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A descriptive study to be undertaken on the effects of contact between English and Quebec French in the French-speaking community of Welland in Ontario is also presented as a study of the "Ontarianization" of Canadian French. The first chapter summarizes previous studies of Ontario French and poses some of the salient research questions about the evolution of this and other minority languages. The second chapter presents a sociohistory and a sociolinguistic profile of the Welland French-speaking community, focusing on its establishment, its battle for the survival of its language and culture, and the characteristics of the community that relate to the varieties of French spoken there. The third chapter describes the language corpus used for the study, and the final chapter outlines the research to be undertaken. The interview questions to be used with adults and adolescents are appended. (MSE)

Three studies are presented, each of which is a comparison of the acquisition of an aspect of the French verb system by three groups of speakers. The speakers are: young Anglophones learning French as a second language in an early French immersion program in Montreal; young monolingual Francophones attending elementary French language schools in Quebec; and young bilingual Francophones enrolled in elementary French language schools in Ontario. The three aspects of the French verb system under study are the syntax of the bare (i.e., prepositionless) infinitival complement of motion verbs, the morphology of the pronominal verbs (i.e., reflexive pronoun plus verb), and the morphology of the past participles (i.e., stem plus affix). Each study presents and attempts to explain the language acquisition errors committed by the three speaker groups as well as the differences in the language acquisition stages reached by the three speaker groups. (Author/MSE)