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New insights on an old rivalry: The passé simple and the passé composé in spoken Acadian French1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2012

PHILIP COMEAU ,
RUTH KING  and
GARY R. BUTLER
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Abstract

This study investigates the expression of past temporal reference in a highly conservative variety of Acadian French spoken in the Baie Sainte-Marie region of Nova Scotia, Canada. Variationist analysis of data from a sociolinguistic corpus for the village of Grosses Coques reveals a split between narrative and conversational discourse, with variation mainly between use of the passé simple and the imparfait in the former and between the passé composé and the imparfait in the latter. The passé simple remains in robust use in this variety and is constrained in a manner similar to that found in 17th-century representations of colloquial speech involving narration.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of French Language Studies , Volume 22 , Issue 3 , November 2012 , pp. 315 - 343
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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