Grammatical Variation and Change in Spoken Ontario French: The Subjunctive Mood and the Expression of Future Temporal Reference

This dissertation examines grammatical variation and change in spoken Ontario French, a minority language in a largely English-speaking province of Canada. The data are drawn from two sociolinguistic corpora for French spoken in four francophone communities Hawkesbury, Cornwall, North Bay and Pembroke. The first corpus was constructed in 1978 and the second in 2005; both comprise interviews with speakers residing in the same four communities. The 28-year period separating the corpora provides an opportunity to trace the trajectory of variation and change.

The empirical chapters provide a detailed investigation of two aspects of French grammar: the variable use of the subjunctive mood and the expression of future temporal reference. The analyses of both morphosyntactic variables are carried out within the variationist sociolinguistic framework introduced by William Labov. In terms of conditioning factors, particular emphasis is placed on the influence that varying degrees of restriction in the use of French has on variable usage.

The findings for mood choice show that as language restriction intensifies, use of the subjunctive mood decreases. This is in large part due to a gradual reduction in use of the verb falloir, the most important conditioning context for the subjunctive, to the benefit of devoir, a more formal semantic equivalent. The rise of the latter at the expense of the former suggests a change in certain communities.

A second variable showing evidence of change concerns the expression of future temporal reference. Use of the inflected future decreases over time, but only for speakers exhibiting mid to high levels of language restriction. Loss of this variant results from a rise in use of the periphrastic future in negative contexts, the privileged domain of the inflected variant in many spoken French varieties. For both variables examined here, reduction in verbal morphology can be ascribed to the progressive loss of or breakdown in the conditioning contexts most favourable to its maintenance.

The present study contributes not only to our understanding of grammatical variation and change in Canadian varieties of French, but also to the growth of research on language variation and change in minority languages.