Dr. Hélène Blondeau Presentation

Upcoming event: Dr. Hélène Blondeau’s presentation “French Language Variation in North America: A corpus-based approach” on March 1, BH Little Theater at 5.30 pm:

French Language Variation in North America: A corpus-based approach

This comparative sociolinguistic study examines two North American varieties of French differently affected by contact with the English language. The analysis is based on sociolinguistic interviews collected in two genetically-related varieties of Canadian French, spoken respectively in Montreal, Quebec (a majority francophone setting), and Welland, Ontario (a minority francophone setting). In a previous study, Mougeon et al. (2016) found that both varieties were displaying convergent patterns of variation in the 1970s. Therefore, the focus here is on the issue of convergence or divergence between the two varieties forty years later. I illustrate this question by a corpus-based analysis of sociopragmatic variation. Thanks to the development of the corpus FRAN (Martineau & Seguin 2017) recently collected in the context of the project Le français à la mesure d’un continent, it is now possible to systematically compare the two French speaking communities. Adopting a variationist approach, I present the results of an analysis of the variation among consequence markers ça fait que, so (vernacular variants), donc, and alors (Standard French variants), all meaning ‘so’.