Villeneuve, Anne-José
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Publication A French Spoken Norm under the Radio-Canada Spotlight: Verbal Negation and Quebec Cultural Elites(2017-11-01) Villeneuve, Anne-JoséSeveral studies have analyzed sociolinguistic variation in Quebec French (QF) vernaculars, but few have examined more careful QF speech. This paper examines verbal negation and the variable use of the negative clitic ne in the speech of 32 members of Quebec’s cultural elites during recent (2003–2011) televised sit-down interviews. As a subset of our sample is interviewed in two different settings, one which deals with emotional personal narratives (Un Train corpus) and another in which speakers talk about a more objective topic (Le Point corpus, see Bigot 2008), the comparison between corpora further assesses the status of the negative particle as a stylistic marker. For instance, our analysis of both corpora reveals rates of ne use far superior to those observed in QF vernaculars, as well as a significant effect of address pronoun (formal 2s vous or informal tu) and age. We also show that operative linguistic constraints in our careful QF data are similar to those described in the literature on colloquial French (e.g. effect of collocations and subject type), and remain stable across speaker groups and interview settings. These results indicate that although speakers are aiming towards an elusive ‘standard Quebec French’ (SQF), they are constrained by a cohesive mental grammar even in careful speech. In short, this study fills a gap in the literature by using comparative sociolinguistics methods to provide a more nuanced description of verbal negation in ‘standard Quebec French’ (SQF), one which measures the relative effect of social, stylistic and linguistic factors.Publication Morphophonological Variation in Haitian Creole: the Case of 3SG(2013-10-17) Villeneuve, Anne-José; Siegel, Jason F.; Valdman, AlbertAmong French-based creole languages, Haitian Creole is the one with the highest degree of standardization. The written norm, Standard Haitian Creole (SHC), is based on the speech of monolinguals of the capital area, Port-au-Prince, rather than on the variety (kreyòl swa) of the politically and economically powerful Creole–French bilingual minority. For instance, the front rounded vowels and postvocalic /r/ of the latter are absent from SHC, which is spreading to the rest of the country through the media and the educational system. In order to evaluate the diffusion of SHC, a sociolinguistic study of Northern Haitian Creole (Capois) was conducted in and around Cape Haitian, whose spoken variety diverges most from SHC. In addition to stereotypical features such as the possessive kin a + pronoun (vs. SHC pa + pronoun), we uncovered several Capois features—some of which were first described in Étienne (1974)—still in widespread use in Northern Haiti. In this article, we focus on the most frequently occurring variable, the third person singular pronoun (3SG), which alternates between SHC li/l, and Capois i/y. Using a corpus of 24 speakers, we show that SHC li has yet to replace Capois i, which is preferred by a large proportion of community members (90%; N=2,823) and used categorically in the existential context i gen ‘there is/are’. For both the rural and urban populations, this variable is conditioned by syntactic and phonological factors. In subject position, the Capois or the full SHC variants are favored before a consonant, while the reduced SHC form l is the only variant favored before a vowel. In object position, Capois and SHC variants are in near perfect complementary distribution: the Capois variant occurs (near-)categorically after a vowel, and SHC variants occur (near-)categorically after a consonant. Despite these shared tendencies, we found a lower rate of Capois variant use in urban speakers, which may be due to their greater exposure to speakers from other areas of Haiti, to the media (especially television), and closer contact with middle class bilingual speakers who are more influencedby the standard emanating from Port-au-Prince.Publication Word-final cluster simplification in Vimeu French: A preliminary analysis(2010-03-21) Villeneuve, Anne-JoséWhile many variationist studies have investigated phonological aspects of North American French varieties in the last three decades, few have focused on regional varieties of European French until recently. In the present study, I examine the simplification of word-final obstruent-liquid (OL) clusters – e.g. table ‘table’ and autre ‘other’ realized as [tab] and [ot] – in Vimeu French, a region of Northern France where French is spoken alongside Picard, a regional Gallo-Roman dialect. Not only does this variety provide us with new data for European French, it also allows us to examine the influence of Picard, a language in which word-final cluster simplification is widespread (Pooley 1996). Using data from a recent Vimeu French corpus, I show that, contrary to previous descriptions of French phonology (Dell 1985), /l/ and /r/ can be deleted not only before consonants and pauses, but also in prevocalic contexts. This extension of the phonological environment in which simplification can occur also characterizes the vernacular French spoken in Roubaix, another Picard-speaking area (Pooley 1996). Differences between age groups in rate of OL simplification and in the ranking of linguistic factors also indicate that Picard may have affected the elders more than younger adults, regardless of their spoken proficiency in Picard.