Cinque's functional verbs in French

This article focuses on the syntax of a number of subcategories of verb in French which are compatible with a following bare infinitive and which express various kinds of grammatical tense, mood, modality, aspect and voice, as well as such (more lexical?) notions as perception, causation and locomotion. The article starts by cataloguing a number of properties that these verbs display, and outlines various traditional accounts. It then sketches recent proposals by Cinque (1999, 2006a) [Cinque, Guglielmo, 1999. Adverbs and Functional Heads: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective. Oxford University Press; Cinque, Guglielmo, 2006a. Restructuring and Functional Heads. Oxford University Press] regarding functional clause structure. Finally, the article uses Cinque’s framework to account for the properties identified

Syntactic variation and diglossia in French

The present article addresses syntactic variation within French, and is an example of a relatively recent shift in attitude towards variation in this language. It considers the status of the variation with respect to the mental grammars of speakers, in particular in the light of Massot’s work suggesting that contemporary metropolitan France is characterised by diglossia, that is, a community of speakers with two (in this case massively overlapping but not entirely identical) ‘French’ grammars which co-exist in their minds, one stylistically marked High, the other Low. The article reviews one particular instance of variation and argues that Massot’s model needs to be revised in order to account for the particular phenomenon of surface forms which can be generated by both putative grammars but which have a different linguistic status in each