Cet Article a pour but d’esquisser la description phonologique d’un dialecte franco-canadien au moyen de la théorie descriptive d’André Martinet.

La Communauté De Maillardville: Histoire. La communauté de Maillardville n’est en réalité ni une ville ni un village, mais plutôt un quartier de la municipalité de Coquitlam, en Colombie Britannique. La municipalité, située à quelque vingt milles de Vancouver, compte 32.000 habitants, d’origine anglaise, suédoise, italienne, allemande, et canadienne-française; ces derniers se sont établis en un groupe homogène d’environ 6.000, dans le coin sud-ouest de la municipalité, pour former Maillardville.

The term ‘paralanguage’ and the corresponding adjective ‘paralinguistic’ are less than ten years old but already they loom large in the study of animal communication. In one sense all non-language communications (kinesics, haptics, as well as “vocalization”) are paralinguistic but this term is now almost exclusively applied to significant, non-linguistic noises made with the vocal tract. Observations of these phenomena are of course quite old. Demosthenes undoubtedly studied “delivery” and “tone of voice.” There are pre-Christian statements on phonology also, but no systematic study of that subject antedates that of Grimm in 1819, and that was a lucky forerunner. Actual investigation of phonology as structure, as patterns in a system, began with Ferdinand De Saussure late in the nineteenth and early in the twentieth century. The first systematic study of paralanguage was by Henry Lee Smith, Jr. in a paper called “The Communication Situation,” mimeographed for the Foreign Service Institute of the United States Department of State in 1950. This was later expanded into “An Outline of Metalinguistic Analysis” in the 1952 Georgetown Round Table Conference on Linguistics and Language Study. Smith did not use the term ‘paralanguage,’ however, but ‘vocalization,’ subdivided into ‘vocal qualifiers’ and ‘vocal modifiers.’ Paralanguage became established with the most complete study to date, the 1958 article by George L. Trager “Paralanguage: A Preliminary Statement.” Other writers in the field are Norman A. McQuown and Charles F. Hockett. This study is more systematic than that of Smith and less complex than that of Trager. The infancy of the field, I think, warrants various approaches.

This paper is an attempt to explore once more the relationship between literary study and linguistics. We think such an attempt is useful in itself, and particularly called for on the Canadian literary and linguistic scene where the divorce between critics and linguists still seems to be fully in force. We hope to have something to say to those linguists who neither welcome nor wish to perpetuate the temporary tactical withdrawal from the domain of meaning which occurred some decades ago in North American linguistics. We also wish to reach those literary critics who do not rely exclusively on the cultivation of intuition and who do not refuse, as a matter of principle, the formulation of systematic and verifiable statements about their work. Both literary study and linguistics deal, to a very large extent, and in their most pertinent and most difficult aspects, with the same set of phenomena. There is no need here to trace the long history of the linguistics-literary study opposition. It is enough to say that this dichotomy represents the partial perpetuation of certain language-literature, science-art, form-content dualisms, and that in spite of its continuing acceptance in practice (sceptics are invited to glance at a few issues of Modern Language journals, or even at most of the University calendars), this dichotomy is neither necessary nor philosophically tenable.