Style in a school community—“Ne” deletion in French preschool

This article explores the question of style in a school community, through negation use among the adults and children in a French preschool. Thirteen adults and 61 pupils aged 3–6 years were followed over a period of 2.5 years. The findings draw on a corpus of oral data collected in an unsupervised manner and comprising almost 640,000 transcribed words (428,100 for the children and 210,241 for the adults). The findings show, on the one hand, that the teachers adapt stylistically to their interlocutors and that their professional stance leads to more formal speech and, on the other hand, that the children's use of bipartite negation is marginal before the age of 6 years and does not present notable stylistic variations.     

A Causality Analysis of Economic Growth and Union Density in European Countries

In this paper, we analyse the relationship between union density and economic growth using a Granger causality analysis and shocks analysis with vector autoregression model. We find that the Granger causality goes from the growth rate to the unionization rate in four of the 11 European countries under study. France bucks the trend: it is the only country in which union density influences economic growth, moreover in a positive way.