Cliticization in Newfoundland French

A Sociolinguistic Analysis

Abstract

In this paper some results of a study of variation in clitic pronoun usage in Newfoundland French are described. While the main orientation of the study is sociolinguistic, Labovian techniques developed for a single speech community have been implemented in the four francophone conmunities -- L’Anse-à-Canards/Maisons d'Hiver, Cap St-Georges, La Grand'Terre, and Stephenville -- of western Newfoundland. Thus elements of the dialect geographer's approach have been combined with the methodology current in sociolinguistics. Those results which concern the extralinguistic conditioning of object pronoun cliticization are presented here. Unlike in many other sociolinguistic studies, the social variable sex was not significant. The intracoramunity variable locality was found to be somewhat more important. Age emerged as the most important extralinguistic variable in the study, with younger speakers having lower frequencies of cliticization than older speakers.