Contenu du sommaire : La variation en syntaxe, sous la direction de Françoise Gadet

La variation, plus qu'une écume This paper tries to establish what "syntactic variation" means, first by opposing it to "phonological variation", then by exploring some phenomena of spoken French usually regarded as being syntactic variation, and finally by asking two questions: 1) can we have, on the syntactic level, "two ways of saying the same thing" ?, and 2) is the sociolinguistic involvement going to be of the same nature ?

La notion de variation syntaxique dans la langue parlée A central topic for sociolinguistic research during the seventies and the eighties, the notion of syntactic variation was linked with discussions about the existence of pure syntactic synonyms. The discussion is now carried on, on a larger scale, within the framework of large linguistic corpora.

La portée de la variabilité On the basis of two diverse analyses of essentially the same change (the loss of sibi reflexives) in French and Spanish, it is argued that the usual approach to syntactic variation is misguided, and should give way to a cognitive motivation of frequency distributions.

Une interprétation diachronique de la "dislocation à droite" dans les langues romanes This paper claims that Right Dislocation (RD), as documented in Romance Languages, is not a movement phenomenon, but the result of associated processes: a change of sentence boundaries by reanalysis, and a change in pragmatic function of the constituents involved. As a consequence, RD starts by being a means for focussing a nominal 'dislocated' constituent, and ends by working as a tool for focussing the verb constituent, so changing variationally its nature, from marked to unmarked structure.

Les causatives en français, un cas de compétition syntaxique Causative structures in French belong to two different types in syntactic variation. They differ by their semantic inferences, with respect to the realization of the causee, the possibility of negating the infinitival V complement, and of being the complement of a "facile" adjective. The structures are formalized in HPSG. The variation hypothesis explains the variability of acceptabilities which characterize VP complementation.

Pléonasmes syntaxiques : dédoublement ou hybridation ? This paper considers a kind of syntactic variants which contrasts with certain standard constructions by containing a pleonasm (= two occurrences of the same argument). It is shown that these structures cannot be properly described by a doubling operation. We must suppose a "hybridation" process that mixes two non-pleonastic variants.

L'approche variationniste et la description de la grammaire du français. Le cas des interrogatives This article presents the case for the sociolinguistic (variationist) analysis of variable areas of grammar, such as French interrogatives. This type of analysis can reveal not only the social and stylistic distribution, but also the linguistic and pragmatic constraints. The problem of equivalence is addressed in this article, and a set of defining criteria for such variables is proposed.

Stratégies référentielles et variation Anaphoric phenomena are considered here as sites of variation. It is shown which types of factors influence speakers' choices, when several expressions are suitable, in a given context, to realize the same act of reference. The atypical uses of third person free pronouns are examined from this point of view: they result from strategic compromises operated by speakers in situations where constraints are in conflict.

Variation et changement, quelles corrélations? We examine the relations between linguistic variation and change. Analyzing the evolution of demonstratives in French, we consider more particularly two questions: a) the conditions of emergence of variation, in synchrony, and b) the conditions in which a certain variation is selected as an element of change, in diachrony.