Sociolinguistic aspects of lexical variation in french

Beeching, Kate

Abstract

In his volume on Parisian French, Lodge (2004) highlights the importance of lexical variation in French, finding it anomalous that sociolinguists, in the Labovian tradition at least, have neglected this highly salient aspect of speaker identity. As he says (2004: 228), by comparison with phonetics and grammar, the lexicon has been largely neglected outside the extensive inventories of dialect-specific words established in, for example, Rézeau (2001); some work has been conducted on Canadian French (e.g. Nadasdi, Mougeon and Rehner, 2008, on automobile) and on hexagonal French by Armstrong (e.g. 2001, Chapter 6, on (pre)adolescents’ use of non-standard lexical items) but a systematic study of lexical variation in contemporary spoken French is still lacking.
This paper attempts to go some way to closing this gap by investigating the use of fifteen lexical doublets such as boulot/ travail in three corpora of spoken French spanning the period from 1968 to 2002.
By creating a metavariable combining rates of occurrence of the fifteen terms, it was possible to demonstrate that rates of colloquial items have risen in both real and apparent time in the last 40 years. Some caveats are issued with respect to the comparability of the corpora and the influence of the semantics of the terms selected (rates of boulot, rigolo and copain are higher for young people, while older interviewees tend to refer to bouquin and bouquiner to a greater extent). Overall, however, it appears that rates of occurrence of colloquial lexical items are rising, suggesting a move towards greater positive politeness and a reduction in social distance, echoed, too, in an increase in tutoiement. Persistent economic divisions and the fact that the least educated are less prone to style-shift than the more educated, reveal the fictive nature of what might appear to be a move towards greater social equality.

Citation

Beeching, K. (2012). Sociolinguistic aspects of lexical variation in french. In T. Pooley, & D. Lagorgette (Eds.), On linguistic change in French: socio-historical approaches ( Le changement linguistique en français ) (37-54). Presses Universitaires de Savoie

• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2012
• Deposit Date: Jan 21, 2013
• Publicly Available Date: Sep 30, 2016
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Pages: 37-54
• Book Title: On linguistic change in French: socio-historical approaches ( Le changement linguistique en français )
• ISBN: 9782915797985
• Keywords: sociolinguistics, lexical variation, speaker identity, lexical doublets, french
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/951532