Grammatical convergence or microvariation? Subject doubling in English in a French dominant town

Abstract

In French, subject doubling is “quite common” (e.g. Nadasdi 1995, Auger 1998, Thibault 1983, Zahler 2014) but in English it is rare (Southard & Muller 1998). Yet when anglophones speak French, they use subject doubling with French patterns (Nagy et al. 2003). In this paper, we analyze subject doubling in English in a bilingual French-English town. Usinga large corpus and statistical modelling, we show that thereis no difference between language groups, and neither sex, education nor job type are significant. The nature of the subject is the major predictor of doubling and there is a significant decrease among middle-aged speakers, suggesting mid-life social pressures on vernacular norms. Although subject doubling is low frequency, it is not stable across generations in the different language origin groups. While subject doubling may be a feature of vernacular dialects more generally, involving marking focus or topic marking as reported in other languages, in Kapuskasing when anglophones use it, they are accommodating to French patterns.

Subject dislocation in Ontario English: Insights from sociolinguistic typology

“…Kapuskasing was founded in the 1920s with an economy driven by pulp and paper, which remains the dominant industry (Dunlap, 2017; Town of Kapuskasing, 2010). The community has a strong religious tradition, a bent toward outdoor activities, and close-knit social networks (Tagliamonte & Jankowski, 2019:4).…”

“…(2003:82) included all strong third-person subjects, both pronouns and noun phrases, we restrict the present analysis to noun phrase subjects only. This is because Tagliamonte and Jankowski (2019:4-5) found that noun phrases exhibited a rate of 10% SD ( n = 6828) in Kapuskasing, whereas subjects outside of first- and third-person contexts, as in the second-person in (9), represented little more than 1% of the data.…”

“…Across studies, full noun phrase subjects are found to have the most SD, and proper nouns favor it more than common nouns (e.g., Nagy et al., 2003:88). Tagliamonte and Jankowski (2019) showed that this constraint was operational in Kapuskasing English: SD was more frequent with human subjects than nonhuman subjects. This study categorized third-person noun phrases by type and animacy: proper names (13), other humans (14), collectives of humans (15), organizations (16), animals (17), places (18), and things (19).…”

“…Tagliamonte and Jankowski (2019) reported high levels of SD 2 in the English spoken in Kapuskasing, Ontario, where locals have Anglophone and Francophone 3 heritage language background, and linked this usage to high levels of French-English bilingualism. A quantitative comparative analysis contrasting English-speaking Anglophones and English-speaking Francophones revealed a trend in apparent-time toward increasing SD, and parallelism in its linguistic patterns in the youngest age groups.…”

“…A quantitative comparative analysis contrasting English-speaking Anglophones and English-speaking Francophones revealed a trend in apparent-time toward increasing SD, and parallelism in its linguistic patterns in the youngest age groups. SD was used more among young people of both heritage language cohorts, and their usage patterns conformed to a subject constraint well-known in studies of French (Tagliamonte & Jankowski, 2019). They explained these findings as grammatical alignment (e.g., Chandler, 2007:117-124, 306; Cheshire, 1998:139-140) based in part on a rising proportion of heritage Francophones in the community over the last decades of the twentieth century as well as simultaneous increasing bilingualism of residents regardless of heritage language, suggesting that the origin of SD in the Anglophones was influence from French.…”