Contact-induced linguistic innovations on the continuum of language use: The case of French in Ontario

Abstract

In this paper we present a methodological approach that can be used to determine the likelihood that innovations observed in a minority language are the result of language contact. We then use this methodological approach to frame a discussion of data concerning eight innovations that can be attributed to transfer from the majority language (English) The theoretical concept of INTERFERENCE has attracted more than its share of criticism. In our view, the generally 'bad press' it has received is not due to a flaw in the theory that languages in contact may influence one another -no serious linguist would deny this fact -but rather to the lack of an adequate methodology (and to some extent also to ideological bias). For instance, in the fields of historical linguistics, minority languages, pidgins and Creoles and second language learning, one can find studies that have hastily and erroneously attributed instances of language change or interlanguage errors to language contact and that have downplayed or ignored alternative internal explanations. As a result, the factor of language contact has come to be held with much suspicion by many linguists and some have even elected to demonstrate that it plays only a marginal role as a source of variation and change in situations of societal bilingualism and language contact. While such a demonstration may be motivated on theoretical grounds, it may also reflect a hidden bias on the part of some linguists, because of the stigma that is attached to contact-induced innovations especially when they are documented in minority speech varieties. In the words of Klein-Andreu (p.c.): "the reason for [neglecting contact] is a kind of covert purism: the results of transfer are considered undesirable or 'bad'; therefore they are ignored or seriously downplayed, as a kind of courtesy to the population under study". We believe that there has been an overreaction against the notion of contact phenomena in linguistics and one of the goals of the * We would like to thank the anonymous reviewer of a previous version of our article for his/her useful comments. More specifically, we will draw on a large body of comparative sociolinguistic data and present a methodological approach that can be used to determine the likelihood that innovations observed in a minority language are, indeed, the result of language contact. We will then use this methodological approach to frame a discussion of data concerning eight innovations that can be attributed to transfer from the majority language of English to the French of Francophones residing in the province of Ontario in Canada. This discussion will show, notably, how systemic and extra-systemic factors play a role in the emergence of these innovations. We will also demonstrate that there are interesting differences in the extent to which these innovations are used across speaker groups and communities and that such differences suggest that there are thresholds of level of language contact associated with the emergence, or lack thereof, of particular tra...

Children’s Language Networks in Minority Language Immersion: What Goes In May Not Come Out

“…Baker and Jones (1998) noted that preschool minority language children are very vulnerable to the status of English which surrounds them, and tend to shift to English quickly. Influences on the children's L1 have also been observed, and Mougeon, Nadasdi and Rehner (2005) have examined innovations observed in the French of Canadian Francophones which are the result of language contact. Beniak (1994, 1991) looked at attenuation and shift among these young Francophones in Canada and argued the need for institutional support for the minority language L1 speakers.…”

Grammatical collocations and verb-particle constructions in Brussels French: a corpus-linguistic approach to transfer

“…Third, for one informant from the bilingual group it could be shown that Dutch was activated during language production, because he produced a hybrid collocation which consisted of the French verb chercher and the Dutch preposition naar. Fourth, it is well known that Dutch learners of French often produce the form chercher après (Desmet et al, 2004), while Anglophone learners of French use the forms chercher pour or regarder pour (Mougeon et al, 2005). The most likely explanation for the differences is that they are the result of transfer or pattern replication (Heine & Kuteva, 2005;Matras & Sakel, 2004) from the students' first language.…”

“…In Brussels French and in the VALIBEL corpus, regarder pour and chercher pour are not attested, and no mention is made of regarder après or chercher après in Ontario French. After completing a detailed comparison of the use of these verbs in a variety of data from speakers, Mougeon and colleagues conclude that the source of the innovations in Ontario French is likely to be English, because degree of contact with the source language English explains the frequency of occurrence of these forms (Mougeon et al, 2005). As we have seen in section 6.1, Mougeon et al (2005, p. 108) also note that the use of the verb regarder with the preposition pour, which together encode the meaning 'to seek' (a calque from 'to look for'), represents a more in-depth form of contact-induced change than the use of chercher pour because the former entails not only the insertion of pour, but also the substitution of regarder for chercher, whereas the latter only involves the addition of a preposition.…”

“…Mougeon et al (2005) argue that, in step 1, researchers should establish whether there is equivalence between the productions of the speakers in both languages, which corresponds to Jarvis and Pavlenko's third criterion. In step 2 alternative explanations such as overgeneralization or regularization are explored and in step 3 a comparison with data from other sources is made.…”

Optimality Theory and language death

“…Bullock and Gerfen (2004 : 95) remark that "most work on the role of convergence in attrition has focused on aspects of the morpho-syntactic restructuring of the attriting language", such as Austin (2006), King (2005), Morimoto (2002), and Rottet (1998) among others. Accordingly, Mougeon et al (2005) lay out a four-step methodology for determining whether contact-induced linguistic changes are due to intersystemic transfer, whether this transfer be overt (syntactic) or covert (morphological or semantic), or intra-systemic transfer (Mougeon et al, 2005 : 102-104). Examples of morphological and syntactic effects of language contact include calques, simplification of gender distinctions, and verb positioning (Bullock and Gerfen, 2004:99) as well as analogical leveling (Dorian, 1977 : 29).…”