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Building on an old feature in langue d’Oïl: interrogatives in Vimeu Picard

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 July 2019

Julie Auger  and
Anne-José Villeneuve
Julie Auger*
Affiliation:
Université de Montréal
Anne-José Villeneuve
Affiliation:
University of Alberta
*
Corresponding author. Email: julie.auger.4@umontreal.ca
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Abstract

Picard faces challenges in its quest for recognition, in part due to its perceived similarity with French. While scholars recognize that Picard and French phonology, morphology and lexicon differ considerably, some scholars maintain that Picard syntax differs little from French. Suspecting that such assessments are based on superficial comparisons, we test their validity by performing comparative variationist analyses of Picard and French morphosyntactic structures. This article focuses on interrogatives. We compare older and contemporary written data, as well as contemporary oral data, and show that Picard and French use their shared structures differently and that the Picard Yes/No interrogative system is complex but constrained by two linguistic factors: polarity and person. We report very different distributions of SV, inversion and interrogative –ti based on polarity and show that negative markers point and mie constrain the choice of interrogative structure. For affirmative interrogatives, we show that the distribution of interrogative structures is strongly constrained by the subject person. A diachronic analysis of text from nine authors from three generations reveals overall stability over time, with some signs of convergence toward French in the middle generation but a reversal to the older patterns in the youngest generation.

Type
Article
Information
Journal of French Language Studies , Volume 29 , Issue 2: Langues régionales: models and methods , July 2019 , pp. 209 - 233
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Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2019 

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Footnotes

*

We wish to thank the audiences at the Seventh Cambridge Conference on Language Endangerment and at the Université du Québec à Montréal, three anonymous reviewers and the editors of this issue for their comments, Scott Evans and Amanda Foster from Indiana University for their help with data collection, as well as the Department of French and Italian and the Institute for Advanced Studies at Indiana University for their financial support to the research reported on in this article.

References

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