Campus Directory

Division Humanities Division

Department/College/Unit Languages and Applied Linguistics

Title Professor, French & Applied Linguistics

Affiliation Faculty

Faculty Type Regular Faculty

Areas of Expertise French
Language Development
Linguistics
Language and Linguistics
Sociolinguistics

Primary Office Location Humanities Building 1
Humanities 1, 137

Office Hours for Students/ Office Hours on leave Fall 2024

Mail Stop Humanities Academic Services

Biography, Education and Training

PhD, French linguistics, Indiana University (Bloomington), 2008

Summary of Expertise

French linguistics, Romance linguistics (primarily Old French and Old Occitan), second language acquisition, historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, syntax

Research Interests

Research areas: second-language acquisition of French, syntax-discourse interface, near-nativeness, historical development of French and Romance, language change

My research examines word order variation as it is conditioned by discourse-pragmatic factors, such as the flow and organization of information, and also by sociolinguistic factors, such as language register, speaker gender, age, and level of education. This theme is common to my two principal areas of research: French as a second language and the history and development of French and the Romance languages. Typical of applied linguistics research, these strands of my work also share a substantial empirical element. In my analyses, I frequently privilege authentic spoken data or, in the case of historical data, written representations of the spoken language. 

Selected Publications

Donaldson, B., & Sibille, J. (2024). Histoire interne de la langue [Internal history of the language]. In L. Esher & J. Sibille (Eds.), Manuel de linguistique occitane [Manual of Occitan linguistics] (pp. 193-230). Berlin: De Gruyter.

Donaldson, B. (2022). Connecting language change with second language acquisition. In K. Geeslin (ed.), Routledge handbook of second language acquisition and sociolinguistics (pp. 174-185). New York: Routledge. 

Destruel, E., & Donaldson, B. (2021). The L2 acquisition of French interrogatives: Pragmatic inferences in clefted wh-questions. Languages 6(4), 165. 

Donaldson, B. (2021). Clause structure and illocutionary force in medieval Gallo-Romance: Clitic position in Old Occitan and early Old French sentential coordination. Probus, 33(1), 1-32. 

Donaldson, B. (2020). Clitic position in Old Occitan affirmative verb-first declaratives coordinated by e: A variationist analysis. Journal of Historical Linguistics, 10(3), 389-427.

Gudmestad, A., Edmonds, A., Donaldson, B., & Carmichael, K. (2020). Near-native sociolinguistic competence in French: Evidence from variable future-time expression. Canadian Journal of Applied Linguistics / Revue canadienne de linguistique appliquée. 23(1), 169-191.

Donaldson, B. (2019). The variable position of initial subordinate clauses in Old French: Arguments against a semantic account. In D. Arteaga (Ed.), Contributions of Romance languages to current linguistic theory (pp. 175-201). Berlin: Springer. 

Donaldson, B. (2018). Diachronie de la négation phrastique en français: Apports d'une approche socio-historique [Diachrony of sentential negation in French: Contributions of a socio-historical approach]. Canadian Journal of Linguistics / Revue canadienne de Linguistique, 63(2), 221-241. 

Gudmestad, A., Edmonds, A., Donaldson, B., & Carmichael, K. (2018). On the role of the present indicative in variable future-time reference in Hexagonal French. Canadian Journal of Linguistics / Revue canadienne de linguistique, 63(1), 42-69.

Edmonds, A., Gudmestad, A., & Donaldson, B. (2017). A concept-oriented analysis of variable future-time reference in native and near-native Hexagonal French. Journal of French Language Studies, 27(3), 381-404.  

Destruel, E., & Donaldson, B. (2017). On the L2 acquisition of pragmatic inferences: Evidence from the French c'est-cleft. Applied Psycholinguistics, 38(3), 703-732.  

Donaldson, B. (2017). Negation in near-native French: Variation and sociolinguistic competence. Language Learning, 67(1), 141-170. 

Donaldson, B. (2016). Aspects of interrogative use in near-native French: Form, function, and register. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 6(4), 467-503. 

Donaldson, B. (2016). Preverbal subjects, information structure, and object clitic position in Old Occitan. Journal of Linguistics, 52(1), 37-69. 

Donaldson, B. (2015). Discourse functions of subject left dislocation in Old Occitan. Journal of Historical Pragmatics, 16(2), 159-186.

Donaldson, B. (2014). Socio-stylistic reflexes of syntactic change in Old French. Journal of French Language Studies, 24(3), 319-345. 

Donaldson, B. (2013). Null objects in Old French. In D. Arteaga (Ed.), Research on Old French: The state of the art (pp. 61-86). Berlin: Springer.

Donaldson, B. (2012). Syntax and discourse in near-native French: Clefts and focus. Language Learning, 62(3), 902-930.

Donaldson, B. (2012). Initial subordinate clauses in Old French: Syntactic variation and the clausal left periphery. Lingua, 122(9), 1021-1046.

Donaldson, B. (2011). Left-dislocation in near-native French. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 33(3), 399-432.

Donaldson, B. (2011). Nativelike right-dislocations in near-native French. Second Language Research, 27(3), 361-390.

Vance, B., Donaldson, B., & Steiner, B. D. (2010). V2 loss in Old French and Old Occitan: The role of fronted clauses. In S. Colina, A. Olarrea, & A. M. Carvalho (Eds.), Romance Linguistics 2009: Selected papers from the 39th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (pp. 301-320). Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Dekydtspotter, L., Donaldson, B., Edmonds, A. C., Liljestrand, A., & Petrush, R. A. (2008). Syntactic and prosodic computations in the resolution of relative clause attachment ambiguity by English-French learners. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 30(4), 453-480.

Courses French 3 First-year French
French 6 Second-year French
APLX 80 Introduction to Applied Linguistics
APLX 116 Discourse Analysis
French 111 Stylistics (advanced grammar and composition)
French 114 Phonetics (advanced pronunciation practice)
French 120 French Linguistics
French 121 History of the French Language
APLX 124 Second Language Variation and Sociolinguistics
APLX 190 Research Seminar in Applied Linguistics