Nathalie Rossi-Gensane

Syntactic variation in spoken French

This chapter is dedicated to the syntax of spoken French. Section 1, which focuses on ‘orality’, presents some phenomena related to ‘oral’ situational parameters with reference to spoken French: speech production processes, ‘ellipsis’, the use of deictics, and discourse markers. Section 2 considers whether we speak in sentences or not, and examines the use of tenses, moods, and voices in spoken French, the frequent non-use of negative ne, as well as the use of interrogative constructions. Section 3, entitled ‘Between syntax and discourse’, evokes the so-called ‘syntax of spoken French’, and mentions some preferred constructions in spoken French, i.e. left detachment (or dislocation) and presentational structures, before closing with a brief reflection on whether spoken French can be considered as an illustration of syntactic variation.

French in Haute Garonne (Midi-Pyrénées): a speaker from Toulouse

This chapter illustrates the variety of French in the Midi-Pyrenees region, more precisely in its capital, Toulouse in the Haute-Garonne department, where the selected male speaker was born in 1942 and still lives. The chapter is based on an informal three-party conversation between the speaker, his sister, and his daughter. What emerges is a well-attested phenomenon in southern France: the main speaker’s pronunciation is a conservative accent meridional while at the same time, lexically as well as syntactically, it exhibits absence of strong regional features.