Although virtually all Inuit children in eastern Arctic Canada learn Inuktitut as their native language, there is a critical lack of tools to assess their level of language ability. This article investigates how mean length of utterance (MLU), a widely-used assessment measure in English and other languages, can be best applied in Inuktitut. The…

French gender marking errors made by 23 Anglophones and 20 Lusophones are analyzed. The observation is made that the errors noted are due to frequent arbitrariness of this particular aspect of the language. It is concluded that the arbitrary portions of this feature of the language are subject to remaining indeterminate in second language…

Analyzes two variants of subject doubling in Ontario French: a non-doubled variant and a doubled variant containing a clitic agreement marker. It is proposed that the doubled variant is favored when the clitic's default features match those of the subject NP (noun phrase), while lack of matching favors the non-doubled variant.(Author/JL)

This study focuses on the use of modes that are dependent on impersonal structures found in the French spoken in Quebec. Six impersonal structures are identified as causing modal variation in the subordinate. This variation is constrained mainly by linguistic factors. Social factors also influence the variation, but the amount of influence exerted…

It is argued that anglicisms in Canadian French cover a much broader spectrum than in any European variety of French, with traits of the English language incorporated into spelling, pronunciation, morphology, syntax, lexicon, and phraseology. A typology of these features is proposed, with examples. (Author/MSE)

Using variationist methodology, this study analyzed natural speech data from 31 speakers of standard Canadian English and found an overwhelming preference for singular agreement in existentials. Contrary to predictions, this was not linked to a determiner-based structural distinction but rather to the form of the copula and the speaker's level of…

Salient lexical, phonetic, and morphological peculiarities of the vernacular French of Quebec are examined and explained, and similarities to European popular French are discussed, both as a guide to texts written in the vernacular and to place this variety in its sociolinguistic context. (Author/MSE)

The language of 29 Canadian children was sampled during the first two years of schooling in free conversations and in more formal school-like tasks as part of a three-year longitudinal study of the properties of oral language and their relation to other measures of cognitive, linguistic, and reading performance. The language samples were subjected…

A study was conducted of the Baie Sainte-Marie Acadian dialect, a particular form of the French language derived from the French spoken in France during the 16th and 17th centuries. The purpose of this study was to analyze and explain a certain number of morphosyntactic deviations from standard French, from both a synchronic and a diachronic…

Examines the quantitative conditioning of English lone nouns of one language used in discourse in Ukrainian in a Canadian setting. Results yield a synchronic portrait of the integrated loanword, even when it bears no surface indication of that integration, is neither recurrent nor widespread, and has no history of attestation or other status in…

This guide provides an extensive but not conclusive list of points of transfer and interference between the French and English languages. It is designed to help English language arts teachers of Francophone students understand that French language skills can be usefully transferred to English. Apart from a brief introduction, this document…

English translations of articles in French in this issue include these: "Discourse Reported in the Print Media"; "Comparison of Register in Quebec and French Speakers"; "Method of Description of Specialized Verbs in View of Machine Translation Applications"; "Dialectal Areas in the Brazilian State of Rio Grande…