Terry Nadasdi

The sociolinguistic competence of immersion students

CH. 1 INTRODUCTION CH. 2 METHODOLOGY CH. 3 FINDINGS OF L1 STUDIES CH. 4 RESULTS CH. 5 THE POTENTIAL BENEFITS OF INCREASED FL1 INPUT IN AN EDUCTIONAL CONTEXT CH. 6 CONCLUSION Appendix A: Semi-directed taped interview schedule-including reading passages Appendix B: Student questionnaire survey Appendix C: Objectives of the Ontario Ministry of Education concerning the development of sociolinguistic competence by secondary school French immersion students Appendix D: Results of the GoldVarb analyses of the sociolinguistic variables focused upon in the current research

Back to the Future in Acadian French

Our article presents a variationist analysis of future verb forms in Acadian French. The main variants considered are the inflected future (e.g. je partirai) and the periphrastic future (e.g. je vais partir). The purpose of this study is two- fold: a) it will determine the distribution of these variants and their linguistic correlates; b) it will compare the use of future verb forms with other varieties of French. Our results reveal that the inflected future is used with greater frequency in Acadian French than in other Canadian varieties and that the factors that condition the variable in Acadian are not the same as in other varieties.

Contact-Induced Linguistic Innovations on the Continuum of Language Use: The Case of French in Ontario.

In this paper we present a methodological approach that can be used to determine the likelihood that innovations observed in a minority language are the result of language contact. We then use this methodological approach to frame a discussion of data concerning eight innovations that can be attributed to transfer from the majority language (English) to the French of Francophones residing in the province of Ontario in Canada. This discussion shows, notably, how systemic and extra-systemic factors play a role in the emergence of these innovations. We also demonstrate that there are interesting differences in the extent to which these innovations are used across speaker groups and communities, and we argue that such differences suggest that there are thresholds of language contact associated with the emergence, or lack thereof, of particular transfer-induced innovations.

Acquisition of the internal and external constraints of variable schwa deletion by French Immersion students

Abstract This article is one among a series of studies on the acquisition of patterns of linguistic variation observable in the speech of native speakers of Canadian French by French immersion (FI) students. The present study is centred on deletion of the central vowel schwa, a widespread feature of casual spoken French. In this study, FI students are compared with same age native speakers of Ontario French. Our study has arrived at the following main findings: (i) FI students delete schwa much less frequently than do the speakers of Ontario French; (ii) FI students observe the same phonetic constraints that influence schwa deletion in native Ontario French; (iii) FI students do not observe the constraint of topic formality which is observable in native Ontario French; and (iv) FI students who have had extracurricular contacts with native speakers of French display higher rates of schwa deletion than the FI students who have not had such contacts.

Subject NP Doubling, Matching and Minority French

ii^BAOIBC LluKAiuCu Our study presents a variationist analysis of subject doubling in the French of Ontario, Canada. Two principal variants are distinguished: a non-doubled variant and a doubled variant containing a clitic agreement marker. In our analyses, both linguistic and social factors are taken into account and analyzed using GOLDVARB2. It is proposed that subject clitics are marked for default features, and that the doubled variant is favored when the clitics default features match those of the subject NP; lack of matching favors the non-doubled variant. Discussion of linguistic factors for the present study, therefore, is limited to those factors which can be explained in terms of matching. The principal social factor studied is restricted language use (cf. Mougeon & Beniak, 1991). Our results show that the greater the restriction, the fewer doubled subjects one finds. Subject doubling constructions (hereafter SD) in French have recently received a great deal of attention within the various subparadigms of generative grammar and variationist studies (cf. Auger, 1991; Carroll, 1982; Ossipov, 1990; Roberge, 1990; Roberge & Vinet, 1989; Sankoff, 1982). Still, few have attempted to verify their findings on a large body of spoken speech or to take into account both linguistic and social factors. Furthermore, there has been no attempt to examine the correlations between subject clitic doubling and minority language restriction. The present study not only concentrates on this latter domain, but also serves to demonstrate the need for, and advantages of, quantitative approaches to linguistic constraints on doubling phenomena. We show, for example, that contextual factors involving the matching of features like [±specific] and [±subject] between a clitic and a subject NP are often quantitative rather than categorical. The relevance of such features has been suggested in previous work on formal syntax, but their variable effect °n SD has remained unexplored and, as such, poorly understood.

First-person plural in Prince Edward Island Acadian French: The fate of the vernacular variant je...ons

In Atlantic Canada Acadian communities, definite on is in competition with the traditional vernacular variant je ...o ns(e.g., on parle vs. je parlons “we speak”), with the latter variant stable only in isolated communities, but losing ground in communities in which there is substantial contact with external varieties of French. We analyze the distribution of the two variants in two Prince Edward Island communities that differ in terms of amount of such contact. The results of earlier studies of Acadian French are confirmed in that je ...o nsusage remains robust in the more isolated community but is much lower in the less isolated one. However, in the latter community, the declining variant, while accounting for less than 20% of tokens for the variable, has not faded away. Although it is not used at all by some speakers, it is actually the variant of choice for others, and for still other speakers, it has taken on a particular discourse function, that of indexing narration. Comparison with variation in the third-person plural, in which a traditional variant is also in competition with an external variant, shows that the decline of je ...o nsis linked to its greater saliency, making it a prime candidate for social reevaluation.

Left dislocation, number marking. and (non-)standard French

In this paper we consider the behavior ofsubject clitics in a highly conservative variety of Acadian French spoken in Newfoundland, Canada. Following Rizzi (1986) and Brandt and Cordin (1989), we distinguish between affixal (e.g. Trentino, Quebec French) and non-qffixal (e.g. Standard French) subject clitics. We apply a sei of diagnostics drawnfrom the Romance literature and find that,for this particular feature, the Newfoundland variety patterns like Standard French and not like other v aneues ofCanadian French, that is, subject clitics behave like syntactic subjects. We argue that historical developments related to number marking have resulted in crossdialectal Variation in French subject clitic Systems. This conclusion is supported by the quantitative analysis ofsubject clitic use in present-day French dialects.

Contact-induced linguistic innovations on the continuum of language use: The case of French in Ontario - CORRIGENDUM

In this paper we present a methodological approach that can be used to determine the likelihood that innovations observed in a minority language are the result of language contact. We then use this methodological approach to frame a discussion of data concerning eight innovations that can be attributed to transfer from the majority language (English) to the French of Francophones residing in the province of Ontario in Canada. This discussion shows, notably, how systemic and extra-systemic factors play a role in the emergence of these innovations. We also demonstrate that there are interesting differences in the extent to which these innovations are used across speaker groups and communities, and we argue that such differences suggest that there are thresholds of language contact associated with the emergence, or lack thereof, of particular transfer-induced innovations. The theoretical concept of INTERFERENCE has attracted more than its share of criticism. In our view, the generally ‘bad press’ it has received is not due to a flaw in the theory that languages in contact may influence one another – no serious linguist would deny this fact – but rather to the lack of an adequate methodology (and to some extent also to ideological bias). For instance, in the fields of historical linguistics, minority languages, pidgins and Creoles and second language learning, one can find studies that have hastily and erroneously attributed instances of language change or interlanguage errors to language contact and that have downplayed or ignored alternative internal explanations. As a result, the factor of language contact has come to be held with much suspicion by many linguists and some have even elected to demonstrate that it plays only a marginal role as a source of variation and change in situations of societal bilingualism and language contact. While such a demonstration may be motivated on theoretical grounds, it may also reflect a hidden bias on the part of some linguists, because of the stigma that is attached to contact-induced innovations especially when they are documented in minority speech varieties. In the words of Klein-Andreu (p.c.): “the reason for [neglecting contact] is a kind of covert purism: the results of transfer are considered undesirable or ‘bad’; therefore they are ignored or seriously downplayed, as a kind of courtesy to the population under study”. We believe that there has been an overreaction against the notion of contact phenomena in linguistics and one of the goals of the * We would like to thank the anonymous reviewer of a previous version