Wednesday 10:00-10:30 Back in Time and Space: The Linguistic

Wednesday 10:00-10:30
Back in Time and Space: The Linguistic Trajectory of an Old Borrowing
Ruth King
French varieties spoken in contact with English typically display some degree of
integration of the English intransitive preposition back. Through a combination of traditional
dialectology, comparative sociolinguistics and recent syntactic theory, I trace its use in Acadian,
Laurentian and Louisiana French from its earliest (1890) attestation through to its use in
recently-constructed sociolinguistic corpora.
In (1), back is used with the same locative meaning and in the same position as it is in
English. Following Mougeon et al’s (1980) analysis of such data, I link the rise of back to the
gradual loss in productivity of the re- suffix (e.g. revenir “to come back”, refaire “to do again”) in
the history of French.
(1)
Il s’en vient back où ce-qu’était la vielle. (Nova Scotia; Aucoin 1953)
“He comes back to where the old woman was.”
In situations of intense language contact, back takes on an iterative meaning, as shown in (2):
(2)
J’ai commencé à refumer back. (Lousiana; Rottet 2000)
“I started smoking again.”
In some varieties, iterative back has been reanalyzed as an adverb, occupying the same
syntactic positions as aspectual adverbs like souvent “often”, illustrated in (3) and (4):
Il m’a back frappé. (Southeast New Brunswick; Perrot 1995)
(3)
“He hit me again.”
(4)
Veux-tu back faire ça? (Prince Edward Island; King 2000)
“Do you want to do it again?”
Syntactic reanalysis may also extend to locative back, as shown in (5), even though Frenchorigin locative adverbs do not precede the past participle or the infinitive.
(5)
Il a back amené la tape. (Nova Scotia; Comeau 2007)
“He brought back the tape.”
On the basis of both interdialectal comparisons and intradialectal real and apparent
time quantitative analyses, I identify five stages in the integration of back, involving variable
presence/absence of the re- suffix, meaning extension and syntactic reanalysis.
References
Aucoin, Gérald-E. 1980/1953. L’oiseau de la vérité et autres contes de pêcheurs de l’Île du CapBreton, presentés par G.E. Aucoin. Montréal: Quinze.
Comeau, Philip. 2007. The integration of words of English origin in Baie Sainte-Marie Acadian
French. Unpublished M.A. Major Research Paper, York University.
King, Ruth. 2000. The lexical basis of grammatical borrowing. Amsterdam & Philadelphia:
John Benjamins.
Martineau, France. 1995-2007. Corpus de français familier ancien. University of Ottawa.
Mougeon, Raymond, Cora Brent-Palmer, Monique Bélanger & Walter Cicocki. 1980. Le français
parlé en situation minoritaire. Vol. 1 : Emploi et maîtrise du français parlé par les élèves
des écoles de langue française dans les communautés franco-ontariennes minoritaires.
Toronto: Ontario Ministry of Education.
Perrot, Marie-Eve. 1995. Aspects fondamentaux du métissage français/anglais dans le chiac du
Moncton (Nouveau-Brunswick, Canada). Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Université de
la Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris III.
Rottet, Kevin. 2000. The calquing of phrasal verbs in language contact. In Julie Auger & Andrea
Word-Allbritton, eds., The CVC of Sociolinguistics: Contact, Variation, and Culture.
Working Papers in Linguistics Vol. 2. Bloomington, Indiana: IULC, 109-126.