Abstract ID: 851
Part of Session 173: Urban Francophone Language Practices in North America (Other abstracts in this session)
Authors: Gadet, Françoise
Submitted by: Gadet, Françoise (University Paris Ouest Nanterre la Défense, France, France)
There are now enough corpora of spoken French vernaculars to allow a confrontation between phenomena and data coming from different areas of francophony. The author of the present communication has worked on different diatopic variation phenomena in French (in particular through the contribution to a Reference grammar of French – Abeillé et al. in preparation), and more particularly on the already available descriptions of North-American vernaculars (see Gadet 2011). She is now currently contributing to compiling a corpus of ordinary French as spoken by young people in the Paris area in interviews as well as in ecological situations. From those two quite different experiences, she considers it is now time for linguists working on French to inquire to what extent different urban vernaculars of French show similar or different so-called non standard phenomena which may develop in convergent or divergent directions.
It is in particular possible to compare data from Paris and from Montreal, the two largest French-speaking cities in the world. In spite of different histories, different relationships to the norm and different conditions which have led to quite different ecological situations at the present time, the impact of globalization means that several social and sociolinguistic factors are comparable, in particular concerning contact due to migration, which has brought very different languages in contact with French. How far is there a possible influence of migrant languages on the French spoken in these two multicultural and multilingual metropoles? Of what type and concerning which phenomena?
Users’ practices will be investigated through grammatical phenomena. This paper focuses on three syntactico-discursive phenomena known to have sociolinguistic implications, namely: clitics, reported speech, and the discursive processes of sequential elaboration through subordination (in particular different uses of que). All the examples have been taken from available corpus data.
The immediate objective of the paper is to study the dynamics of these urban vernaculars by inquiring how far they exhibit the expected communicative tendencies (see several papers in Filppula et al. Eds) and whether contact and the role of bilingualism and biculturalism (see for example Matras 2009) have an impact upon the ordinary way of speaking French. A longer-term objective will be to consider the communicative dynamics of French vernaculars in general and of all vernaculars. It will focus particularly on Paris, but will refer to other forms of French. The issues of the possible comparability between data from corpora collected through quite different methodologies will also be discussed.
Abeillé, Anne, in prep. Grammaire de référence du français, Editions Bayard.
Filppula, Markku, Klemola Juhani & Paulasto, Heli (Eds) (2009). Vernacular Universals and Language Contacts. Evidence from Varieties of English and beyond, New York/Londres : Routledge.
Gadet, Françoise, 2011, « What Can Be Learned About the Grammar of French From Corpora of French Spoken Outside France », in Grammatik und Corpora 2009, Hgg M. Konopka, J. Kubczak, C. Mair, F. Sticha, U. Wassner, Tübingen, Narr Verlag, 87-120.
Matras, Yaron, 2009, Language Contact, Cambridge University Press.