The VP in language contact: on creation event lexicalization in Canadian French

Abstract

The effects of language contact on semantic and syntactic properties of verbs can be considered as not yet extensively studied. This contribution is concerned with French as a typical verb-framed language that cannot freely combine manner verbs with result-denoting arguments within the VP. Drawing on creation events, the study explores if restrictions can loosen, and lexicalization preferences change when French is in contact to a satellite-framed language like English. Judgment data from bilingual speakers of Canadian French (CaFr) are compared to data from speakers of Hexagonal French (HFr). The analysis addresses how selective copying from English is relevant for the acceptability of different VPs and considers how the factors of individual and social language dominance might influence the judgments within the CaFr group. The results show that French manner verbs and direct objects can be coerced into creation readings in both test groups as long as only the selectional restrictions of a particular verb have to be adapted. When, however, a general constraint of French has to be overridden to arrive at a creation reading, acceptability is higher in the CaFr group, who can resort to combinatorial copying from English. Furthermore, VPs in which manner is not lexicalized in the verb are somewhat more accepted in the HFr group than in the CaFr group. Within the CaFr group, certain cases of satellite framing are judged somewhat better by speakers from an English dominant region, while VPs without a manner verb reach slightly higher scores among speakers from Quebec. It is thus shown how structural and speaker-related factors can affect the acceptability of event descriptions in language contact.