8 Contact as alignment: community norms in bilingual Ontario, Canada
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Sali Tagliamonte
Abstract
In Northern Ontario, Canada, Anglophones and Francophones have been living together in a situation of long-term contact since colonial settlement; however, over the 20th century the socio-cultural ecology has changed dramatically. Where once Francophones were in the minority and held mostly blue-collar jobs, they have increasingly entered white collar professions, populations have increased, and bilingualism has become the norm. In this study, I provide an overview of a research project studying this contact situation focusing on two characteristic linguistic features of English that are characteristic of French: subject doubling (Maurice he couldn’t talk a word of French) and non-locative use of adverbs in utterance final position (I like your outfit there). Using comparative sociolinguistic techniques, mixed effects models and conditional inference trees I assess the impact of social and linguistic factors on the use of these features. For subject doubling, analysis of parallel samples from Anglophones and Francophones revealed no difference in the frequency of subject doubling and sex, education and job type were not significant. For discourse-pragmatic there, the strongest predictor is date of birth, but no other social factors are significant. The two phenomena share many patterns: both are favoured among middle-aged speakers and are linguistically constrained demonstrating that they are vernacular norms of Northern Ontario English. Where it is possible to directly compare Anglophones and Francophones, both groups pattern similarly. Further, discourse pragmatic there is most frequent in communities with a higher proportion of Francophones. A reasonable explanation is grammatical convergence; however, while both features are typical of French, they are also attested in English from earlier times. I argue that the explanation for these results is socially driven alignment, the process by which cultural values are embodied in the frequency and patterns of variant choice, the result of positively evaluated local interaction.
Abstract
In Northern Ontario, Canada, Anglophones and Francophones have been living together in a situation of long-term contact since colonial settlement; however, over the 20th century the socio-cultural ecology has changed dramatically. Where once Francophones were in the minority and held mostly blue-collar jobs, they have increasingly entered white collar professions, populations have increased, and bilingualism has become the norm. In this study, I provide an overview of a research project studying this contact situation focusing on two characteristic linguistic features of English that are characteristic of French: subject doubling (Maurice he couldn’t talk a word of French) and non-locative use of adverbs in utterance final position (I like your outfit there). Using comparative sociolinguistic techniques, mixed effects models and conditional inference trees I assess the impact of social and linguistic factors on the use of these features. For subject doubling, analysis of parallel samples from Anglophones and Francophones revealed no difference in the frequency of subject doubling and sex, education and job type were not significant. For discourse-pragmatic there, the strongest predictor is date of birth, but no other social factors are significant. The two phenomena share many patterns: both are favoured among middle-aged speakers and are linguistically constrained demonstrating that they are vernacular norms of Northern Ontario English. Where it is possible to directly compare Anglophones and Francophones, both groups pattern similarly. Further, discourse pragmatic there is most frequent in communities with a higher proportion of Francophones. A reasonable explanation is grammatical convergence; however, while both features are typical of French, they are also attested in English from earlier times. I argue that the explanation for these results is socially driven alignment, the process by which cultural values are embodied in the frequency and patterns of variant choice, the result of positively evaluated local interaction.
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Frontmatter I
- Acknowledgements
- Contents VII
- 1 Introduction 1
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Part I: Historical language contact: focus on diachrony and typology
- 2 Towards a reductionist view of language contact effects 7
- 3 Towards an integrated account of the history of Northern Samoyedic 23
- 4 Language contact in South Asia — typology meets diachrony 55
- 5 Albanian of Western Thrace: contact, areal convergence, and ideology in the past and the present 85
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Part II: Historical language contact: focus on bilingualism
- 6 Language contact effects, (bi)directionality and feature interpretability: morphosyntactic data across domains in Greek/Vlach Aromanian bilinguals 111
- 7 A situationally based model of language and (trans)languaging in multilingual ecologies 135
- 8 Contact as alignment: community norms in bilingual Ontario, Canada 171
- Index
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Frontmatter I
- Acknowledgements
- Contents VII
- 1 Introduction 1
-
Part I: Historical language contact: focus on diachrony and typology
- 2 Towards a reductionist view of language contact effects 7
- 3 Towards an integrated account of the history of Northern Samoyedic 23
- 4 Language contact in South Asia — typology meets diachrony 55
- 5 Albanian of Western Thrace: contact, areal convergence, and ideology in the past and the present 85
-
Part II: Historical language contact: focus on bilingualism
- 6 Language contact effects, (bi)directionality and feature interpretability: morphosyntactic data across domains in Greek/Vlach Aromanian bilinguals 111
- 7 A situationally based model of language and (trans)languaging in multilingual ecologies 135
- 8 Contact as alignment: community norms in bilingual Ontario, Canada 171
- Index
