Morphosyntactic Variation in Picard

Indiana University, Bloomington IN

Investigators

Abstract

This proposal uses new and original data from Picard, a little-known regional language of France, in an effort to develop a "socially realistic linguistics". For this study, Vimeu, a region located in the western part of the Somme department of France, was selected as a focus of investigation. Over the past five years, an extensive corpus of oral and written data was gathered. Transcription of the corpus constitutes the first objective of this research proposal. The second objective consists in providing detailed analyses of many grammatical constructions of Picard. These analyses will be carried out using an approach which combines a sociolinguistic methodology and the analytical tools provided by generative grammar. This approach will shed new light on many longstanding issues within Romance and general linguistics (e.g., pronominal clitics, subject doubling, verbal negation), contribute crucial new data from language change in progress and grammaticalization processes (e.g., how demonstrative determiners turn into definite articles), and address new questions concerning constructions little known in the literature (e.g., why does Vimeu Picard have two subject neuter pronouns?). The third and fourth objectives concern variation, both crosslinguistic and language-internal. Comparison of Vimeu Picard features with those of other varieties of Picard, other Gallo-Romance languages, and varieties of French will contribute significantly to the search for a better understanding of the limits Universal Grammar imposes on crosslinguistic variation. Finally, the issue of language-internal variation will be considered using recent developments in two different areas of Optimality theory, namely the study of phonological variation and that of morphosyntax. The goal is to propose a model of grammar which generates variable morphosyntactic patterns and predicts relative frequencies of use for linguistic variants. This project will contribute to bridge the gap that currently exists between sociolinguistics and formal approaches to the study of language.