Grammatical collocations and verb-particle constructions in Brussels French: a corpus-linguistic approach to transfer

Abstract

This article shows how a corpus-linguistic approach to transfer based on Jarvis (2000), Jarvis and Pavlenko (2008) and Mougeon, Nadasdi, and Rehner (2005) can help to disentangle internal and external explanations in language variation and change. The focus of the study is on grammatical collocations (Granger & Paquot, 2008) such as chercher après 'to search for' and verb-particle constructions (VPCs) such as recevoir dehors 'to get out' in Brussels French. The occurrence of such patterns in Romance varieties is often linked to contact with Germanic varieties, in which VPCs are common. This article discusses the syntactic and semantic properties of both types of constructions and argue they are to be considered as replications of grammatical use patterns (Heine & Kuteva, 2005) from the contact language, the regional variety of Dutch. Proof for covert transfer from Dutch is found through a detailed comparison of the frequency of the patterns in a range of spoken and written corpora.

Particle Placement in Learner Language

“…We labeled the 17 L1s in our data sample as equipollent, satellite‐framed, or verb‐framed based on existing classification in Egan (), Iacobini and Masini (), Liao and Fukuya (), Montero‐Melis et al. (), Pasanen and Pakkala‐Weckström (), Treffers‐Daller (), and Yasuda () to create three language families. The only equipollent language in our data sample was Chinese; satellite‐framed languages included Bulgarian, Czech, Dutch, Finnish, German, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish; and we classified French, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Tswana, and Turkish as verb‐framed languages.…”

Exploring a Loan Translation and Its Consequences in an Oral Bilingual Corpus

“…Different heuristics for classifying a change as contact-induced have been proposed in contact linguistics. These can be roughly categorized along three planes: criteria of linguistic similarity, of distribution across corpora, and of degree of contact (Thomason, 2001;Mougeon, Nadasdi, and Rehner, 2005;Poplack and Levey, 2010;Treffers-Daller, 2011). The test of linguistic similarity requires that there be a feature in the recipient language that manifests similar properties to the source language and that the feature at issue be unconventional for the recipient language.…”

“…Whereas much of the empirical work in corpus-based approaches to contact has been conducted in the variationist sociolinguistic tradition of Labov (1972), Treffers-Daller (2011 advocates for a frequency-based comparative approach to transfer in her study of the effect of Dutch on Brussels French particle verb constructions. Her method is founded on comparing the probability that an unconventional construction appears in the contact corpus relative to non-contact corpora.…”

Particle Verbs in the Surinamese Creoles

“…Treffers-Daller (2012) has studied PV constructions and other collocations of verb + preposition in French as spoken in Brussels. PV constructions pose a number of interesting theoretical problems, on which little consensus has been reached.…”