Variation and change in Newfoundland French : a sociolinguistic study of clitic pronouns

King, Ruth Elizabeth (1983) Variation and change in Newfoundland French : a sociolinguistic study of clitic pronouns. Doctoral (PhD) thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

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Abstract

The native French population of Newfoundland is with few exceptions restricted to four communities—L’Anse-à-Canards, Cap St.-Georges, La Grand’ Terre, and Stephenville—in Port-au-Port Peninsula/Bay St. George area of the west coast. The French spoken here is a little-studied variety of Acadian. In this thesis covariation of a number of phonological and grammatical variables with both linguistic environment and a number of social factors is quantified. While the main orientation of the study is sociolinguistic, Labovism techniques developed for a single speech community have been implemented in the four Francophone communities of the area. Thus the study combines elements of the dialect geographer’s approach with the methodology current in sociolinguistics. -- The dependent variables all relate to clitic pronoun usage. They include phonological variation of third person subject clitics and of object clitics lui, leur, and en. Grammatical variables include third person case and number marking, variation in cliticization of first, second, and third person object pronouns, of reflexive pronouns and of y and en. -- Both phonological and grammatical variation were found to be conditioned by linguistic and social factors. For example, phonological environment affects deletion of the /1/ of third person subject clitics. Loss of third person case marking is more prevalent in the faire-infinitive grammatical construction. Unlike in many other socio-linguistic studies, the social variabIe sex did not condition variation to any great degree. The intracommunity variable locality was found to be somewhat more important. Younger speakers in one community, La Grand’ Terre, stood out as less conservative than their counterparts in other communities. Age emerged as the most important nonlinguistic variable in this study. Younger speakers, for example, tend to cliticize object pronouns less often than do older, speakers, which may well mark a linguistic change in progress.

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