Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-swr86 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-16T18:11:11.708Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A question of change: Putting five complementary measures to the test with French polar interrogatives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 October 2023

Nathalie Dion
Nathalie Dion*
Affiliation:
University of Ottawa, Canada
*
Email: ndio2@uottawa.ca
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This paper explores how five key complementary features of variable systems—overall rates, variant conditioning, productivity, contextual dispersion, and diffusion in the community—must be marshaled to provide a more comprehensive characterization of change in progress. We illustrate by revisiting a robustly variable sector of Canadian French morphosyntax whose variants are known to be in flux: the polar interrogative domain. Analyses extend the timeline of Elsig (2009)/Elsig and Poplack’s (2006) diachronic analysis by an additional twenty-five years, bringing 2,000+ questions produced by 133 speakers to bear on developments occurring over a period of nearly a century and a half of spontaneous Québec French speech. Results underscore the need to consider more than rates and conditioning in the study of language change. Linguistic dispersion and diffusion in the community provide crucial insight into the mechanics of the transition period and contribute to identifying shifts in variant productivity at each point in time.

Keywords

(morpho)syntactic changeapparent timereal timemethodstransition period
Type
Research Article
Information
Language Variation and Change , Volume 35 , Issue 3 , October 2023 , pp. 247 - 271
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Auger, Julie & Villeneuve, Anne-José. (2019). Building on an old feature in langue d’Oïl: Interrogatives in Vimeu Picard. Journal of French Language Studies 29(2): 209–233.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Auger, Julie & Villeneuve, Anne-José. (2021). Étude comparative des particules interrogatives en picard et dans deux variétés de français parlées au Canada. Langue française 212(4): 57–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bailey, Charles-James. (1973). Variation and linguistic theory. Arlington, VA: Center for Applied Linguistics.Google Scholar
Bailey, Guy Wikle, Thomas, Tillery, Jan & Sand, Lori. (1991). The apparent time construct. Language Variation and Change 3(3): 241–264.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Comeau, Philip. (2016). An extension of the comparative sociolinguistics approach for sociosyntax: Comparing a single linguistic constraint across multiple sociolinguistic variables. Linguistic Variation 16:183–220.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Philip, Comeau, King, Ruth & LeBlanc, Carmen L. (2022). Continuity and change in the evolution of French yes-no questions: A cross-variety perspective. Diachronica 39(5): 616–657.Google Scholar
Elsig, Martin. (2009). Grammatical variation across space and time: The French interrogative system. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Elsig, Martin & Poplack, Shana. (2006). Transplanted dialects and language change: Question formation in Québec. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 12(2): .Google Scholar
Foulet, Lucien. (1921). Comment ont évolué les formes de l’interrogation. Romania 47(186/187): 243–348.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fox, Cynthia. A. (1989). Syntactic variation and interrogative structures in Québécois. Doctoral dissertation, Indiana University.Google Scholar
Haiman, John. (1994). Ritualization and the development of language. In Pagliuca, W. (ed.), Perspectives on grammaticalization. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 3-28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haspelmath, Martin. (1998), Does grammaticalization need reanalysis? Studies in Language 22:315–351.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haspelmath, Martin. (2006). Against markedness (and what to replace it with). Journal of Linguistics 42(1): 25–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kastronic, Laura, & Poplack, Shana. (2021). Be that as it may: The unremarkable trajectory of the English subjunctive in North American speech. Language Variation and Change 33(1): 107–134.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Labov, William. (1963). The social motivation of a sound change. Word 19:273–309.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Labov, William. (1969). Contraction, deletion, and inherent variability of the English copula. Language 45(4): 715–762.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Labov, William. (2007). Transmission and diffusion. Language 83:344–387.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Léard, Jean-Marcel. (1996). Ti/-tu, est-ce que, qu’est-ce que, ce que, hé que, don: des particules de modalisation en français? Revue québécoise de linguistique 24(2): 107–124.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lehmann, Christian. (2015). Thoughts on grammaticalization, 3rd edition. Berlin: Language Science Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Martineau, France & Vinet, Marie-Thérèse. (2005). Microvariation in French negation markers: A historical perspective. In Batllori, M., Hernanz, M.-L., Picallo, C., and Roca, F. (eds.), Grammaticalization and parametric variation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 194–205.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morin, Yves-Charles. (1985). On the two French subjectless verbs voici and voilà. Language 61(4): 777–820.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morin, Annick. (2017). Questioning particles: A cross-linguistic approach to Quebec French polar interrogatives. Doctoral dissertation, University of Toronto.Google Scholar
Paolillo, John C. (2002). Analyzing linguistic variation: Statistical models and methods. Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information.Google Scholar
Paolillo, John C. (2013). Individual effects in variation analysis: Model, software, and research design. Language Variation and Change 25(1): 89–118.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Picard, Marc. (1992). Aspects synchroniques et diachroniques du tu interrogatif en québécois. Revue québécoise de linguistique 21(2): 65–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Poplack, Shana. (1989). The care and handling of a mega-corpus: The Ottawa-Hull French project. In Fasold, R. & Schiffrin, D. (eds.), Language change and variation. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 411–451.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Poplack, Shana. (1997). The sociolinguistic dynamics of apparent convergence. In Guy, G., Feagin, C., Baugh, J. & Schiffrin, D. (eds.), Toward a social science of language: Papers in honor of William Labov. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 285–310.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Poplack, Shana. (2015). Norme prescriptive, norme communautaire et variation diaphasique. In Kragh, K. & Lindschouw, J. (eds.), Variations diasystématiques et leurs interdépendances. Strasbourg: Éditions de linguistique et de philologie. 293–319.Google Scholar
Poplack, Shana & Dion, Nathalie. (2021). Cartographie de la variation et du changement morphosyntaxique en français: leçons à retenir. Cahiers internationaux de sociolinguistique 18(1): 83–115.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Poplack, Shana & Malvar, Elisabete. (2007). Elucidating the transition period in linguistic change: The expression of the future in Brazilian Portuguese. Probus 19(1): 121–169.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Poplack, Shana & St-Amand, Anne. (2007). A real-time window on 19th-century vernacular French: The Récits du français québécois d’autrefois. Language in Society 36(5): 707–734.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Poplack, Shana & Tagliamonte, Sali A. (2001). African American English in the diaspora. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Poplack, Shana & Torres Cacoullos, Rena. (2015). Linguistic emergence on the ground: A variationist paradigm. In MacWhinney, B., and O’Grady, W., W. (eds.), The handbook of language emergence. Malden: Wiley Blackwell. 267–291.Google Scholar
Shana, Poplack, Lealess, Allison V., & Dion, Nathalie. (2013). The evolving grammar of the French subjunctive. Probus 25:.Google Scholar
Shana, Poplack, Torres Cacoullos, Rena, Nathalie, Dion, de Andrade Berlinck, Rosane, Salvio, Digesto, Lacasse, Dora & Steuck, Jonathan. (2018). Trajectories of change in Romance sociolinguistics. In Ayres-Bennett, W., and Carruthers, J. (eds.), Manuals in linguistics: Romance sociolinguistics. Berlin: De Gruyter. 217–252.Google Scholar
Robillard, Suzanne. (2021). Implicit norms and “School French” forms: Linguistic cohesion of second-generation francophones in Victoria, BC. Doctoral dissertation, University of Ottawa.Google Scholar
Sankoff, David. (1988). Variable rules. In Ammon, U., Dittmar, N. & Mattheier, K. J. (eds.), Sociolinguistics: An international handbook of the science of language and society. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. 984–997.Google Scholar
Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt. (2016). About text frequencies in historical linguistics: Disentangling environmental and grammatical change. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 12(1): 153–171.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Torres Cacoullos, Rena & Travis, Catherine E. (2021). Alternating or mixing languages. In Pérez, D., Hundt, M., Kabatek, J., and Schreier, D. (eds), English and Spanish: World languages in interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 287–311.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Travis, Catherine E. & Torres Cacoullos, Rena. (2021). Categories and frequency: Cognition verbs in Spanish subject expression. Languages 6(3): .CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Villeneuve, Anne-José. (2020). Variation stylistique et accommodation langagière: l’interrogation totale en français québécois soutenu. In Bigot, D. (ed.), Les français d’ici en perspective. Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval. 109–129.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vinet, Marie-Thérèse. (2000). Feature representation and -tu (pas) in Quebec French. Studia Linguistica 54(3): 381–411.CrossRefGoogle Scholar