Semantic and Pragmatic Issues in the Analysis of Grammatical Variation in French

Abstract

Interest in grammatical variation in spoken French has increased substantially in recent years, and in this article I will examine how aspects of the 'problem of meaning' have been tackled with regard to a range of the variables examined within variationist sociolinguistics. It is worth highlighting at the outset one of the main objectives of sociolinguistic research into variation, as this is perhaps not as well known as it should be. Before the middle of the twentieth century, it had generally been assumed that it was impossible to observe linguistic change in progress, and, by implication, to understand fully the mechanisms by which change takes place. This situation altered dramatically with the advent of the variationist paradigm, established by William Labov and others in the 1960s. Detailed analysis of large quantities of tokens of a sociolinguistic variable, drawn from a carefully constructed corpus of speech produced by a representative sample of the population, henceforth enabled researchers to study change in 'apparent time', by observing quantitative differences in the language of comparable age cohorts within a given speech community. The variationist paradigm revolutionised the study of linguistic change, as well as revealing that linguistic variation often correlates both with other social factors such as gender and social class and with aspects of the linguistic context in which variables occur. As is well known, the concept of the sociolinguistic variable was initially applied almost exclusively to phonology, especially in studies of varieties of English. 1 However it was not long before the pioneers of variationist sociolinguistics began to apply their methods to higher linguistic levels, notably morphology and syntax. Trudgill's study of Norwich English, for example, included an analysis of 'the social differentiation of a grammatical feature' the