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Chercher pour or chercher après: arguing the case for contact-induced linguistic innovation in different varieties of French

Treffers-Daller, J. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6575-6736 (2011) Chercher pour or chercher après: arguing the case for contact-induced linguistic innovation in different varieties of French. In: Martineau, F. and Nadasdi, T. (eds.) Le francais en contact. Hommages a Raymond Mougeon. Universite de Laval, Canada, pp. 375-392. ISBN 9782763793177

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Abstract/Summary

This paper provides evidence for the claim made in Baetens Beardsmore (1971) that the grammatical collocation "chercher après" «to look for», which is very frequent in Brussels French, is the result of transfer from the contact language, Brussels Dutch. A detailed quantitative analysis of this construction in different varieties of French which have more or less contact with a Germanic language was made to investigate the likelihood of influence from the Germanic substrate. The differences between the meaning of "chercher" and "chercher après" are also analysed in some depth, to find out whether or not the particle is redundant. According to Trudgill (2004) redundant constructions are more often found in contact situations involving long-term, stable contact and child bilingualism. The particle "après" was found to add a particular shade of meaning to "chercher", and is thus not redundant. Therefore no evidence could be obtained from the current data for Trudgill’s (2004) claim.

Item Type:Book or Report Section
Refereed:Yes
Divisions:Arts, Humanities and Social Science > Institute of Education > Language and Literacy in Education
ID Code:29881
Uncontrolled Keywords:language contact, French, contact-induced language change, particles, grammatical collocations
Publisher:Universite de Laval

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