Variation and Change in French Morphosyntax

Variation and Change in French Morphosyntax PDF

Author: Anna Tristram

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 1351537857

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Collective nouns such asmajorite or foulehave long been of interest to linguists for their unusual semantic properties, and provide a valuable source of new data on the evolution of French grammar. This book tests the hypothesis that plural agreement with collective nouns is becoming more frequent in French. Through an analysis of data from a variety of sources, including sociolinguistic interviews, gap-fill tests and corpora, the complex linguistic and external factors which affect this type of agreement are examined, shedding new light on their interaction in this context. Broader questions concerning the methodological challenges of studying variation and change in morphosyntax, and the application of sociolinguistic generalisations to the French of France, are also addressed.

Acadian French in Time and Space

Acadian French in Time and Space PDF

Author: Ruth King

Publisher: Publication of the American Di

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780822367840

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Acadian French in Time and Space is concerned with varieties of French spoken in Canada's four Atlantic Provinces and in parts of eastern Quebec, along with a close relative, Louisiana French. Ruth King triangulates from evidence for francophone speech communities past and present the grammatical history of these varieties, drawing on contemporary methodology and theory in quantitative and qualitative sociolinguistics and in generative grammar. Of particular interest to sociolinguists who focus on the study of grammatical variation and change and to dialectologists interested in the comparison of geographically dispersed but closely related language varieties, this book will also interest specialists in other North American varieties, such as Quebec French, along with specialists in sociosyntax and in language contact. King explores the preservation of rich verbal morphology and its consequences, mechanisms involved in the spread of particular instances of grammatical change, and the relationship between discourse phenomena and grammar. In addition to bringing to light new data and presenting new analyses, this volume also makes recent scholarship on the evolution and contemporary situation of French accessible to anglophone audiences. Ruth King is professor of linguistics at York University in Toronto. She has published widely on grammatical variation and change in contemporary French varieties and on the sociolinguistic history of the language. Her research areas include language and dialect contact, minority language varieties in the media, and language and identity.

The Interplay of Variation and Change in Contact Settings

The Interplay of Variation and Change in Contact Settings PDF

Author: Isabelle Léglise

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2013-03-12

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 9027272484

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This volume is at the cross-roads between two research traditions dealing with language change: contact linguistics and language variation and change. It starts out from the notion that linguistic variation is still a little researched area in most contact-induced language change studies. Intending to fill this gap, it offers a rich panorama of case studies and approaches dealing with linguistic variation in contact settings. It concentrates both on monolingual data, tracing variation and contact beneath surface homogeneity, and on bilingual data such as code-switching and other forms of variation, to trace their underlying regularities. It investigates the relationship between variation and change in language contact settings. The book will be relevant for students and researchers in contact linguistics, sociolinguistics, language variation and change, sociology of language, descriptive linguistics and linguistic typology.

Social and Stylistic Variation in Spoken French

Social and Stylistic Variation in Spoken French PDF

Author: Nigel Armstrong

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2001-01-01

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 9789027218391

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Many of the assumptions of Labovian sociolinguistics are based on results drawn from US and UK English, Latin American Spanish and Canadian French. Sociolinguistic variation in the French of France has been rather little studied compared to these languages. This volume is the first examination and exploration of variation in French that studies in a unified way the levels of phonology, grammar and lexis using quantitative methods. One of its aims is to establish whether the patterns of variation that have been reported in French conform to those reported in other languages. A second important theme of this volume is the study of variation across speech styles in French, through a comparison with some of the best-known English results. The book is therefore also the first to examine current theories of social-stylistic variation by using fresh quantitative data. These data throw new light on the influence of methodology on results, on why certain linguistic variables have more stylistic value, and on how the strong normative tradition in France moulds interactions between social and stylistic variation.

Syntactic Change in French

Syntactic Change in French PDF

Author: Sam Wolfe (Professor of French linguistics)

Publisher:

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 9780191896477

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Providing the most comprehensive and detailed formal account to date of the evolution of French syntax, this title covers syntactic variation and change across all periods of French, and in standard and non-standard varieties, and explores phenomena such as subject positions and null subjects, verb movement, object placement, and negation.

Language Acquisition and Change

Language Acquisition and Change PDF

Author: Jurgen M Meisel

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2013-10-17

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 0748677992

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Under which circumstances does grammatical change come about? Is the child the principle agent of change as suggested by historical linguistics?This book discusses diachronic change of languages in terms of restructuring of speakers' internal grammatical knowledge. Efforts to construct a theory of diachronic change consistent with findings from psycholinguistics are scarce. Here, these questions are therefore addressed against the background of insights from research on monolingual and bilingual acquisition. Given that children are remarkably successful in reconstructing the grammars of their ambient languages, commonly held views need to be reconsidered according to which language change is primarily triggered by structural ambiguity in the input and in settings of language contact. In an innovative take on this matter, the authors argue that morphosyntactic change in core areas of grammar, especially where parameters of Universal Grammar are concerned, typically happens in settings involving second language acquisition. The children acting as agents of restructuring are either L2 learners themselves or are continuously exposed to the speech of L2 speakers of their target languages. Based on a variety of case studies, this discussion sheds new light on phenomena of change which have occupied historical linguists since the 19th century and will be welcomed by advanced undergraduate and graduate students as well as researchers in the fields of historical linguistics and language acquisition.

Grammatical Variation across Space and Time

Grammatical Variation across Space and Time PDF

Author: Martin Elsig

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2009-02-04

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 9027290377

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Interrogative clauses in French show abundant variation, especially with regard to the position of the subject vis-à-vis the finite verb, the placement of the wh-word, and the use of question markers such as est-ce que and ti/tu. This book presents a comprehensive study of the evolution and use of French interrogative constructions across a time span of approximately five hundred years by drawing on written sources (15th to 17th century) and oral data (19th and 20th century). Special attention is paid to the regional variation between European French and Quebec French. A variationist analysis reveals the relevant sociolinguistic factors conditioning variant choice. On the basis of the results obtained, the syntax of the different variants is modeled within the framework of generative grammar. In particular, the progressive diachronic decline and restriction of subject-verb inversion is argued to mirror the loss of verb movement. This book is of interest to anyone concerned with syntactic variation and change.

Variation and Change in Gallo-Romance Grammar

Variation and Change in Gallo-Romance Grammar PDF

Author: Sam Wolfe

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-05-07

Total Pages: 480

ISBN-13: 0192576534

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This volume offers a wide-range of case studies on variation and change in the sub-family of the Romance languages that includes French and Occitan: Gallo-Romance. Both standard and non-standard Gallo-Romance data can be of enormous value to studies of morphosyntactic variation and change, yet, as the volume demonstrates, non-standard and comparative Gallo-Romance data have often been lacking in both synchronic and diachronic studies. Following an introduction that sets out the conceptual background, the volume is divided into three parts whose chapters explore a variety of topics in the domains of sentence structure, the verb complex, and word structure. The empirical foundation of the volume is exceptionally rich, drawing on standard and non-standard data from French, Occitan, Francoprovençal, Picard, Wallon, and Norman. This diversity is also reflected in the theoretical and conceptual approaches adopted, which span traditional philology, sociolinguistics, formal morphological and syntactic theory, semantics, and discourse-pragmatics. The volume will thus be an indispensable tool for researchers and students in French and (Gallo-) Romance linguistics as well as for readers interested in grammatical theory, sociolinguistics, and historical linguistics.

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