A B S T R A C TWe investigated the French of the first generation of Montreal Anglophones who had had access to French immersion schooling. Our aim was to determine the extent to which these Anglophones had acquired the variable grammar of their Francophone peers and how that was related to the type of French instruction received and to the types of exposure to French. In Montreal French, a subject NP may be "echoed" by a pronoun without emphatic or contrastive effect. Because this is not a feature of standard French, Anglophones who learned French primarily in school were not expected to exhibit it. On the other hand, Anglophones who frequently spent time with Montreal Francophones were expected to have picked it up. To test this hypothesis, we used a database of speech from 29 speakers, varying in their quantity and type of exposure to French. Multivariate analyses determined the degree of correlation of several linguistic and social factors (related to type and quantity of exposure to French) to the presence of a doubled subject. These data were then compared with that for L1 French. Speakers who were more nativelike with respect to the rate of subject doubling and effects of linguistic factors were those who had had more contact with native speakers, especially as adults.Our goal was to determine the extent to which Montreal Anglophones acquire the variable grammar of their Francophone peers and how that is related to the type of French instruction they have received and the amount of exposure to French they have had. For this study, we examined speech recorded from 29 second
One striking feature of Vimeu Picard concerns the regular
insertion of epenthetic vowels in order to break up consonant
clusters and to syllabify word-initial and word-final consonants.
This corpus-based study focuses on word-initial epenthesis.
It provides quantitative evidence that vowel epenthesis applies
categorically in some environments and variably in others.
Probabilistic analysis demonstrates that the variable pattern
is constrained by a complex interplay of linguistic factors.
Following Labov (1972a, 1972b) and Antilla and Cho (1998), I
interpret such intricate grammatical conditioning as evidence
that this variation is a reflection of a grammatical competence
that generates both categorical and variable outputs, and I
propose an account within the framework of Optimality Theory.
An analysis of individual patterns of epenthesis by members
of the community reveals that, even though all speakers share
the same basic community grammar, their use of epenthesis differs
qualitatively as well as quantitatively. I show that individual
grammars can be derived from the community grammar, and that
Optimality Theory allows us to formalize the idea that individual
grammars constitute more specific versions of community grammars.
RÉSUMÉDans cet article, nous abordons l’étude des clitiques pronominaux du français parlé informel en assumant que statut morphologique et comportement morphosyntaxique sont deux dimensions indépendantes et qu’il est donc possible d’être un affixe sans pour autant fonctionner comme un marqueur d’accord. Le fait que nombre d’idiosyncrasies affectant les clitiques pronominaux ne puissent être générées par des règles phonologiques ou syntaxiques et que les règles syntaxiques ne puissent manipuler ces éléments nous amèneront à conclure que tous les clitiques pronominaux du français parlé informel sont des affixes qui doivent être attachés à la racine verbale dans une composante morphologique. Mais le fait que seuls les sujets redoublés apparaissent en position d’argument et que seuls les marqueurs de sujets soient employés de façon régulière dans les propositions relatives indique clairement que seuls les marqueurs de sujet fonctionnent comme de véritables marqueurs d’accord et que les marqueurs d’objet retiennent leur statut d’argument syntaxique.
Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0959269512000385 How to cite this article: ANNE-JOSÉ VILLENEUVE and JULIE AUGER (2013). 'chtileu qu'i m'freumereu m'bouque i n'est point coér au monne': Grammatical variation and diglossia in
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