speech and the normative dictates that underlie the notion of the standard. We explore the implications of these findings for the use of grammarians' observations as data for linguistic analysis.

This study proposes a new qualitative method in historical pragmatics to extract politeness formulae for master-servant directives from nineteenth-century French advice literature. Whereas traditional politeness models study strategic face-saving, this study investigates non-strategic, routinized or conventionalized politeness by mapping explicit linguistic instructions in historical prescriptive metasources. Because etiquette and conduct books targeted middle-class households – typically defined as having at least one live-in servant – they routinely discussed interactions with servants. The self-built corpus comprises 43 sources: etiquette and conduct manuals, alongside servant manuals. Through close reading I manually extract politeness formulae, which are compiled into a formulary. Historians underline servants’ harsh conditions and social erasure, typically mirrored by bare imperatives. Advice on a kind prosody is widespread, but politeness formulae (e.g. voulez-vous? – je vous prie) only emerge in the 1870s, when the crisis of domestic service begins. This shift suggests that domestic service was increasingly viewed in transactional rather than purely hierarchical terms. Despite these changes, master-servant, servant-master and peer directives remain rigidly compartmentalized. The article addresses a notable gap in French historical im/politeness studies by showing how politeness formulae in prescriptive discourse reveal the persistence of caste-like social structures in nineteenth-century French domestic service.

High-vowel laxing in Laurentian French is notoriously variable and complex: while high-vowel tenseness is categorically predictable in final syllables, speakers seemingly apply distinct combinations of optional processes in non-final syllables (see, e.g., Dumas 1987 and Poliquin 2006). The current study investigates laxing in non-final syllables with two core objectives: (a) to determine which grammars individual speakers have acquired, and (b) to elucidate whether subgroups within the community have distinct grammars as suggested by Poliquin or instead these subgroups are superficial categorisations (e.g., emerging from a shared community with wide distributions of possible weightings for constraints). The results reveal that a larger number of superficially distinct individual grammars emerge than were proposed in existing literature, but that these patterns fall on a spectrum centred on a shared community grammar. They also provide new evidence for the importance of prosody in conditioning phonological processes in this variety of French.

In the analysis of free variation in phonology, we often encounter the effects of INTERSECTING CONSTRAINT FAMILIES: there are two independent families of constraints, each of which has a quantifiable effect on the outcome. A challenge for theories is to account for the patterns that emerge from such intersection. We address three cases: Tagalog nasal substitution, French liaison/elision, and Hungarian vowel harmony, using corpus data. We characterize the patterns we find as across-the-board effects in both dimensions, restrained by floor and ceiling limits. We analyze these patterns using several formal frameworks, and find that an accurate account is best based on HARMONIC GRAMMAR (in one of its two primary quantitative implementations). Our work also suggests that certain lexical distinctions treated as discrete by classical phonological theory (e.g. ‘h-aspiré’ vs. ordinary vowel-initial words of French) are in fact gradient and require quantitative treatment.