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LEXICAL AND GRAMMATICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF A CONTACT-INDUCED VARIETY: A CASE STUDY OF CHIAC

Linguistics , UDC: 81ʹ282 DOI: 10.25688/2619-0656.2020.14.12

Authors

  • Zurabova Lana
  • Borisova Elena Doctor of Philology, Professor

Annotation

The article explores the dialectal features of Acadian French in New Brunswick (NB), Canada. Acadia has been developing as a region with distinctive linguistic and cultural characteristics since the early seventeenth century (1605) after Samuel de Champlain and Pierre Du Gua de Monts discovered Port-Royal (modern-day Nova Scotia). It encompasses the Atlantic provinces including New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and partially Quebec (Gaspésie, Côte-Nord and Îles de la Madeleine). The study focuses on a variety of French known as chiac (or chiaque), spoken in the province of New Brunswick. Despite its limited geographical distribution (south-east of NB), chiac proves to be of interest for research: it is highly variable, mostly spoken, and lexically, semantically, phonetically, and even grammatically influenced by English. Furthermore, it shows signs of language mixing. The author argues that the presented functional and lexical features are partially due to the longlasting language contact in Acadia and a specific sociolinguistic situation within the region. The source of evidence for the present study comes from the analysis of the oral corpus Chiac-Kasparian H99 and the mini-corpus Kasparian-Léger H2004 provided by Dr. Sylvia Kasparian, Head of the Textual Data Analysis Laboratory (Laboratoire d’analyse de données textuelles), University of Moncton. The corpus consists of transcribed spontaneous conversations of the inhabitants of the south-east of New Brunswick. The provided linguistic material comprises an unannotated text corpus, accompanied by partial sociolinguistic data about the speakers, including age, gender, place of study, place of residence, and status of participants to each other. Therefore, our first research step was to carry out the content analysis and subsequently interpret the results. At the initial stages of analysis, the authors annotated the text corpus which enabled them to highlight several distinctive characteristics of chiac, both as a subdialect of Acadian French and as a contact-induced variety, including signs of semantic transformation in both French and borrowed adverbs; dialectal interrogative morphemes -ti / -tu, and preposition stranding. Moreover, the authors postulate variability in verb forms, conjugation system, and functioning of auxiliaries. It must be noted, that the study relies on the theoretical and empirical body of work conducted by L. Peronnet, S. Kasparian, G. Chevalier, R. King, M. Roy, A. Thibault.

Tags:
Acadian dialect , Canada , chiac , corpus analysis , language contact , language variation

How to link insert

Zurabova, L. . & Borisova, E. . (2020). LEXICAL AND GRAMMATICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF A CONTACT-INDUCED VARIETY: A CASE STUDY OF CHIAC Bulletin of the Moscow City Pedagogical University. Series "Pedagogy and Psychology", # 14. 2020, 182-200. https://doi.org/10.25688/2619-0656.2020.14.12
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