Abstract
In French, subject doubling is “quite common” (e.g. Nadasdi 1995, Auger 1998, Thibault 1983, Zahler 2014) but in English it is rare (Southard & Muller 1998). Yet when anglophones speak French, they use subject doubling with French patterns (Nagy et al. 2003). In this paper, we analyze subject doubling in English in a bilingual French-English town. Usinga large corpus and statistical modelling, we show that thereis no difference between language groups, and neither sex, education nor job type are significant. The nature of the subject is the major predictor of doubling and there is a significant decrease among middle-aged speakers, suggesting mid-life social pressures on vernacular norms. Although subject doubling is low frequency, it is not stable across generations in the different language origin groups. While subject doubling may be a feature of vernacular dialects more generally, involving marking focus or topic marking as reported in other languages, in Kapuskasing when anglophones use it, they are accommodating to French patterns.
Highlights
In French, subject doubling is “quite common” (e.g. Nadasdi 1995, Auger 1998, Thibault 1983, Zahler 2014) but in English it is rare (Southard & Muller 1998)
Perhaps the most salient of these is SUBJECT DOUBLING, a type of left-dislocation that has been described as a pronominal appositive, where the subject of the clause appears twice
We approached subject doubling using the principle of accountability (Labov 1982: 30), “all occurrences of a given variant are noted, and where it has been possible to define the variable as a closed set of variants, all non-occurrences of the variant in the relevant circumstances”
Summary
The Kapuskasing data exhibits a canonical feature of (Canadian) French, but it is salient among community members when they are speaking English, as in (7) and (8), from anglophone women, aged 24 and 84 years old. Do francophones and anglophones use subject doubling the same way when they speak English? The data in the archive come from over 900 speakers born from 1879 to the early 2000s, ranging in age from 9-100. The communities under investigation range from urban to rural, with a wide variety of population sizes and distances from Toronto, the main urban center of Ontario. They contrast by economic base and nature of the social networks of the community. This permits investigation and insight into language variation across social and geographic space.
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