Hostname: page-component-7b7567c8c-fvjsw Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-14T04:30:51.719Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

When does variation indicate linguistic change in progress?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 October 2008

William J. Ashby
William J. Ashby
Affiliation:
Department of French & Italian, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California, 93106USA
Get accessRights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

It is argued that two variables of Modern French (the negative particle ne and the consonant l of clitic pronouns such as il) are indeed indices of ongoing linguistic change, even though this change appears to be of long duration. This conclusion is based not only on the distribution of the variables in a corpus of natural French discourse, but also on independent linguistic evidence, together with the available historical record. In the absence of adequate ‘real-time’ data, variationist analysis yielding synchronic, “apparent-time” data provides a useful means of charting the drift of the language.

Information

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of French Language Studies , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , March 1991, pp. 1 - 19
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

REFERENCES

Ashby, William J. (1976). The loss of the negative morpheme, ne, in Parisian French. Lingua, 39:119–137.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ashby, William J. (1977). Clitic Inflection in French: An Historical Perspective. Amsterdam: Rodopi.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ashby, William J. (1981). The loss of the negative particle, ne in French: a syntactic change in progress. Language, 57:674–687.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ashby, William J. (1984). The elision of \1\ in French clitic pronouns and articles. In: Ernst, Pulgram (ed.), Romanitas: Studies in Romance Linguistics (Michigan Romance Studies 4). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, pp. 1–16.Google Scholar
Balibar, Renée (1985). L'Ecole de 1880. Le français national: républicain, scolaire, grammatical, primaire. In: Antoine, Gérald and Martin, Robert (eds.), Histoire de langue française, 1880–1914. Paris: Editions du CNRS, pp. 255–293.Google Scholar
Blanche-Benveniste, Claire (1985). Coexistence de deux usages de la syntaxe du français parlé. In: Jean-Claude, Bouvier (ed.), Contacts de langues: Discours oral. Aix-en-Provence: Université de Provence, pp. 201–214.Google Scholar
Blanche-Benveniste, Claire and Jeanjean, Colette (1987). Le Français parlé: Transcription et édition. Paris: Didier.Google Scholar
Bossong, Georg (1981). Séquence et visée. L'Expression positionnelle du thème et du rhème en français parlé. Folia Linguistica, 15:237–252.Google Scholar
Collinet, Jean-Pierre (ed.) (1974). Jean de La Fontaine, Fables. Paris: Gallimard.Google Scholar
Damourette, Jacques and Pichon, Edouard (1911–1940). Des Mots à la pensée. Essai de grammaire de la langue française. Paris: D'Artrey.Google Scholar
Ernst, Gerhard (1985). Gesprochenes Französich zu Beginn des 17. Jahrhunderts: Direkte Rede in Jean Héroards ‘Histoire particulière de Louis XIII’ (1650–1610) (Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für Romanische Philologie, 204). Tübingen: Niemeyer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foulet, Lucien (1968). Petite Syntaxe de l'ancien français. Paris: Champion.Google Scholar
Gray, Floyd (1967). Anthologie de la poésie française du XVe siècle. New York: Irvington.Google Scholar
Gueunier, Nicole, Genouvrier, Emile, and Khomsi, Abdelhamid (1978). Les Français devant la norme; contribution à une étude de la norme du français parlé. Paris: Champion.Google Scholar
Guy, Gregory R. (1988a). Advanced Varbrul analysis. In: Ferrara, Kathleen et al. . (eds.) Language Change and Contact (Proceedings of the Sixteenth Annual Conference on New Ways of Analyzing Variation). Austin: University of Texas Press, pp. 124–136.Google Scholar
Guy, Gregory R. (1988b). Language and social class. In: Newmeyer, Frederick J. (ed.), Language: The Socio-Cultural Context (Linguistics: The Cambridge Survey, vol. IV). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 37–63.Google Scholar
Harris, Martin (1978). The Evolution of French Syntax: A Comparative Approach. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Hausmann, Franz Josef (1979). Wie alt is das gesprochene Französich? Romanische Forschungen, 91:431–444.Google Scholar
Henry, Albert (1967). Chrestomathie de la littérature en ancien français. Bern: Franke.Google Scholar
Horn, Laurence (1989). A Natural History of Negation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Jespersen, Otto (1917). Negation in English and Other Languages. Copenhagen: A. F. Host.Google Scholar
mJournal françis d'Amérique (1988). Et la négation? San Francisco: France Press, Inc. Vol. I, no. 5 (26 02–10 03 1988), p. 1.Google Scholar
Juneau, Marcel and Poirier, Claude (1972). Le Livre de comptes d'un meunier québécois (fin XVII-début XVIIIe). Québec: Laval University Press.Google Scholar
Labov, William (1966). The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Washington: Center for Applied Linguistics.Google Scholar
Labov, William (1972). Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Labov, William (1981). What can be learned about change in progress from synchronic description? In: Sankoff, David and Cedergren, Henrietta J. (eds.), Variation Omnibus. Carbodale and Edmonton: Linguistic Research, Inc., pp. 177–199.Google Scholar
Laks, Bernard (1980). Différentiation linguistique et différentiation sociale: quelques problèmes de sociolinguistique française. Thèse de 3éme Cycle de Linguistique, Université de Paris VIII-Vincennes.Google Scholar
Lass, Roger (1980). On Explaining Language Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Lemieux, Monique and Cedergren, Henrietta J. (1985). Les Tendances dynamiques du français parlé à Montréal, vol. 2. Québec: Government of Québec.Google Scholar
Lewis, Charlton T. and Short, Charles (1969). A Latin Dictionary. Oxford: The Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Micha, Alexandre (ed.) 1969. Michel de Montaigne, Essais. Pairs: Garnier-Flammarion.Google Scholar
Pope, Midred K. (1966). From Latin to Modern French, with Consideration of Anglo-Norma. Manchester: Manchester University Press.Google Scholar
Poplack, Shana and Walker, Douglas (1986). Going through (1) in Canadian French. In: Sankoff, David (ed.), Diversity and Diachrony. Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp. 173–198.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Posner, Rebecca (1985). Post-verbal negation in Non-Standard French: a historical and comparative view. Romance Philology, 39:170–197.Google Scholar
Pulgram, Ernst (1967). Trends and predictions. In: To Honor Roman Jakobson (Janua Linguarum. Series Maior, XXXI, vol. 2). The Hague: Mouton, pp. 1634–1649.Google Scholar
Sankoff, David (1988). Sociolinguistics and syntactic variation. In: Newmeyer, Fredrick J. (ed.), Language: The Socio-cultural Context (Linguistics: The Cambridge Survey, IV). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 140–161.Google Scholar
Sankoff, Gillian, and Vincent, Dianne (1977). L'Emploi productif du ne dans le français parlé à Montréal. Le Français Moderne, 45:243–256.Google Scholar
Sapir, Edward (1921). Language. An Introduction to the Study of Speech. New York: Harcourt, Brace.Google Scholar
Schlieben-Lange, Brigitte (1984). La 'Longue Durée en sociolinguistique des langues romanes. In: Bouvier, Jean-Claude (ed.), Actes du 17e Congrès Internationale de linguistique et philologie romanes (1983), Vol. 5. Aix-en Provence: Université de Provence, pp. 289–297.Google Scholar
Schwegler, Armin (1983). Predicate negation and word-order change: a problem of multiple causation. Lingua, 61:297–334.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Simon, Jean (1973). La Langue écrite de l'enfant. Paris: PUF.Google Scholar
Sneyders de Vogel, Kristoffer (1919). Syntax historique du français. The Hague: Wolters.Google Scholar
Steinmeyer, Georg (1979). Historische Aspekte des ‘Français avancé’. Geneva: Droz.Google Scholar
Sturm, Joachim (1981). Morpho-syntaktische Untersuchungen zur ‘phrase négative’ im gesprochenen Franzözich. Die Negation mit und ohne NE. Frankfurt and Bern: Lang.Google Scholar
Thomas, Adolphe V. (1971). Dictionnaire des difficultés de la langue française. Paris: Larousse.Google Scholar
Valli, André (1983). Un Exemple d'approche du problème des variantes syntaxiques en linguistique diachronique. Recherches sur le français parlé, 5, 125–146.Google Scholar
Vangelas, Claude Favre de (1970). Remarques sur la langue française (1647) (Facsimile Edition of the Original by Jeanne Streicher). Geneva: Slatkine Reprints.Google Scholar
Wanner, Dieter (1987). The Development of Romance Clitic Pronouns: from Latin to Old Romance. Berlin, New York, Amsterdam: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weinrich, Uriel, Labov, William and Herzog, Marvin (1968). Empirical foundations for a theory of language change. In: Lehmann, Winfred P. and Malkiel, Yakov (eds.), Directions for Historical Linguistics. Austin: University of Texas Press, pp. 97–195.Google Scholar