Cynthia A

Wednesday 16:00-16:30
Phonosyntactic Restructuring of Gender in Franco-American French
Cynthia Fox & Gregg Castellucci
In this paper, we examine variation in gender marking in Franco-American, a variety of French
was brought from Canada to the northeastern United States in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. Although still spoken in many communities, it is no longer being transmitted to
younger generations and is now used primarily by older speakers in home settings (reference
omitted). Our data comes from sociolinguistic interviews with 90 French speakers from three
different communities.
In French, overt gender marking is present in the oral forms of certain types of descriptive
adjectives (canadien/canadienne; français/française) and in the singular forms of the definite
(le/la), indefinite (un/une) demonstrative (ce/ cette) and possessive (mon/ma) determiners. In an
earlier analysis, it was shown that a trend toward the generalization of the masculine, vowel-final
adjectival form that has been widely documented in other varieties of North American French
(Hull 1956; Péronnet 1989; Niederehe 1991, inter alia) only obtains in Franco-American when
the adjective is in predicate or post-nominal position, and that simplification is most likely to
occur when the final segment of the adjective is an oral consonant: elle était prêt, la messe
français (reference omitted).
In this paper, we extend the analysis to show that when adjectives appear pre-nominally, the
trend is in the opposite direction, namely toward the generalization of the feminine adjective
whose final segment is an oral consonant: les dernières quinze ans, un petite voisinage. Our
hypothesis that these trends are the result of phonosyntactic processes rather than morphological
simplifications is supported by the behavior of adjectives whose final syllable contains a nasal
vowel : (certain/certaine ; différent/différente) In these cases, the « simplification » is in the
direction of the « masculine » form (certains prières ; différents choses), a behavior that mirrors
that of the possessive determiners (mon mère).
] before nouns and adjectives beginning with a vowel (un école ; un
autre femme) lend further support to our analysis.
Works cited
Hull, Alexander. 1956. "The French Canadian Dialect of Windsor, Ontario: a Preliminary
Study," Orbis 5:35-60.
Niederehe, Hans-Josef. 1991. "Quelques aspects de la morphologie du franco-terreneuvienne." In
Horiot (dir): Français du Canada--français de France. Tubingen: Max Verlag, Pp. 161172.
Péronnet, Louise. 1889. Le parler acadien du Sud-Est du Nouveau Brunswick: éléments
grammaticaux et lexicaux. New York: Peter Lang