000 02060cam a2200193 4500500
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041 _afre
042 _adc
100 1 0 _aBrasseur, Patrice
_eauthor
245 0 0 _aThe Regularization of Verbal Paradigms in Newfoundland French
260 _c2009.
500 _a41
520 _aThis article is about Newfoundland French, a variety of Acadian French spoken in the peninsula of Port-au-Port in Newfoundland (Canada). The corpus is made up of recordings of interviews made between 1981 and 1998, with 53 native speakers, all bilingual, who had had no exposure to French as a taught language, and were then aged over 40. The verb morphology of Newfoundland French (present indicative, imperfect, future and present subjunctive) is used to throw light on the more or less successful attempts at systemic regularization of a variety of French, far from normative pressure, within the theoretical framework of Chaudenson, Mougeon and Beniak (1993). Certain rules are tentatively described and it is shown, for example, that the commonest verbs are also the most irregular. The underlying tendency of Newfoundland French, under the influence of syntactic and phonetic factors, towards a system potentially presenting a single form for each verb tense, does not however eliminate the many exceptional forms, which are presented here. The multiplicity of forms encountered among the speakers seems to represent a transitory phase in language development preceding normalization. This situation is a result of the maintenance of older diachronic stages within a variety transmitted in purely spoken form up to the present day, and not to the disorder which precedes language death, as the small number of speakers may also lead one to suppose.
690 _aNewfoundland French
690 _averb morphology
690 _aAcadian French
786 0 _nLangage et société | o 127 | 1 | 2009-03-09 | p. 85-102 | 0181-4095
856 4 1 _uhttps://shs.cairn.info/journal-langage-et-societe-2009-1-page-85?lang=en&redirect-ssocas=7080
999 _c513472
_d513472