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Henning Nølke : « The linguistic dilution of responsibilities. A polyphonic description of the evidential markers il semble que and il parait que » Assertion guarantees truth based on evidence available to the speaker. The speaker may indicate the source and type of his evidence. This paper deals with the two French evidentials il semble que and il paraît que. Both indicate hearsay evidence and are equivalent to the English evidential it seems that. Although very similar at first glance, closer analysis reveals important, though often rather subtle differences as to the type of evidence. A polyphonic study permits a detailed explication of their functioning, and may explain observable distributional differences.

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Henning Nølke : Where to place the attributive adjective in French ? Focalisation and modularity More than 450 years of research have shown that the placement of the French attributive adjective — before or after its substantive — is governed by a huge number of apparently disparate factors. This paper argues that a cogent theory of focalisation can explain a large scale of facts which hitherto been regarded as non-related. Conceived of as a component of a linguistic modular model, focalisation theory may thus contribute to yielding valuable new insight into the complex mechanisms underlying word order even at the phrase level.

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