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SummaryThe search for a unified principle to account, from an economic point of view, for the presence of the state, imposes a compromise between the necessary simplifications of a theoretical framework and the operational and comparative requirements of empirical work. With a complex object, uncertainty and ignorance are the rule, and they impose a specific heuristic strategy. The problem must be constructed methodically so that, in a further stage, it becomes possible to delimitate the space of relevance, necessarily local, of the framework. The Complex Integrated Relational State approach (ERIC) and the concept of Mode of Public Presence in the Economy (MPPE) proposed in this article offer a first answer to the vast programme opened by tins perspective.

This study examines the processing of agreement in continuous speech by English-speaking late learners of French as a second/foreign language (L2). It aims to tease apart three theories that attempt to explain why the processing of inflectional morphology is difficult for late L2 learners. Native English speakers who began learning French towards the age of twelve and native French speakers completed an auditory acceptability judgment task in French in which subject-verb agreement dependencies were either short (adjacent positions) or long (non-adjacent positions). Participants also completed a series of tests that could serve as individual variability measures: a French proficiency test (cloze test), two working memory tests (one in each of French and English), a word-familiarity questionnaire targeting the verbs used in the acceptability judgment task, and two language aptitude tests not specific to French or English (phonological memory and grammatical deduction). The results of the acceptability judgment task show lower sensitivity to agreement in L2 learners than in native speakers, and an effect of distance between the subject and the verb only in L2 learners. Regression analyses reveal that proficiency in French and phonological memory explain some of the variance in the acceptability judgments. We discuss the implications of these findings in relation to the three theories that attempt to explain the lack of sensitivity to agreement in late L2 learners.

Keywords: français langue seconde/étrangère, accord sujet-verbe, parole continue, variabilité individuelle, mémoire de travail, French as a second/foreign language, subject-verb agreement, continuous speech, individual variability, working memory, francés lengua segunda/extranjera, concordancia sujeto-verbo, habla continua, variabilidad individual, memoria de trabajo

The following text may be read in itself ; but it could have been the last chapter of La théorie de la perception I wrote in 2000, or an appendix of this book. I intend to show the relation and the bond between the authority of perceptions and the authority which enters political communications and became sheer violence during the Second World War. Perception displays symbolic elements which, gathered in a set, acts as its screen : in this way, Lacan reaches the truth of La phénoménologie de la perception's author, and Merleau-Ponty ceased his analysis too soon. Instead of speaking of the things of the world as a sort of absolute screen for our perception, he should have pointed out a web of language with the same function. If he has reached up to this point, he would have both better stabilized his discourse on perception and less missed the junction with politics he expected to aim. Marxism, indeed, was probably, among political philosophies, the most subversive of the author's design and the most incompatible with Merleau-Ponty's reflexion about perception. Nevertheless, Merleau-Ponty's philosophy has opened up fields and roads which might still be laboured at to-day.

Education is a core resource in the new knowledge economies of the 21st century, and the concept of choice of school is examined here in the context of rebuilding the State. School choice is shown to be structured by public policy instruments such as the rankings of school performance on standardized tests. In the first part of the paper, a review of the literature deconstructs this concept by investigating in greater detail what choice means, who is doing the choosing and how choices are made possible. In the second part of the paper, the responses to a recent survey of a group of association parents (n = 59) whose children are enrolled in French schools in Ontario are analysed with the aim of exploring and better understanding what it means for families to choose a school, and determining what criteria they use in making that choice. The results show that parents who exercise their right to choose their child's school rely less on formal or officially compiled information and more on first-hand information obtained through their social network. The programs offered, the teaching and administrative staff, the standards and values, and the school spirit seem to be the criteria that parents focus on, whereas diversity of the student body is not a decisive criterion. In the context of a highly diverse population, these results raise the question of the capacity of schools to promote integration.

This paper explores how discourse is reframed in audiovisual translation in a well-known South Korean television news magazine, PD Swuchep [PD Notebook]. The episode under consideration raised serious questions regarding the safety of US beef and the conduct of South Korean officials responsible for negotiating imported beef in the Korea-US Free Trade Agreement talks. The program, which contained sound bites of interviews in English subtitled in Korean, created uproar in the South Korean society and played a significant role in touching off many months of massive street rallies against the government for its alleged sloppy handling of the beef import negotiation talks. Based on the view that subtitling for television news is a practice of “entextualization,” the study argues that (1) different degrees of discursive transformations in the target text cumulatively work to support and exaggerate the risk of the transmission of mad cow disease as a result of eating American beef; and (2) the discursive transformation is reinforced by institutionally defined roles and procedures for target text production. The findings suggest that one of the main criteria for the selection of target text expressions may be the narrative relevance of the political slant of the translation to the story of the program. Furthermore, the narrative of the target text may not necessarily be consensually co-constructed by participants. On the contrary, it is often a product of conflict-ridden processes that are characterized by tensions and differences in power relationships among people in different roles in the media institution.

Keywords: institutional translation, entextualization, subtitling, news, narrative relevance, traduction institutionnelle, entextualisation, sous-titrage, nouvelles, cohérence narrative