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The Subjunctive in Guernsey French: Implications for Gauging Authenticity in an Endangered Language

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The Subjunctive in Guernsey French: Implications for Gauging Authenticity in an Endangered Language Clare Anne Ferguson A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of the West of England, Bristol for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Faculty of Arts, Creative Industries and Education, University of the West of England, Bristol June 2013 This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. i Abstract Authenticity is a salient issue within endangered language contexts, particularly where revitalisation efforts are in place. There is currently much activity worldwide to document and describe endangered languages, but whose language should go into the reference grammars? It is a common perception in endangered languages that the oldest speakers speak the most authentic language, but is this necessarily the case? This is a study of interspeaker and intragenerational variation in mood choice in Guernsey French which provides an insight into the issue of gauging authenticity in a severely endangered language. Working within the variationist paradigm, the linguistic data for this apparent-time study are recorded natural speech, collected in semi-structured and unstructured interviews, both one-to- one and group, from forty-three participants on the island of Guernsey. Sociolinguistic data were collected using an oral questionnaire. The results show that mood choice is associated with one social factor, frequency of use of the language ‘now’1, and four linguistic factors, subjunctive trigger, trigger tense, embedded verb and, to a lesser extent, the presence or absence of a relative pronoun. A quantitative and qualitative approach is taken to examining interspeaker and intragenerational variation. The findings undermine any notion that the oldest generation can be unconditionally assumed to use the traditional variants. The findings are discussed in relation to variationist theory and to the focal theory, authenticity. The research contributes to the field by being the first to examine interspeaker variation in a grammatical variable in Guernsey French. It adds to the small body of empirical research on idiolectal variation within the fields of variationist sociolinguistics and endangered languages, and highlights issues associated with applying variationist methodology in endangered language contexts. Finally, the study exposes the difficulties of seeking out and gauging authenticity in an endangered language. 1 ‘Now’ means ‘at the time of collecting the data’ which was 2010-11. ii Acknowledgements My thanks first and foremost to the Guernsey French language community who gave me such a warm welcome onto their lovely island and graciously agreed to take part in my project. Without them, this thesis would not have been possible. My thanks, too, to Guernsey’s former Language Support Officer, Yan Marquis, for giving up his time to answer my questions and for helping with the transcribing of two recordings. He also introduced me to some of the language community, two of whom were subsequently responsible for gathering together about a third of the sample for me. I owe these two men a debt of gratitude. I would also like to thank the parents and pupils from the following schools and college who gave up their time to fill out the language attitudes survey and to the teaching staff for their help in distributing the questionnaires and collecting the returns on my behalf: Trevor Wakefield, Principal at Guernsey College of Further Education; Tina Watson, Deputy Head at Guernsey Grammar School; Gary Le Huray, Headteacher at Forest Primary School; Peter McGovern, Headteacher at Notre Dame du Rosaire RC Primary, Danielle Cassell, Headteacher at La Houguette Primary School. My thanks also to Gary Le Huray, then Acting Headteacher at St Mary and St Michael RC Primary School, whose parents took part in a pilot study of a previous questionnaire that was subsequently abandoned as unworkable in the Guernsey context. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Dr Julia Sallabank of SOAS, University of London, who has been so generous with both her time and her expertise since the very first time I contacted her with questions about the language. I want to thank her most particularly for suggesting ‘authenticity’ as a subject that might be worth exploring in relation to my research, and for the joint presentation we gave on the subject at the BAAL 2011 conference. I would like to thank my Director of Studies, Professor Richard Coates, for lending me his Guernsey French literature to get me started, and to both him and my second supervisor, Dr Jeanette Sakel, for their guidance and support throughout, and for their comments on drafts which have made this a much better thesis than it would otherwise have been. Any errors that remain are my own. My thanks also to Professor Jeanine Treffers-Daller whose early comments helped shape the project, and also to Dr Michael Daller for giving up his time to help me with the statistical analysis of my data using SPSS. I am grateful, too, to Dr Chris Webber and Dr Deirdre Toher from the university’s department of Engineering, Design and Mathematics who also helped with my SPSS queries. iii I would also like to thank the University of the West of England for the financial support I received in the form of a PhD Research Studentship, without which this thesis would not have been possible. Finally, my thanks go to my family for all their support over the past three years. iv Table of contents Abstract .............................................................................................................................................. i Acknowledgements........................................................................................................................... ii List of tables ..................................................................................................................................... xi List of figures .................................................................................................................................. xiii List of illustrations ......................................................................................................................... xvv List of accompanying materials ..................................................................................................... xvi Abbreviations ................................................................................................................................ xvii 1 Guernsey French: past, present and future ................................................................................... 1 Introduction .................................................................................................................................. 1 1.1 Guernsey French: past ............................................................................................................ 2 The literature on GF .................................................................................................................. 4 1.2 Guernsey French: present ....................................................................................................... 7 1.2.1 Guernsey French in use by the language community ...................................................... 7 1.2.2 Guernsey French in use in the linguistic landscape ....................................................... 11 1.2.2.1 Introduction to linguistic landscape theory ............................................................ 11 1.2.2.2 Guernsey French in the linguistic landscape .......................................................... 12 1.2.3 Ethnolinguistic vitality .................................................................................................... 13 1.2.3.1 Introduction to ethnolinguistic vitality (EV) theory ................................................ 13 1.2.3.2 UNESCO’s Language Vitality and Endangerment framework for Guernsey French ............................................................................................................................................ 15 1.3 Guernsey French: future ....................................................................................................... 17 1.3.1 Language attitudes survey: method .............................................................................. 18 1.3.1.1 Population ............................................................................................................... 18 1.3.1.2 Sample..................................................................................................................... 18 1.3.1.3 Questionnaire ......................................................................................................... 19 1.3.1.4 The variables ........................................................................................................... 20 1.3.1.5 Analysis ................................................................................................................... 23 1.3.2 Language attitudes survey: results ................................................................................ 23 1.3.2.1 What do people think? ........................................................................................... 23 1.3.2.2 Who showed the most support for GF? ................................................................. 25 1.3.3 Language attitudes
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