This study investigates mood choice for five Acadian French communities in Atlantic Canada which have intertwined settlement histories but which differ in terms of type and degree of dialect contact. The two communities with least contact with supralocal French preserve the highly salient imperfect subjunctive, moribund or absent from most other present-day spoken French varieties. While four communities exhibit high selection rates for the present subjunctive, in line with variationist analyses of other French varieties, one community has surprisingly low rates of such usage, along with absence of the imperfect subjunctive. This dichotomy is explained by the local prestige of the smaller of two founder groups for the community, settlers from Haute-Bretagne, France, a dialect area for which the historical record reveals low levels of subjunctive forms. The results highlight the importance not only of demographic factors but also of local identity construction in the formation of new contact varieties.

This present study contributes to research on the structure of yes-no questions in French. Informed by previous historical linguistic research tracing developments from the Old French period onwards, we focus on qualitative analysis of grammatical commentary and variationist analysis of Acadian French spoken-language data. We compare the evolution of yes-no questions in Acadian, Metropolitan, and Quebec French, reconstructing the history of variants up to the present. While in most cases we encounter slow-moving change, we do find inter-varietal differences in degree of retention of individual variants, including outright loss; in development of stylistic differentiation; and in analogically based innovation. We also find inter-varietal differences in grammatical constraints governing usage and in the fine detail regarding sentential polarity, illuminated in terms of the semantico-pragmatic functions of negative yes-no questions. The overall results underline the importance of considering sociolinguistic histories, including histories of dialect contact, along with local linguistic markets.

This article reports on a synchronic analysis in the surface variation between the conditional and the imperfect or pluperfect indicative in hypothetical clauses headed by the subordinatorsi. The empirical basis of the study is a corpus of French spoken in the national capital region of Canada, which comprises 120 informants. The study also has a diachronic component concerning the evolution of the variable based on a collection of published works since Early Modern French. The most interesting aspect of the results is the system wherein the morphological exponent of the verb is determined by the modal reading of the utterance. It is revealed that this grammatical trait was attested at earlier steps in the development of the language and that it helps to resolve a form-function asymmetry resulting from use of the indicative imperfect in a conditional context.

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