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The Symila Project Syntactic Microvariation In the Romance Languages of France Mapping Gallo-Romance Syntax Anne Dagnac (CLLE-ERSS , UT2,) Università di Padova, 17/06/2016 Asit Meeting Università di Padova, 17/06/2016 Mapping Gallo-Romance Syntax Aim of the talk • Long-term research goal Document and analyze the microsyntax of Gallo- Romance languages • 1st step: SyMiLa A short-term (2013-2016) ANR-funded project Anne Dagnac (CLLE-ERSS , UT2,), [email protected] Asit Meeting, Università di Padova, 17/06/2016 Mapping Gallo-Romance Syntax Summary 1. What we want to do eventually 1.1. Against all odds… 1.2. Yet worth trying: 2 examples 1.3. Research questions 2. What we are presently doing 2.1. SyMiLa-ALF 2.2. SyMiLa-NES 2.3. Some more things we/others are doing 1. What we want to do Against all odds… • almost no study of Oïl syntax (descriptive or formal) • some descriptive work on Occitan, few formal analyses • dying dialects: e.g. Normandy, Croissant, around Aix: only native speakers > 70 some have not spoken for 10 to 40 years • normative pressure in France: dialects are « illegitimate », even for speakers grammatical judgements are not a straightforward task • few written or spoken corpora suitable for syntax • Oïl areas: poor knowledge of written/oral sources. Yet worth trying … •Double Complementizer Constructions (DCC) It is useful to know [that once you have mastered the chosen dialect that you will be able to pick up a newspaper and read it]. Irish English, McCloskey 2006: (69d) I veno volonté, basta mach [che Gioann ch’ a staga nen solo] ‘I will come willingly provided John is not on his own’ Turinese and Ligurian, Paoli 2007 Ji so ditte [ca dumane, a Urtone, gni lu zie, ca nin gi da’ ji ] ‘I told him that tomorrow he shouldn’t go to Ortona with his uncle’ Abruzzese (Ariellese), Ledgeway & d’Alessandro 2010 Also: various Italo-Romance varieties (Paoli, 2002 & sq, Ledgeway, 2003 & sq; Damonte, 2006; Vincent, 2006; Vecchio, 2010) , Spanish (Demonte & Fernandez- Soriano 2005, Villa-García 2010), Galician, Portuguese (Mascarenhas 2007), Old French (Wanner 1995), … Yet worth trying (2) Picard and DCC il ad’v’naut qu’ ein’ mam’zelle, […], Qu’ all’ quéïau it happened that a miss, [...], that she fell Picard from Ternois ALF Quand mon fils sera grand ( 573 ) quand sa femme vivait encore (458 + 548 + 1109) que le domestique a chargée (1537) comme les arbres en étaient chargés (310/52/513/240) Corpus work (Dagnac 2009/2013) Optional Relatives, WH-clauses, that-clauses,… Any left-periphery item (Adjuncts, Subjects, Topics, Foci, …) Multiple preposed items ok, multiple Cs marginal cf. Abruzzese : Fin°-to-Force° and multiple spellout. Yet worth trying (3) Negation and Optional Negative Concord Main postverbal marker Preverbal NE drop Map 897: (j’ai cru) qu’ils ne (viendraient) pas 283 pu̜ rkwo k o s marje pˈõ̜ 295 pu̜ rko k tø n tə ma̱ ri põ̜ 284 pu̜ rkwˈɛ k o s marje pˈaː 290 pụkø n vo marje nɛ̃ 294 pu̜rkjɥaː k o n sə marje pwẽ Yet worth trying (3) Neg & NC in Picard Corpus work (Dagnac 2013 & sq) • One main marker (po, pon, point, nin), area-correlated • Several other markers: speaker-correlated (mie, pas, point…), some (pas) context-correlated not age-correlated, area-correlated, … • Optional negative concord with postverbal mie and point/pon, ch‘(n‘)est (mie) rien (Vasseur, Vimeu) pour (point) foaire vir érien (Vasseur, Vimeu) • Two speaker-profiles 1. Optional NC with mie only, no NC with point 2. Optional NC with mie, Optional NC with point iff NW parsonne (nobody) and rin (nothing ) Yet worth trying (3) More corpus work (Dagnac & Burnett, 2015 & sq) Same lexical effect wrt Optional NC in Picard and Montreal French Exclusions in one variey correspond to low frequency in the other Mie and point may co-occur for some speakers Est poé mie croéyabe écmént qu' chés maniéres é d' parler à chés jon.nes d'én.n'hui i sont droles ! (JL Zégré, FB comment 12/06/2016) Research questions Syntactic structure Which status for mie in Picard? Can it co-occur with point for profile 2 speakers? Correlations (Some varieties of) Picard display - (optional) DFC - optional DCC - optional NC (various patterns) Linked? - subject doubling (Auger 2003) Diachrony Picard : earliest written Oïl variety in France (Lusignan 2012) impact of Picard on descriptions of « Old French » ? limit between primary Oïl dialects & regional French today? Variation : How to account for intra-speaker variation and optionality ? Are literary written dialects special ? Typology: How to handle optionality and soft contrainsts ? 2. What we are doing What we are doing (1) SyMiLa-ALF • Make the (morpho)syntactic data from ALF available and handy Dialectal data published circa 1905 Romance languages of France (+ borders) 639 locations 1 interview per informant, Translation, 1st answer Phonetical transcription (special font) Published on paper, alphabetical order, 25% of the ALF maps belong to elicited sentences, sliced • Map 23: JE VAIS < je vais acheter deux chevaux à la foire et vendre les deux que j’ai achetés l’an dernier What we are doing (1) JE…POUVAIS (map 1084) Before… (74) Je ne pouvais ni avancer ni reculer > NE…NI…NI ( map 901) AVANCER (map 77) RECULER (map 1138) What we are doing (1) Now http://symila.univ-tlse2.fr/alf/phrase/ (soon)… What we are doing (1) Now (soon)… http://symila.univ-tlse2.fr/alf/phrase/ CLIC ! What we are doing (1) • 181 sentences X 639 survey points = 20.125 sentences 130.804 words 2 persons x sentences done ( 25%, 17% in the database) • But eventually: IPA + Right word order + (French/Occitan) glosses Search tools by sentence properties, word properties, … Exportable in .pdf (public) & .csv (on request) format • Horizontal view: 1 map, all locations (maps 9+86: Quel âge as-tu?) • Vertical view: 1 speaker, all sentences 639 inner grammars What we are doing (2) SyMiLa-NES • Go beyond the ALF data New surveys Syntax-oriented questionnaire: 315 contextualized sentences (+ 17 verbal paradigms) More relevant contexts Eg: ALF: Y-N questions only 2nd person sg NES: all persons, various triggers Clitics Negation /NC 5 main targets: Questions DP Word order • Where we can, with the speakers we can find • Translation (+ some judgements and further surveys) • Recorded, segmented sound available in the database Contextualized questionnaire Contextualized questionnaire: negation & NC - Importance of interpretation (NC/DN, NPI/indefinites/free choice) - Hard task for informants - Higher need for context the « Coward Donkey » story On-going fieldwork Full protocol Planned Partial protocol Some things we and others are doing • GeoDoLaR (Dagnac, Courouau, Jegou) Geolocalized bibliography of dialectal documents • Picartext (A. Dawson, U. Amiens) Picard textual database Daddipro (BCL/U. Nice) Subjects & prodrop in Occitan Surveys and database • BaTelÒc (M. Bras, U. Toulouse2) Occitan textual database 2.Doing The ALF syntax, sub-project too… : first results (4) First results General questions Hilda Koopman and Dominique Sportiche. (2013). Grounding Syntactic Variation, presented at the "Advances in Phylogenetic Linguistics" Workshop , Ragusa July 2013. Hinzelin, Marc-Olivier. (2014). Moderne Sprachatlanten und ihre Darstellung von Morphologie und Syntax. Überlegungen anlässlich des Erscheinens des ALD-II. Romanische Forschungen 126.2: 204-217 Clausal structure, questions Dagnac, Anne (2013). How do you double your C ? Evidence from an Oïl dialect, Empirical Issues in Syntax and Semantics, 9. Dagnac, Anne. (2013). Les interrogatives picardes et le typage des questions en dialecte ternois. In E. Casanova Herrero, & C. Calvo Rigual (eds.), Actes del 26é Congrés de Lingüística i Filologia Romàniques. Berlin: W. de Gruyter. DPs Sauzet, Patrick (2014). Partitives and number marking in Occitan (International Exploratory Workshop "Partitivity in Romance and Beyond" Zurich, 11-13 December 2014). Sibille, Jean (2013). « Le marquage du nombre dans le parler occitan des Ramats (TO, Italie). », Zeitschrift für romanische philologie, 129-3, pp. 629-651. Sibille, Jean (2013). « Morphologie nominale et morphologie pré-nominale dans plusieurs variétés d’occitan », à paraître dans les actes du 27e congrès de linguistique et de philologie romanes, Nancy, 15-20 juillet 2013. 2. The ALF sub-project (4) First results Negation & negative concord: variation of sentential markers and typology of NC Dagnac, Anne (2015). Pas, mie, point et autres riens : de la négation en picard. In Mariana Pitar et Jan Goes (éds.), La négation: études linguistiques, pragmatiques et didactiques. Arras: Artois Presses Université. Burnett, Heather. (2015). La négation dans les langues romanes de France: Données de l'Atlas Linguistique de la France. Communication à l'atelier Déterminants et Inférences. Université Paris Sorbonne. Juin 2015. Burnett, Heather. (2015). The Syntax of Negation in the Romance Languages of France: Data from the SyMiLa Project. Conférence à l'Institut für Germanistik. Université de Vienne. Mai 2015. Burnett, Heather and Anne Dagnac. (2014). A tale of two negations in Picard. Talk given at Dialect Syntax: the State of the Art, Frankfurt, dec. 2014. Burnett, Heather (2014). Reflections of Grammar in Patterns of Variation: Negative Concord in Dialects of French. Conférence à Leiden-Utrecht Semantic Happenings. Utrecht U., Oct. 2014. Dagnac, Anne et Heather Burnett. (2014). Personne (n')y comprend (pas) rien: La concordance négative en picard. Séminaire Axe VAST. CLLE-ERSS. Université Toulouse 2. Novembre 2014. Dagnac, Anne. (2013). De la négation en picard. Journée SyMiLa, Toulouse, 7 juin 2013. Guilliot, Nicolas. (2013). Négation et Polarité en gallo, Journée SyMiLa, Toulouse, 7 juin 2013. Sibille, Jean (2013). ALF et négation en occitan. Journée SyMiLa, Toulouse, 7 juin 2013 2. The ALF sub-project (4) First results Clitics Much work by our BCL partners, within the DADDIPRO ANR project , among which: Oliviéri, M., J.-P. Lai & D. Heap (à paraître), "Meteorological subjects in transitional Northern Occitan dialects", In Selected Proceedings of the 44th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages, Western University, 2-4 mai 2014, John Benjamins.
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