LEFT DISLOCATION, NUMBER MARKING, AND (NON-)STANDARD FRENCH

0. introduction

The proper characterization of weak, or clitic, subject pronouns in Romance has been the topic of much discussion and debate over the past two decades. This article presents an analysis of subject clitics in French, concentrating in particular on the behaviour of these elements in a highly conservative variety of Atlantic Canada Acadian French spoken in a rural, isolated area of Newfoundland, where there is almost no contact with the standard or for that matter with other varieties of French (cf. King 1989, 1994). Our purpose is to compare the syntactic behaviour of subject clitics in Newfoundland French (hereafter NF) to that found in other colloquial varieties of Canadian French as well as in the standard language. In our analysis we shall review the various diagnostics invoked by previous researchers to argue in favour of an affixal for status of subject clitics in colloquial French, applying them also to NF. Our results show that NF patterns differently from other colloquial varieties. In fact, with regard to the diagnostics for affixal status, NF subject clitics more closely resemble those of Standard French. We then offer an explanation as to why these two varieties of French which differ so dramatically in sociolinguistic status and which exist in isolation from each other would pattern together. This explanation is bolstered by quantitative analyses of data taken from corpora of spoken NF and Ontario French. These analyses suggest that there is a strong correlation between absence of verbal number marking and the affixal status of subject clitics.