Full Description
This volume brings together two particularly dynamic areas of contemporary research on the French language. The chapters showcase the most innovative current scholarship in historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, and in the burgeoning field of historical sociolinguistics which lies at their intersection. The research across the volume is strongly data-centred, drawing on a wide range of both well-established and more novel theoretical and methodological approaches in order to open up new perspectives on the study of the French language in the twenty-first century. Although it is written in English, the work presented here is underpinned by a range of different approaches from across the Francophone and Anglophone worlds. Particular emphasis is placed on combining quantitative and qualitative approaches, on diversifying tools, methods, and objects of inquiry, and on adopting comparative and multilingual perspectives where these shed new light on important questions relating to French. In these ways, Historical and Sociolinguistic Approaches to French highlights some of the most exciting new directions for linguistic research on the French language.
Contents
1: Janice Carruthers, Mairi McLaughlin, and Olivia Walsh: New directions in the history and sociolinguistics of French
2: Thomas Rainsford: Proclisis and enclisis in early Gallo-Romance: Evidence from sandhi phenomena
3: Sophie Marnette: The grammar(s) of reported discourse in medieval French literature
4: Sophie Prévost: The evolution of the syntax of the subject in French and factors of variation
5: Bernard Combettes: The evolution of 'background' from Middle to pre-Classical French
6: Mairi McLaughlin: Women and language in the Journal de la langue françoise (1784-1795)
7: Helena Sanson: The French language and eighteenth-century Italian women: Language of vanity or language of scholarship?
8: Jenelle Thomas: The construction of authority and community in French official correspondence from Spanish Louisiana
9: Nicola McLelland: Language authority, language ideologies, and eighteenth-century bilingual lexicographers of French, German and English: Comparing Abel Boyer, Christian Ludwig, and Lewis Chambaud
10: Douglas A. Kibbee: The history of terms for varieties of Gallo-Romance
11: John N. Green and Marie-Anne Hintze: Elision, the neglected link in French phonology
12: Rosalind A. M. Temple: On the rise and fall of modern français régional in the rural Côte d'Or
13: Olivia Walsh: Attitudes towards the French language: An analysis of the metalanguage used in twentieth-century French language columns
14: Emma Humphries: Comparing the prescriptivism of nineteenth- and twenty-first-century language experts in France
15: Anna Tristram: Attitudes on Twitter towards French inclusive writing
16: Merryn Davies-Deacon: Breton dictionaries and contemporary corpus planning: Vocabulary and purism in the minoritized languages of France
17: Philippe Caron: France and its difficult relationship with foreign languages
18: Janice Carruthers and Mícheál B. Ó Mainnín: Minoritized languages in France and Ireland: Policy, practice, vitality
