BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//Talks.cam//talks.cam.ac.uk//
X-WR-CALNAME:Talks.cam
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:Talk B - Variable agreement in French: investigating grammatical a
 nd social variation - Anna Tristram\, Department of Linguistics
DTSTART:20091130T170000Z
DTEND:20091130T180000Z
UID:TALK20166@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Louise Radok
DESCRIPTION:In comparison to sociolinguistic research on English\, the bod
 y of research on sociolinguistic variation in French remains relatively sm
 all\, as well as being concentrated in certain areas. Though various studi
 es have been carried out on Québecois French (cf. Sankoff et al 1989)\, w
 ork on mainland French tends to focus on phonological variation\; those st
 udies which do consider syntactic variation mainly focus on negation and i
 nterrogation (cf. Ashby 1981\; Coveney 1996). \n\nMy research seeks to con
 tribute to this area by investigating the effect of social factors on agre
 ement with collective nouns and quantifying expressions in French (e.g.: _
 une foule de personnes a/ont_…[a crowd of people has/have]\; _la majorit
 é des étudiants a/ont_…[the majority of students has/have]). Here\, a 
 mismatch between syntactic and semantic number leads to variation in agree
 ment (singular/plural\; cf. Corbett 2006). Though singular agreement is of
 ten viewed as prescriptively ‘correct’\, much discussion of agreement 
 is found in grammars (cf. Grevisse 1993\; Riegel\, Pellat & Rioul 1994)\, 
 itself indicative of the large amount of variation found here. \n\nAlthoug
 h variable agreement of this kind exists in a number of languages (cf. Eng
 lish – Levin 2001\; German – Berg 1998\; Spanish – Ortega & Morera 1
 981-1982)\, the investigation of this phenomenon in French offers an addit
 ional dimension\, which is to consider the influence of prescriptivism on 
 language use. French is widely cited as one of the most codified languages
  in the world\, but the question of the extent to which this actually affe
 cts language use remains open\, given the relative lack of investigations 
 in this area. \n\nUsing sociolinguistic interviews and gap-fill tests\, my
  research qualitatively and quantitatively analyses real language data to 
 investigate the effect of age\, gender and education on agreement with the
 se constructions. This paper presents results from fieldwork completed in 
 Normandy\, France\, in 2009.
LOCATION:GR-04\, English Faculty Building
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR