Contenu du sommaire : Micro-diachronie de l'oral

This paper presents a trend study of the low back vowel merger over 45 years of real time, with the primary analysis focusing on a shorter time window of 15-20 years. We present the results of anovas on Euclidean distance measurements between the speakers' mean lot and thought vowels, taking into account the effects of the speakers' sex, year of birth, and the time period when a recording was made, as well as potential interactions among these independent variables. We find a pattern that looks more like age grading than language change in progress.

This paper aims to give a realistic measure of the distance between the spoken lexicon used by Florentine people in 1965 and current standard Italian, and to evaluate the changes that occurred in the last forty years. To this purpose, we compared the lexicons derived from two spoken resources collected in the Florence area: the stammerjohann corpus (1965) and a specifically designed sampling of the lablita corpus (recordings after the year 2000). The pan-Italianness of the language spoken in Florence has been evaluated by means of a parallel annotation of the same corpora performed by two Italian linguists born respectively in Northern and Southern Italy. Results show that the overall percentage of regional forms in the spontaneous speech of Florence, albeit generally limited, has undergone a significant reduction over the last decades, while the high-frequency lexicon has remained more stable.

The corpus study presented here examines the variation between the realisation and the omission of the expletive subject pronoun il in modern French spoken in France. More precisely, it aims to answer the question of whether the frequency of the omission of il, its syntactic restrictions and the influence of diastratic factors have changed in the last decades. This article depicts an example of the exploitation of the oral corpus eslo in a micro-diachronic perspective. As a real-time analysis, the comparison of the two parts of the corpus, 40 years apart, shows a significant increase in the omission of the expletive, thus constituting a change in progress. Beyond the micro-diachronic variation discovered, the corpus analysis reveals a combination of grammatical and sociolinguistic factors exerting an effect on the variable of the use of expletive il.

This article examines the variation between simple non-clitic forms (nous, vous, eux) and their complex counterparts with autres (nous autres, vous autres, eux autres). The study measures the progress of simple forms on a micro-diachronic scale between 1971 and 2012. The variationist analysis of sociolinguistic interviews collected in 2012 indicates a shift in favor of simple forms (48 % vs. 8 % in 1971). In 2012, simple forms are favored by young people, women and speakers in high and intermediate social positions. The analysis shows that it is young people who are driving the change with each new generation. Furthermore, the comparison indicates a stability of linguistic constraints between 1971 and 2012, with the simple form being favored in the first person and when the pronoun follows a preposition in both corpora.

This article deals with progressive periphrasis ‹être après INF› et ‹être en train de INF›. The first one was in use by the French speakers of Europe during the time of colonial extension in the 17th century. We are interested here in the values expressed by these expressions, a few decades apart. The comparison focuses on their use in the early 1970s and in the current era. Beyond a reversal of their frequency of use during this period, the studied periphrasis has been and still are conceptually similar. They are not in complementary distribution, from a semantic point of view, contrary to what has been argued elsewhere. It is proposed that the low frequency of the “progressivity” category in French would have facilitated the gradual decline of ‹être après INF› (in accordance with normative prescriptions for more than a hundred years), in favor of ‹être en train de INF›, which has gradually become the most common form.

This study, which deals with the connective du coup in oral French, is based on an exhaustive exploration of a sampled oral corpus of approximately 1.3 million words, extracted from the Enquêtes Socio-Linguistiques à Orléans (eslo). The internal characteristics of this corpus, combined with a precise syntactic and semantic annotation of each of the occurrences of du coup, allow us to propose a description of its main linguistic properties and to map its usage according to a number of variables, notably diachronic, diaphasic and diastratic. On the one hand, we will be able to document, in real and apparent time, the quantitative development of this connective and, on the other hand, to argue in favour of an ongoing process of pragmaticalization, which transforms this connective which was marginal forty years ago, into a new discourse marker in vogue.

This paper reports a study on the usage of après from a microdiachronic perspective. The study is based on an annotation of a thousand occurrences of après retrieved from the French corpus Enquêtes SocioLinguistiques à Orléans (eslo), which comprises two sub-corpora recorded over two periods, which are 40 years apart (eslo1 and eslo2). We conducted an elaborate and thorough annotation at both morphosyntactic and semantico-pragmic levels, which enabled us to identify various semantico-pragmatic characters of après; some of usages are frequently cumulated in the use of discursive markers (MDs). From the micro-diachronic perspective, we found a strong increase in MD use (3.5 times more in eslo2). In terms of dia-variation, we identified two primary factors that can affect the enunciative uses of après: age of the speaker and interactiveness of the speech genre.

This paper proposes a micro-diachronic study of the marker genre in two sub-corpuses of the tcof interaction corpus: A first sub-corpus collected between 2006 and 2009 and a second one collected between 2016 and 2019. This ten-year span allows us to analyze the common points between the two periods but especially the differences in the use of genre. These semantic, syntactic, pragmatic and interactional differences are analyzed in the light of the elements of the communication situation and the kind of discourse in which the marker appears. We will see that the most recent values of genre concern the management of interactions.