We investigated the French of the first generation of
Montreal Anglophones who had had access to French immersion
schooling. Our aim was to determine the extent to which these
Anglophones had acquired the variable grammar of their Francophone
peers and how that was related to the type of French instruction
received and to the types of exposure to French. In Montreal French, a
subject NP may be “echoed” by a pronoun without emphatic or
contrastive effect. Because this is not a feature of standard French,
Anglophones who learned French primarily in school were not expected to
exhibit it. On the other hand, Anglophones who frequently spent time
with Montreal Francophones were expected to have picked it up. To test
this hypothesis, we used a database of speech from 29 speakers, varying
in their quantity and type of exposure to French. Multivariate analyses
determined the degree of correlation of several linguistic and social
factors (related to type and quantity of exposure to French) to the
presence of a doubled subject. These data were then compared with that
for L1 French. Speakers who were more nativelike with respect to the
rate of subject doubling and effects of linguistic factors were those
who had had more contact with native speakers, especially as
adults.We thank Pierrette Thibault and
Gillian Sankoff for graciously allowing us to use this corpus. The
interviews in French, which provide the linguistic data and some
sociological data, were conducted by Hélène Blondeau,
Marie-Odile Fonollosa, Lucie Gagnon, and Gillian Sankoff. The follow-up
interviews in English, which provide additional sociological data, were
conducted by Naomi Nagy. The authors gratefully acknowledge the
interviewers' work, the helpful comments of two anonymous
reviewers, and the support of a Summer Research Fellowship from the
University of New Hampshire to the first author in 1997.