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Subject NP doubling, matching, and minority French

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Terry Nadasdi
Terry Nadasdi
Affiliation:
York University
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Abstract

Our study presents a variationist analysis of subject doubling in the French of Ontario, Canada. Two principal variants are distinguished: a non-doubled variant and a doubled variant containing a clitic agreement marker. In our analyses, both linguistic and social factors are taken into account and analyzed using goldvarb2. It is proposed that subject clitics are marked for default features, and that the doubled variant is favored when the clitic's default features match those of the subject NP; lack of matching favors the non-doubled variant. Discussion of linguistic factors for the present study, therefore, is limited to those factors which can be explained in terms matching. The principal social factor studied is restricted language use (cf. Mougeon & Beniak, 1991). Our results show that the greater the restriction, the fewer doubled subjects one finds.

Type
Research Article
Information
Language Variation and Change , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , March 1995 , pp. 1 - 14
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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