期刊名称：University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics
出版年度：2012
卷号：18
期号：2
页码：13
出版社：University of Pennsylvania
摘要：Since at least the mid 19th century, the inflected future (IF) in affirmative clauses has steadily declined in Québécois French (Poplack & Dion 2009). Indeed, Wagner and Sankoff (2011) reported that in the Montreal French 1971 corpus (Sankoff & Cedergren 1972), decreasing age was correlated with decreasing use of affirmative IF. However, they also found that a panel of 59 speakers had significantly increased their use of IF between 1971 and 1984. They proposed that this be interpreted as a case of age grading rather than retrograde community change. The current paper reports on a trend study undertaken to test Wagner and Sankoff's proposal. 34 speakers recorded in 1971 were matched for social characteristics with 34 speakers recorded in 1984 (N=68 unique speakers). There was no significant difference (p < 0.5) in the rate of IF use between the two years (for affirmative uses only, 13.2% [N=112/847] in 1971 and 15.6% [N=194/1247] in 1984). Since this finding effectively rules out the "retrograde change" interpretation of the panel results, our trend study confirms Wagner & Sankoff's proposal.
