Left dislocation, number marking, and (non-)standard French

Ruth King & Terry Nadasdi

Sat. 9:00-10:40 B

The grammatical status of French subject clitic pronouns has been the topic of much debate in current syntax. On the one hand, some propose that these elements are simple clitics (cf. Zwicky 1977) that occupy the same syntactic position as full NPs, and should be distinguished from the subject clitics of northern Italian dialects such as Trentino and Fiorentino which are true verbal affixes (cf. Rizzi 1986, Brandi & Cordin 1989). Crucial evidence for this distinction concerns the occurrence of doubled subjects. In Standard French, lexical NPs and subject clitics can co-occur only in left dislocation structures. Thus (1) is grammatical but (2) is not:

(1) Marie, elle parle français. / "Marie, she speaks French."

(2) *Marie elle parle français. /"Marie she speaks French."

However, in the northern Italian dialects the subject clitic necessarily accompanies full NPs, as shown by (3) and (4):

(3) La Maria la parla trentino. / "Marie she speaks Trentino."

(4) *La Maria __ parla trentino. / "Maria speaks Trentino."

It has also been argued that Colloquial French patterns with the northern Italian dialects, i.e., subject clitics in these varieties are verbal affixes, not syntactic subjects (cf. Roberge & Vinet 1989, Zribi-Hertz 1993, Auger 1995). Again, subject doubling facts are a crucial diagnostic in that examples such as (2) are grammatical in those varieties of Colloquial French reported on in the literature. Indeed the generalization is often made that all colloquial varieties of French allow (2). However, King & Nadasdi (1995) apply a set of diagnostics drawn from the literature to data from a particular nonstandard variety, Atlantic Canada Acadian French, and provide strong evidence that its subject clitics must be analyzed as syntactic subjects, just as in the case of Standard French. Unlike other colloquial varieties of French reported on, Acadian does not allow subject doubling, shown in (2), but only left dislocation, as shown in (1).

This paper addresses the question of why Acadian French (unlike other colloquial varieties, including other Canadian varieties) would pattern with the standard variety of the language. We begin with a quantitative (GoldVarb2) analysis of the co-occurrence of lexical NPs and subject pronouns in two recently-collected Canadian sociolinguistic corpora, one for the Newfoundland variety of Acadian French and the other for French of Hawkesbury, Ontario. We see that lexical NP and subject clitic combinations occur with virtually the same frequency across all persons and numbers in the Acadian corpus but that in the Ontario French corpus they are much more prevalent in the third person. Why might this be the case? Third person singular and plural is always distinct in Acadian, due to the presence of the traditional dialectal suffix -ont marking plurality on the verb (e.g. il arrive [ilariv] 'he arrives'; il arrivont [ilarivõ] 'they arrive'). In Ontario French, and in other colloquial varieties of French described in the literature, the third person singular and plural are homophonous (e.g. Ontario French il arrive [jariv] 'he arrives'; il arrivent [jariv] 'they arrive'). Standard French patterns with Acadian French in that it retains a third person number distinction, in this case through the presence of a liaison element (e.g. il arrive [ilariv] 'he arrives'; ils arrivent [ilzariv] 'they arrive'). We suggest that this person asymmetry in terms of relative frequency of lexical NP plus subject clitic combinations will occur in varieties in which number distinction is not recoverable from the verbal complex.

The synchronic analysis leads us to propose a historical explanation for the differential status of subject clitics across modern-day varieties of French. We argue that when colloquial varieties of French lost the third person number distinction, speakers began to use more doubled structures in the third person, most likely left dislocations, in order to disambiguate singular and plural. This elevated frequency of doubled structures would then have to led to reanalysis of lexical NPs as syntactic subjects and of subject clitics as verbal affixes. Such a development, we argue, did not take place in either Acadian French or Standard French because both continued to mark number on the verb, albeit in different ways.