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Vestiges from the grammaticalization path: The expression of future temporal reference in Acadian French1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2014

PHILIP COMEAU
PHILIP COMEAU*
Affiliation:
Université du Québec à Montréal
*
Address for correspondence: Département de linguistiqueUniversité du Québec à MontréalC.P. 8888, Succursale Centre-Ville Montréal QC H3C 3P8Canada e-mail: comeau.philip@uqam.ca
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Abstract

This study presents a variationist analysis of the expression of future temporal reference (variation between the inflected future and the periphrastic future) in a linguistically conservative variety of Acadian French spoken in Baie Sainte-Marie, Nova Scotia, Canada. Results show that Acadian French is distinct from Laurentian French and that the Baie Sainte-Marie variety also differs from other Acadian varieties in some respects. A comparison of the distribution of variants and of the conditioning factors reveals that Acadian and Laurentian varieties have different future temporal reference systems. The Baie Sainte-Marie variety retains vestiges of earlier stages of the grammaticalization of one of the variants, the periphrastic future, not found in other Acadian varieties, thus supporting its characterization as a conservative variety.

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Articles
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Journal of French Language Studies , Volume 25 , Issue 3 , November 2015 , pp. 339 - 365
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

1

Acknowledgements: Thanks to Gary R. Butler for granting me access to the Butler Grosses Coques Sociolinguistic Corpus and to Michelle Daveluy for granting me access to the Corpus acadien de la Nouvelle-Écosse. I thank Rick Grimm, Ruth King, France Martineau, Joseph Roy, and three anonymous reviewers for extensive comments on earlier versions of this paper. Thanks also to Raymond Mougeon for comments and discussion. All errors are my own. This research was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and also by the project Le français à la mesure d’un continent : un patrimoine en partage under the directorship of France Martineau and supported through a Major Collaborative Research Initiative grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

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