The Structure of Modern Standard French


Book Description

This book is an advanced student's grammar of French that integrates traditional grammar with knowledge and insights from modern linguistics. It assumes some prior knowledge of French grammar but is designed to be accessible to those with no background in linguistics.




The Vocabulary of Modern French


Book Description

In this book, Hilary Wise provides a comprehensive overview of the lexis of contemporary French: its historical sources, formal organisation and social and stylistic functions.The Vocabulary of Modern French provides a fresh insight into contemporary French.With this book, Hilary Wise offers the first comprehensive overview of the modern French vocabulary: its historical sources, formal organization and social and stylistic functions.Topics covered include:*external influences on the language*word formation*semantic change*style and registerIn addition, the author looks at the relationship between social and lexical change and examines attempts at intervention in the development of the language.Each chapter is concluded by notes for further reading, and by suggestions for project work which are designed to increase awareness of specific lexical phenomena and enable the student-reader to use lexicographical databases of all kinds.The Vocabulary of Modern French is an accessible and fascinating study of the relationship between a nation and its language, as well as providing a key text for all students of modern French.




The Structure of Modern Standard French


Book Description

This book is an advanced student's grammar of French that integrates traditional grammar with knowledge and insights from modern linguistics. Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen takes a structural approach to French grammar: she provides clear descriptions of grammatical rules based explicitly on syntactic structure, and places descriptive emphasis on instances where the grammatical structures of French differ from those used in corresponding contexts in English. The first part of the book provides an introduction to French sentence structure, before the following parts examine the grammar of verbs, nominals, particles, and clauses and sentences. The Structure of Modern Standard French will be a valuable resource for students of French at undergraduate level and beyond. It assumes some prior knowledge of French grammar but is designed to be accessible to those with no background in linguistics.




The Structure(s) of French


Book Description




The Oxford Handbook of the French Language


Book Description

This volume provides the first comprehensive reference work in English on the French language in all its facets. It offers a wide-ranging approach to the rich, varied, and exciting research across multiple subfields, with seven broad thematic sections covering the structures of French; the history of French; axes of variation; French around the world; French in contact with other languages; second language acquisition; and French in literature, culture, arts, and the media. Each chapter presents the state of the art and directs readers to canonical studies and essential works, while also exploring cutting-edge research and outlining future directions. The Oxford Handbook of the French Language serves both as a reference work for people who are curious to know more about the French language and as a starting point for those carrying out new research on the language and its many varieties. It will appeal to undergraduate and graduate students as well as established scholars, whether they are specialists in French linguistics or researchers in a related field looking to learn more about the language. The diversity of frameworks, approaches, and scholars in the volume demonstrates above all the variety, vitality, and vibrancy of work on the French language today.




Topic, Antitopic, and Verb Agreement in Non-standard French


Book Description

The author describes and explains the syntactic and pragmatic properties of the nominal and pronominal elements in sentences of the types Ces Romains ils sont fous and Ils sont fous, ces Romains, which, in spite of their frequent occurrence, have so far received little attention among linguists and grammarians. He argues that far from having the marginal status of a linguistic anomaly, the cooccurrence in the same clause of coreferential nouns and pronouns is one formal manifestation of an important functional principle in modern French: the encoding of a topic-comment relationship in the surface structure of the sentence. The pronouns in sentences such as the ones mentioned are interpreted as agreement markers. The syntactic and semantic differences between topics and anti-topics are analyzed.




Français Interactif


Book Description

This textbook includes all 13 chapters of Français interactif. It accompanies www.laits.utexas.edu/fi, the web-based French program developed and in use at the University of Texas since 2004, and its companion site, Tex's French Grammar (2000) www.laits.utexas.edu/tex/ Français interactif is an open acess site, a free and open multimedia resources, which requires neither password nor fees. Français interactif has been funded and created by Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services at the University of Texas, and is currently supported by COERLL, the Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning UT-Austin, and the U.S. Department of Education Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education (FIPSE Grant P116B070251) as an example of the open access initiative.




English-French Translation


Book Description

English-French Translation: A Practical Manual allows advanced learners of French to develop their translation and writing skills. This book provides a deeper understanding of French grammatical structures, the nuances of different styles and registers and helps increase knowledge of vocabulary and idiomatic language. The manual provides a wealth of practical tasks based around carefully selected extracts from the diverse text types students are likely to encounter, from literary and expository, to persuasive and journalistic. A mix of shorter targeted activities and lengthier translation pieces guides learners through the complexities and challenges of translation from English into French. This comprehensive manual is ideal for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students in French language and translation.




On Spoken French


Book Description

This scholarly edition invites us to reconsider our assumptions about the French language, by showcasing the oeuvre of one of the pioneers of diachronic Spoken French corpus linguistics, William J. Ashby, and the ground-breaking findings to come out of his influential Tours corpora (1976 & 1995), including two real-time studies appearing for the first time in English translation. To help readers visualize just how radically different the morphosyntax, morphophonology, and semantics of Spoken French are from French-on-the-page, the editor has developed a glossing framework, designed to capture the systemic, radically-prefixal morphology of Spoken French and the variability of change-in-progress. The model, presented here and used to gloss the examples from the Tours corpus, is also suitable for corpus-tagging. The volume is organized into sections preceded by an Editor’s note and followed by suggestions for further reading, and closes with an appendix of French corpora. This scholarly edition was written for advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and scholars in the field.




Syntactic Change in French


Book Description

This book provides the most comprehensive and detailed formal account to date of the evolution of French syntax. It makes use of the latest formal syntactic tools and combines careful textual analysis with a detailed synthesis of the research literature to provide a novel analysis of the major syntactic developments in the history of French. The empirical scope of the volume is exceptionally broad, and includes discussion of syntactic variation and change in Latin, Old, Middle, Renaissance, and Classical French, and standard and non-standard varieties of Modern French. Following an introduction to the general trends in grammatical change from Latin to French, Sam Wolfe explores a wide range of phenomena including the left periphery, subject positions and null subjects, verb movement, object placement, negation, and the makeup of the nominal expression. The book concludes with a comparative analysis of how French has come to develop the unique typological profile it has within Romance today. The volume will thus be an indispensable tool for researchers and students in French and comparative Romance linguistics, as well as for readers interested in grammatical theory and historical linguistics more broadly.