Kastronic, Laura
Email Address
ORCID
Disciplines
2 results
Search Results
Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
Publication Discourse Like in Quebec English(2011-01-01) Kastronic, LauraThis study considers the spread of discourse like in Quebec English. Although several previous studies have examined the pragmatic functions and rate of use of like as a discourse marker, few consider its interaction with the syntactic structure and most focus solely on English-dominant communities. Thus, while D’Arcy (2005) has shown that this discourse feature is spreading systematically throughout the syntactic structure in apparent time in Toronto, it is unknown whether its evolution is as advanced in communities such as Quebec, where English is a minority language, isolated from mainstream varieties. We analyze the rate of use of discourse like in three distinct structural contexts (CP, DP, and vP) by 39 native English speakers from the Quebec English Corpus (Poplack, et al., 2006). Speakers from both Montreal and Quebec City were included in this study since the degree of isolation from mainstream English is arguably greater in the latter. Internal grammatical factors and external factors are also analyzed. The results show that while both Quebec City and Montreal speakers exhibit substantially lower rates than Toronto speakers in their use of like in each of the structural contexts examined, the internal conditioning of like in Quebec English is practically identical to that in Toronto English. These findings only partially support the hypothesis that these speakers’ isolation from mainstream English causes them to lag behind in ongoing change and highlight the complexity involved in the exploration of such a widespread and multifaceted phenomenon.Publication The (North) American English Mandative Subjunctive in the 21st Century: Revival or Remnant?(2014-10-01) Kastronic, Laura; Poplack, ShanaThe English mandative subjunctive has had a checkered history, ranging from extensive use in Old English to near extinction by Late Modern English. Then, in a dramatic (if still unexplained) reversal, it was reported to have revived, notably in American English, a scenario which is now widely endorsed. Observing that most references to this revival are based on the written language, we sought to replicate this result in contemporary North American English speech. Finding little evidence of the mandative subjunctive in contexts where revivalist claims would predict it, we next attempted to contextualize the current situation by tracing the trajectory of the mandative subjunctive back to the 16th century via the speech-like portions of two major corpora of English. Adopting a variationist perspective, we carried out systematic quantitative analyses of the morphological form of verbs embedded under large numbers of mandative subjunctive triggers. Results show that selection of the subjunctive was already both sparse in terms of rate and sporadic in terms of triggers as far back as the Early Modern English speech surrogates investigated, and far from reviving over the course of the 20th century, has remained that way ever since. We implicate methodological inconsistencies, in particular violations of the principle of accountability, in the disparities between the findings reported here and the consensus in the literature with respect to the evolution and current status of the mandative subjunctive in North American English.