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Collocational and Lexical Frequency Effects on Language Change: Variation in Acadian French Sentential Negative Markers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2026

Philip Comeau
Philip Comeau*
Affiliation:
Département de linguistique, Université du Québec à Montréal, P.O. Box 8888, Station Centre-Ville, Montreal QC H3C 3P8, Canada
*
[comeau.philip@uqam.ca]
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Abstract

This study considers how lexical frequency effects and collocations help shape a case of language change in progress. The case of change involves the sentential negative markers point and pas in Acadian French. While point has been lost from most contemporary spoken varieties of French, it has been retained in conservative varieties of Acadian French. Quantitative analyses of one such variety show that point is replacing the pas variant, with the youngest speakers making almost exclusive use of point. Furthermore, the analysis shows how lexical frequency effects and collocations help us understand the evolution of constraints operating on the variable.

Keywords

negationfrequencycollocationpartitivepseudopartitiveAcadian French

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Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 101 , Issue 2 , June 2025, pp. 321 - 350
Copyright
Copyright © Linguistic Society of America 2025

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Footnotes

*

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 49th New Ways of Analyzing Variation conference, at the 2021 annual meeting of the Canadian Linguistic Association, and as the keynote address at the 2021 York University Graduate Symposium in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics. I thank audience members for comments and suggestions. I also thank the Language editors as well as two anonymous referees for comments, which greatly improved this paper. All errors are my own. Data collection and transcription of the Corpus de Par-en-Bas 2016–2017, the Lettres acadiennes corpus, and the Massignon recordings were financed by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The Corpus de Par-en-Bas 2016–2017 was constructed thanks to a partnership with the Musée des Acadiens des Pubnicos et Centre de recherche Père Clarence d'Entremont. Data for the Lettres acadiennes corpus were collected in collaboration with France Martineau and financed in part by her Major Research Collaborative Initiative Les français à la mesure d'un continent, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

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