This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the French language from the perspective of modern linguistics. Placing French within its social and historical context, the authors highlight the complex, diverse aspects of the language in a lively and accessible way. A variety of topics is covered, including the distribution of French in the world, the historical development of standard French, the sound system of French, its sentence patterns, and its stylistic and geographical variations.
Fully updated and revised, this new edition places a greater emphasis on sociolinguistics. To make the book more user-friendly, the following new features have been added:
* a further reading guide at the end of each chapter
* a glossary of linguistic terms
* an expanded bibliography and index.

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the French language from the perspective of modern linguistics. Placing French within its social and historical context, the authors highlight the complex, diverse aspects of the language in a lively and accessible way. A variety of topics is covered, including the distribution of French in the world, the historical development of standard French, the sound system of French, its sentence patterns, and its stylistic and geographical variations.
Fully updated and revised, this new edition places a greater emphasis on sociolinguistics. To make the book more user-friendly, the following new features have been added:
* a further reading guide at the end of each chapter
* a glossary of linguistic terms
* an expanded bibliography and index.

The principles-and-parameters approach to linguistic theory has triggered an enormous amount of work in comparative syntax over the last decade or so. A natural consequence of the growth in synchronic comparative work has been a renewed interest in questions of diachronic syntax, and this collection testifies to that trend. These papers focus on questions of clause structure which have become a central theme of theoretical work since the pioneering work in the late 1980s by Chomsky, Pollock, and others. The languages studied by an international roster of contributors include all the major Romance and Germanic languages. This volume should appeal not only to scholars of historical syntax, but also to those interested in language change, syntactic variation and language variation as well.

This is a collection of previously unpublished papers on a specific topic in historical linguistics - clause structure, an issue of central importance since the pioneering work in the late 1980s by Chomsky and Pollock. The collection testifies to the recent renewal of interest in questions of diachronic syntax, a consequence of the new emphasis on comparative issues in the principles and parameters framework. Languages studied in this volume include all the major Romance and Germanic languages.