Subordinate clause marking in Montreal Anglophone French and English

Hélène Blondeau | University of Florida

Naomi Nagy | University of Toronto

We investigate the variable presence of overt complementizers in the bilingual repertoire of young Anglophone Montrealers, examining approximately 1,600 sentences in spoken French and English. The effects of linguistic constraints are compared between their two languages, and also to recent research on Quebec City Anglophones’ and to L1 Quebec Francophones’ speech. We also examine instances of usage of the verbs of quotation be like and être comme. Patterns of several linguistic constraints affecting the variation help us understand the intersection of subordinate clause marking and the grammaticization of be like/être comme as verbs of quotation as well as better understand advanced stages of second language acquisition.

Keywords: be like, collocations, complementizer (COMP), English, French, frequency effects, Montreal, Second language acquisition (SLA), subordinate clause, syntactic variation, verb of quotation (VOQ), vernacular

Published online: 26 September 2008
https://doi.org/10.1075/impact.24.18blo

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