Constitution et exploitation d’un corpus de français parlé parisien

We analyse genre in the speech of young people with multi-ethnic friendship groups in Paris in order to address the as yet unresolved question of whether new quotatives equivalent in meaning to English BE LIKE result from simultaneous independent parallel developments in languages other than English or from a process of calquing.We conclude that French quotative genre results from independent internal developments but that it enters the French quotative system in the same way that BE LIKE entered the English system, driven by the meanings of 'similarity' or 'approximation' that are shared by the lexical item genre in a range of syntactic categories. We propose that in order for a new similarity quotative to emerge, a lexical item with a meaning of 'similarity' or 'approximation' must become syntactically multifunctional, and that the use of that lexical item must reach a critical frequency threshold. In the case of genre we suggest that the necessary increase in frequency results from the development of the lexical item into a discourse marker.We also analyse another new French quotative, ETRE LA, a sequence that we find is used to highlight activity of many kinds (including, but not confined to, spoken behaviour). The trajectory followed by each of the new quotative expressions conforms to De Smet's proposals about how linguistic innovations spread through the grammar. , 15:151-198. Clark, H. and Gerrig, R. (1990). Quotations as demonstrations. Language, 66: Journal of Sociolinguistics 764-895.Danon-Boileau, L. and Morel, M-A. (1997). "Question, point de vue, genre, style: les noms prépositionnels en français contemporain." Faits de langue, 9:192-200.

Section: The Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

The origins of new quotative expressions: the case of Paris French

Cheshire

Secova

2018

“…Abeillé et al (2016) present the distribution of dont in a newspaper corpus, the French Treebank (FTB; Abeillé et al, 2019), and in a spoken corpus, the Corpus Francais Parlé Parisien des années 2000 (CFPP2000; Branca-Rosoff et al, 2012) of contemporary French. An overview of their results is given in Table 1 2 .…”

Section: Some Corpus Results On Dontmentioning

confidence: 99%

French subject island? Empirical studies ofdontandde qui

Abeillé

Winckel

2020

Abstract Dont has been claimed to be an exception to the ‘subject island’ constraint (Tellier, 1991; Sportiche and Bellier, 1989; Heck, 2009) and to contrast with true relative pronouns such as de qui. We provide corpus data from a literary corpus (Frantext), which show that relativizing out of the subject is possible with dont and de qui in French relative clauses, and is even the most frequent use of both relative clauses. We show that it is not a recent innovation by comparing subcorpora from the beginning of the twentieth century and from the beginning of the twenty-first century. We also show, with an acceptability judgement task, that extraction out of the subject with de qui is well accepted. Why has this possibility been overlooked? We suggest that it may be because de qui relatives in general are less frequent than dont relatives (about 60 times less in our corpus). Turning to de qui interrogatives, we show that extraction out of the subject is not attested, and propose an explanation of the contrast with relative clauses. We conclude that in this respect, French does not seem to differ from other Romance languages.

“…As regards age, the highest users of the newer in situ variant are the youngest speakers. This seems likely to indicate a change in progress, 14 especially since the form appears to be so rare in adult speech (Branca et al, 2009). The structure scarcely arises in other corpora collected in France, as reported by Ledegen (2016: 95): ‘B.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Grammatical change in Paris French:in situquestion words in embedded contexts

Gardner‐Chloros

Secova

2018

This article will review the parameters of a grammatical variable within the putative variety ‘Multicultural Paris French’, i.e. its distribution and use within a group of young banlieue speakers. The structure in question stands out as it has rarely been found in previous corpora in France: indirect questions following verbs like savoir, where the question word is post-verb (je sais pas il a dit quoi). We discuss which groups use the new forms in Paris, referring briefly to some comparable changes in London. This structure appears to be an instance of ‘change from below’ (Labov, 2007), which seems to have emerged in the speech of young people of immigrant background. It might also, on the other hand, be a long-standing vernacular variant, which has re-emerged, with specific identity-related significance, in this particular group of speakers. Its exceptional character in the Paris context highlights a lack of evidence for the emergence of a more wide-ranging, distinct multiethnolect, as found in London and other European capitals.