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- Title
Language Variation and Change? Gender Agreement in Franco-American Descriptive Adjectives.
- Authors
Fox, Cynthia A.; Stelling, Louis E.
- Abstract
Studies of Franco-American French (FAF) suggest that this obsolescing variety spoken in the northeastern United States is resistant to grammatical changes that are typical in situations of language contact, restriction, and shift. Here we address the issue through an examination of gender agreement in descriptive adjectives. Our analysis of data from four communities shows that a tendency toward morphological reduction in the direction of the masculine variant that has been widely documented in the popular French of France and in many North American varieties is widespread in terms of number of speakers that exhibit this behaviour, but infrequent overall. Variation is conditioned by the nature of the final segment and by speaker community of residence and education in French. We relate these factors to widespread negative attitudes about FAF that have contributed to a communitywide shift to English on the one hand and to grammatical conservatism among speakers who have maintained French on the other.
- Subjects
FRENCH language education; VARIATION in language; LINGUISTIC change; GENDER differences in language; SOCIOLINGUISTICS; FRANCO-Americans
- Publication
Canadian Journal of Applied Linguistics / Revue Canadiennne de Linguistique Appliquée, 2014, Vol 17, Issue 1, p101
- ISSN
1481-868X
- Publication type
Article