Frequency effects on the evolution of discourse markers in spoken vs. written French
(2009) International Corpus Linguistics Conference (CL 2009) — Location: University of Liverpool, United Kingdom (21.July.2009)
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- The current paper discusses the role of frequency effects in the domain of language variation and language change (Bybee 2003; Diessel 2007), with particular attention to differences between spoken and written language (Chafe & Danielewicz 1987). The following questions will be addressed: How do spoken and written modes interact with each other in the grammaticalization process? Are uses in spoken language the mirror of what we could expect for the future in writing? The question is not new, but needs systematic analyses. The aim of the paper is thus to explore the extent to which evolution of frequent linguistic phenomena may be predicted from their observed frequency in use. Conversely, it also focuses on how the variation of such phenomena in contemporary French can be explained by their diachronic evolution. To shed some light on these issues, we analyzed two types of pragmatic markers in French: (i) the parenthetical constructions tu vois (‘you see’) and tu sais (‘you know’); and (ii) the causal conjunctions car and parce que (‘because’).We argue that the historical functional shift from the conceptual domain to the pragmatic/causal domain (Traugott 1982) of these elements could be interpreted as a consequence of the primacy of spoken uses at a given stage of language evolution. According to the criteria of corpus design in diachronic studies, we investigate corpora which are comparable in size and register, and that have a continuous history across periods. Diachronic data consist in fictional prose and “speech-based” texts taken from drama – these latter being so far recognized to be the most consistent “spoken-like” register for face-to-face conversations. First, the evolution from non-parenthetical uses – with que (‘that’) complementation – to parenthetical uses, typical of spoken language (Dehé & Wichmann, to appear), will be explored with respect to their context of production. A preliminary analysis shows an increase in frequency of both tu vois (‘you see’) and tu sais (‘you know’) in literature (from infrequent in Classical French to frequent in Contemporary French) and in drama (from frequent in Classical French to highly frequent in Contemporary French). According to the cline of subjectification in language change, these results allow for two hypotheses: (i) we expect a higher frequency of non-parenthetical constructions (objective uses) in written vs. “speech-like” French at any historical period; (ii) at the same time, we expect an increase over time in the frequency of parentheticals (subjective uses) as they undergo a grammaticalization process, mainly in “speech-based” corpora. Secondly, the reversed frequency evolution of car (from highly frequent in Old French to dramatically infrequent in Contemporary spoken French) and parce que (from infrequent in Old French to highly frequent in Spoken French) is analyzed in terms of different subjectification patterns for the two conjunctions. Parce que shows an increasing cline of subjective uses, typical of spoken language, while car (being subjective from Old French on) does not show this evolution that makes it particularly fit to (renewed) use in spoken contexts, leading to its quasi disappearance from speech, and probable specialization to restricted (written) genres.
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Bolly, C., & Degand, L. (2009). Frequency effects on the evolution of discourse markers in spoken vs. written French. International Corpus Linguistics Conference (CL 2009), University of Liverpool, United Kingdom. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/241832