This is an attempt to correlate nonlinguistic and linguistic events in order to make explicit some of the “rules” by which members of a given society can intuitively categorize speakers and speech situations within that society. Syntactic variation in French, as analyzed within the framework of transformational grammar, is shown here to be conditioned by both sociological and contextual factors. This pilot study is based on twenty‐four samples of spoken French obtained in two different contexts from subjects of two different social classes. The speech samples are analyzed in terms of complexity of sentence structure as measured by the occurrence of certain transformational operations. A clear correlation obtains between sociological variation (socioeconomic Class I/Class II), contextual variation (formal/informal situation) and syntactic variation (particularly in terms of nominalization).
Our comparison of French immigrants in the United States and American immigrants in France (based on extensive fieldwork in each case) first reveals similarities regarding their motives for emigration, demographic and sociocultural characteristics, and contacts with the homeland. However, some marked di¤erences also emerge on closer examination, particularly in the area of language behavior, analyzed here in terms of family bilingualism. In an attempt to account for those di¤erences, we systematically review a number of potential factors of language maintenance ranging from national context to family dynamics and the status of each of the two languages concerned. After a detailed presentation of our findings, we end with considerations on the emerging study of atypical immigrants (or ''fortunate immigrants,'' as we call them here) in the age of globalization.
La traduction des formules de politesse ou autres expressions toutes faites n'est pas sans poser problème, malgré leur apparente simplicité linguistique, car au delà du sens littéral il faut en saisir la portée socio-culturelle pour bien les comprendre. Il s'agit donc d'une tâche qui exige à la fois la connaissance des langues en question et un certain degré de familiarité avec le milieu socio-culturel dans chacun des deux cas.Les exemples qui illustrent ces propos théoriques sont issus d'un corpus de données recueillies dans le cadre d'une étude comparative des appels de vendeurs sur les places marchandes en France et aux Etats-Unis. La conclusion de l'article porte sur le problème de la liberté vis-à-vis du texte: jusqu'où les traducteurs doivent-ils aller dans la voie de la sensibilité aux différences culturelles?
This is an attempt to correlate nonlinguistic and linguistic events in order to make explicit some of the “rules” by which members of a given society can intuitively categorize speakers and speech situations within that society. Syntactic variation in French, as analyzed within the framework of transformational grammar, is shown here to be conditioned by both sociological and contextual factors. This pilot study is based on twenty‐four samples of spoken French obtained in two different contexts from subjects of two different social classes. The speech samples are analyzed in terms of complexity of sentence structure as measured by the occurrence of certain transformational operations. A clear correlation obtains between sociological variation (socioeconomic Class I/Class II), contextual variation (formal/informal situation) and syntactic variation (particularly in terms of nominalization).
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