Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-qxdb6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-28T08:32:55.362Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Social class, cluster simplification and following context: Sociolinguistic variation in word-final post-obstruent liquid deletion in French1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 November 2013

ZOË BOUGHTON
ZOË BOUGHTON*
Affiliation:
University of Exeter
*
Address for correspondence: Modern Languages, University of Exeter, Queen's Building, The Queen's Drive, Exeter, EX4 4QH, UK e-mail: z.c.boughton@exeter.ac.uk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article is a quantitative study of the variable deletion of post-obstruent /l/ and /R/ in word-final obstruent-liquid clusters (OLC) in French (capable [kapab(l)], cidre [sid(ʁ)]). The analysis of over a thousand tokens extracted from a corpus of interviews gathered in Nancy and Rennes shows that the reduction of word-final OLCs is a stable sociolinguistic marker in northern, standardised metropolitan French. Patterns of stylistic and social stratification in age, gender, and social class and interaction with following phonological context are attested, but OLC reduction does not appear to be an ongoing change. It is argued that the data provide further evidence of variable morpheme-final consonant clusters as a ‘primitive’ feature of vernacular dialects.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of French Language Studies , Volume 25 , Issue 1 , March 2015 , pp. 1 - 21
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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.)

Footnotes

1

I acknowledge with gratitude the financial support of the British Academy and the Arts and Humanities Research Council which has facilitated different aspects of the research reported here. Thanks are also due to Aidan Coveney, Zsuzsanna Fagyal-Le Mentec and the three anonymous JFLS reviewers for their detailed and constructive remarks. Any remaining shortcomings are, of course, solely my responsibility.

References

REFERENCES

Armstrong, N. (1993). A study of phonological variation in French secondary school pupils. PhD thesis, Newcastle University.Google Scholar
Armstrong, N. (2001). Social and Stylistic Variation in Spoken French: A Comparative Approach. Amsterdam: Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Armstrong, N., Bauvois, C. and Beeching, K. (eds), with Bruyninckx, M. (2001). La langue française au féminin: le sexe et le genre affectent-ils la variation linguistique? Paris: L'Harmattan.Google Scholar
Armstrong, N. and Boughton, Z. (1998). Identification and evaluation responses to a French accent: Some results and issues of methodology. Revue PArole, 5/6: 27–60.Google Scholar
Armstrong, N. and Low, J. (2008). C'est encœur plus jeuli, le Mareuc: Some evidence for the spread of /ɔ/-fronting in French. Transactions of the Philological Society, 106 (3): 432–55.Google Scholar
Armstrong, N. and Unsworth, S. (1999). Sociolinguistic variation in southern French schwa. Linguistics, 37 (1): 127–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ayres-Bennett, W. (1990). Variation and change in the pronunciation of French in the seventeenth century. In: Green, J. N. and Ayres-Bennett, W. (eds), Variation and Change in French: Essays Presented to Rebecca Posner on the Occasion of her Sixtieth Birthday. London: Routledge, pp. 151–79.Google Scholar
Bauvois, C. (2002). Ni d'Eve ni d'Adam: Etude sociolinguistique de douze variables du français. Paris: L'Harmattan.Google Scholar
Boughton, Z. (2003). Phonological variation in contemporary standard French: A tale of two cities. PhD thesis, Newcastle University.Google Scholar
Boughton, Z. (2008). La géographie d'abord? Phonological variation in contemporary French. In: Abecassis, M., Ayosso, L. and Vialleton, E. (eds), Le français parlé au XXIe siècle: Normes et variations géographiques et sociales, vol. 1. Paris: L'Harmattan, pp. 259–72.Google Scholar
Boughton, Z. (forthcoming). Locating variation in French: Geolinguistic patterns, levelling and the ‘French exception’. In: Jones, M. C. and Hornsby, D. (eds), Language and Social Structure in Urban France. Oxford: Legenda.Google Scholar
Chambers, J. K. (2009). Sociolinguistic Theory: Linguistic Variation and its Social Significance, revised edn. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Chambers, J. K. and Trudgill, P. (1998). Dialectology, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Chevrot, J.-P., Beaud, L. and Varga, R. (2000). L'apprentissage des unités phonologiques variables: l'exemple du /R/ post-consonantique final en français. LINX, 42: 89–100.Google Scholar
Cohen, M. (1973). Histoire d'une langue: le français. Paris: Editions sociales.Google Scholar
Conein, B. and Gadet, F. (1998). Le ‘français populaire’ de jeunes de la banlieue parisienne, entre permanence et innovation. In: Androutsopoulos, J. and Scholtz, A. (eds), Jugendsprache — langue des jeunes — young language. Linguistische und soziolinguistische Perspektiven. Frankfurt:Lang, pp. 105–23.Google Scholar
Côté, M.-H. (2004). Consonant cluster simplification in Québec French. Probus, 16: 151–201.Google Scholar
Coveney, A. (2001). The Sounds of Contemporary French: Articulation and Diversity. Exeter: Elm Bank.Google Scholar
Coveney, A. (2002). Variability in Spoken French. Bristol: Elm Bank.Google Scholar
Ernst, G. (1985). Gesprochenes Französisch zu Beginn des 17. Jahrhunderts. Direkte Rede in Jean Héroards «Histoire particulière de Louis XIII» (1605–1610). Tübingen: Niemeyer.Google Scholar
Estienne, H. (1578). Deux dialogues du nouveau langage françois italianizé et autrement desguizé, principalement entre les courtisans de ce temps, ed. Smith, P.-M.. Geneva: Slatkine, 1980.Google Scholar
Fasold, R. (1990). The Sociolinguistics of Language. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Francard, M. (2001). ‘L'accent belge’: Mythes et réalités. In: Hintze, M.-A., Pooley, T. and Judge, A. (eds), French Accents: Phonological and Sociolinguistic Perspectives. London: AFLS / CiLT Publications, pp. 251–68.Google Scholar
Gadet, F. (1989). Le français ordinaire. Paris: Colin.Google Scholar
Gadet, F. (1992). Le français populaire. Paris: PUF.Google Scholar
Gadet, F. (1997). Classe sociale. In: Moreau, M.-L. (ed.), Sociolinguistique: Les concepts de base. Liège: Mardaga, pp. 76–81.Google Scholar
Guiraud, P. (1965). Le français populaire. Paris: PUF.Google Scholar
Hambye, P. (2005). La prononciation du français contemporain en Belgique: Variation, normes et identités. PhD thesis, Université Catholique de Louvain.Google Scholar
Hambye, P. (2009). The sociolinguistic relevance of regional categories: Some evidence from word-final consonant devoicing in French spoken in Belgium. In: Beeching, K., Armstrong, N. and Gadet, F. (eds), Sociolinguistic Variation in Contemporary French. Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp. 25–42.Google Scholar
Hornsby, D. (2006). Redefining Regional French: Koinéization and Dialect Levelling in Northern France. Oxford: Legenda.Google Scholar
Hume, E. (1988). The realization of /R/ in Canadian and Standard European French. In: Ferrara, K.et al. (eds), Linguistic Change and Contact: Proceedings of the 16th Annual Conference on New Ways of Analysing Variation. Austin: University of Texas, pp. 143–51.Google Scholar
Kemp, W., Pupier, P. and Yaeger, M. (1980). A linguistic and social description of final consonant cluster simplification in Montreal French. In: Shuy, R. and Shnukal, A. (eds), Language Use and the Uses of Language. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, pp. 12–40.Google Scholar
Laberge, S. and Chiasson-Lavoie, M. (1971). Attitudes face au français parlé à Montréal et degré de conscience de variables linguistiques. In: Darnell, R. (ed.), Linguistic Diversity in Canadian Society. Edmonton, Alberta: Linguistic Research Inc., pp. 89–126.Google Scholar
Labov, W. (1966). The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics.Google Scholar
Labov, W. (1972). Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Labov, W. (2001). Principles of Linguistic Change, Volume 2: Social Factors. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Lanher, J. and Litaize, A. (1990). Dictionnaire du français régional de Lorraine, 2e édition revue et augmentée. Paris: Bonneton.Google Scholar
Laks, B. (1983). Langage et pratiques sociales. Etude sociolinguistique d'un groupe d'adolescents. Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, 46: 73–97. Paris: Editions de Minuit.Google Scholar
Léon, P. (1993). Précis de phonostylistique: Parole et expressivité. Paris: Nathan.Google Scholar
Léon, M. and Léon, P. (1997). La prononciation du français. Paris: Nathan.Google Scholar
Léon, P. and Tennant, J. (1990). ‘Bad French’ and nice guys: A morphophonetic study. The French Review, 63 (5): 763–78.Google Scholar
Lodge, R. A. (2004). A Sociolinguistic History of Parisian French. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Martinet, A. (1990). Remarques sur la variété des usages dans la phonie du français. In: Green, J. N. and Ayres-Bennett, W. (eds), Variation and Change in French: Essays Presented to Rebecca Posner on the Occasion of her Sixtieth Birthday. London: Routledge, pp. 13–26.Google Scholar
Milne, P. M. (2013). The relationship between schwa insertion and consonant cluster simplification in French: An Analysis of Covariance. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, 19 (1): 123–8.Google Scholar
Milroy, L. and Gordon, M. (2003). Sociolinguistics: Method and Interpretation. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Oudin, A. (1633). Grammaire françoise rapportée au langage du temps. Paris (cited in Ayres-Bennett, 1990).Google Scholar
Pooley, T. (1996). Chtimi: The Urban Vernaculars of Northern France. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
Posner, R. (1997). Linguistic Change in French. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Pustka, E. (2007). Phonologie et variétés en contact. Aveyronnais et Guadeloupéens à Paris. Tübingen: Narr.Google Scholar
Randell, E. (2008). ‘Le Vrai recueil des Sarcelles’ of Nicolas Jouin: An edition with a linguistic study of the depicted sociolect and its Parisian connections. PhD thesis, University of St Andrews.Google Scholar
Sobotta, E. ( = Pustka, E.) (2006). Phonologie et Migration – Aveyronnais et Guadeloupéens à Paris. PhD thesis, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München / Université de Paris X-Nanterre.Google Scholar
Thurot, C. (1883). De la Prononciation française depuis le commencement du XVIe siècle d'après les témoignages des grammairiens, vol. 2. Geneva: Slatkine, 1966.Google Scholar
Trudgill, P. (1974). The Social Differentiation of English in Norwich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Trudgill, P. (1986). Dialects in Contact. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Trudgill, P. (2003). A Glossary of Sociolinguistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Valdman, A. (1982). Français standard et français populaire: sociolectes ou fictions? The French Review, 56: 218–27.Google Scholar
Villeneuve, A.-J. (2010). Word-final cluster simplification in Vimeu French: A preliminary analysis. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, 15 (2): 133–44.Google Scholar
Walter, H. (1977). La phonologie du français. Paris: PUF (cited in Pooley, 1996).Google Scholar
Walter, H. (1990). Une voyelle qui ne veut pas mourir. In: Green, J. N. and Ayres-Bennett, W. (eds), Variation and Change in French: Essays presented to Rebecca Posner on the Occasion of her Sixtieth Birthday. London: Routledge, pp. 27–36.Google Scholar
Wioland, F. (1985). Les structures syllabiques du français. Geneva and Paris: Slatkine and Champion (cited in Coveney, 2001).Google Scholar
Wyld, H. C. (1936). A History of Modern Colloquial English, 3rd edn. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar