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In Spoken Continental French, the subject clitic il can in some cases be dropped – for example in certain impersonal construction (e.g. faut que ‘is necessary that’). This phenomenon is of particular interest in the context of claims that this variety of French is in fact a null subject language, with subject clitics acting as agreement affixes rather than true arguments (e.g. Roberge, 1990; Auger, 1994; Culbertson, 2010, among others). Under this view, the il in impersonals (and other constructions with less than fully referential subjects) is likewise an agreement marker, which can be dropped under some circumstances. Here we report the results of a controlled acceptability judgement task designed to probe features which affect the availability of il-drop. Our findings suggest that verb frequency, subcategorisation by the verb for a quasi-argument vs. true expletive, and modal vs. non-modal status influence il-drop. We discuss implications of this variation for an analysis of subject clitics as agreement affixes in Spoken French. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THIS STUDY investigates how speakers of Educated Yoruba English (EYE) produce the vowels in typically unstressed syllables of English words whose suffixes require a shift of stress and a consequent reduction of vowels, as in atómic from átom and dramátic from dráma. Twenty suffixed English words were read by one hundred Yoruba subjects, with a Briton who studied at the University of London serving as the control. The focus is on Yoruba English because of both its many speakers and the need for a ‘geo-tribal’ approach to defining the concept Nigerian English. The data was analysed by converting tokens of occurrence to percentages, the higher percentages being taken as the norm. The acoustic analysis was done in a computerized speech laboratory. The study establishes that vowels occurring in typically unstressed syllables in traditional Standard English remain strong and full in educated Yoruba English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various articles within the issue on topics including English translation of a public sign in China; differences between two native-speaker models and Vietnam War American slang; and English prefix de.