INTERLOCUTOR EFFECTS ON SOCIOLINGUISTIC VARIATION IN L2 FRENCH Mark Alan Black Submitted to the faculty of the University Graduate School in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of French and Italian, Indiana University February 2021 Accepted by the Graduate Faculty, Indiana University, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Doctoral Committee: ________________________________________ Committee Chairperson, Julie Auger, PhD ________________________________________ Committee Chairperson, Laurent Dekydtspotter, PhD ________________________________________ Committee Member, Barbara Vance, PhD ________________________________________ Committee Member, Kelly Sax, PhD ________________________________________ Committee Member, Kimberly Geeslin, PhD Date of Defense: July 16th, 2020 ii Copyright © 2021 Mark Alan Black iii For Amber and Leona iv Acknowledgements I begin by thanking the co-directors of my dissertation, Julie Auger and Laurent Dekydtspotter. I could not have completed this project without their steady guidance and extreme patience, from conception of the topic to the final edits. I am also very grateful for the members of my dissertation committee beyond their roles in the dissertation-writing process: Kelly Sax, who guided me through my graduate studies as an excellent instructor, mentor, and supervisor; Barbara Vance, for her guidance as an instructor and for her advice during my job search preparation; and Kim Geeslin, whose presence as outside committee member became more and more invaluable as my project became more and more aligned with aspects of her and her students’ research programs. In the French and Italian department, I am also very grateful to Kevin Rottet for his meticulously prepared courses in French Linguistics and for his comments on my presentations of research at various conferences in Bloomington. I would also like to thank Albert Valdman, not only for his comments on my research presentations at IU, but also because his textbook was my very first introduction to the French language as a high school student in 1994. I am also indebted to other scholars who visited Bloomington during my time there. Luke Plonsky was gracious in sharing with me some of his unpublished research (with Laura Gurzynski- Weiss) on interlocutor individual differences. Many thanks to Aiden Coveney, who took time from his Bloomington visit to discuss his research with me and to offer suggestions on my own research. I also owe great thanks to Charlène Gilbert and Arielle Roadman for their help in coding the variationist analyses, and also to my officemates Kelly Kasper-Cushman and Laura Demsey, who provided a sounding board for various aspects of the dissertation as well as for the job search. Thanks also to Carly Bahler for providing last-minute editing and proofreading support. And finally, many thanks to Rodica Frimu, an extraordinary friend to Amber and me during our v challenging coursework and research projects together in Bloomington, our summers with the IUHPFL in Brittany and in Paris, our dissertation tribulations in Lille, and our adventures in Brussels and Knoxville by way of Nebraska. This dissertation would also not have been possible without the generous offering of time and resources from many friends and colleagues in France. From the Pau community, I would like to thank Soubha Essafi, Chloé Butler, Freddie Puszka, Thomas Dunning-Laredo, Marc Artzrouni, and Aaron Murray-Nellis for their help in organizing my project and recruiting participants. I also wish to thank Amanda Edmonds for providing me with lodging upon my arrival in Pau, for recruiting participants, and for providing me with the opportunity to present my research to the scholars at the Université de Pau. Amanda also coordinated Bryan Donaldson’s visit to Pau; the discussions I had with Amanda and Bryan during his visit were instrumental in the organization of my project. A second discussion I had with Bryan in Bloomington in 2019 was immensely helpful for my statistical analysis. In Lille, I wish to thank Sarah Moreau and Capucine Fosse for their enormous help in organizing my project there. Thanks also to Rebecca Grey, Jeremy Levin, Bailey Wamp, Kevin Bolle, Chad Langford, and all colleagues at Université Lille 3. Finally, I thank my family for their unending patience and support: my wife Amber and her family, my daughter Leona, my parents Michael and Cynthia, my brother Greg, my sister Becky and her family, my aunt Nancy, and my grandmother Phyllis. The development of this project and interpretation of the data therein were aided by valuable discussion with audiences at the AILA Symposium on Interlocutor Individual Differences (Indiana University, October 2015), SLRF 36 (The Ohio State University, October 2017), NWAV 47 (New York University, October 2018), and SLRF 38 (Michigan State University, September 2019). vi INTERLOCUTOR EFFECTS ON SOCIOLINGUISTIC VARIATION IN L2 FRENCH Mark Alan Black The ability to speak in a second language (L2) requires a certain level of linguistic proficiency, but the ability to live in a second language requires a certain level of sociolinguistic proficiency. L2 sociolinguistic variables present acquisitional challenges for language learners, since informal discourse features are largely absent from classroom-based input but frequent in native speakers’ informal communication. In this dissertation, I examine how L2 sociolinguistic performance can be influenced by a specific social characteristic: the interlocutor’s native language status vis-à-vis the language of communication. That is, how does learner speech change in conversation with a native speaker compared to conversation with another learner who shares the same L1? While previous studies have examined this interlocutor characteristic on measures of grammatical proficiency in classroom-based learners, few studies have measured its effect on sociolinguistic performance, especially in highly advanced learners. My data focus on two sociolinguistic features that frequently appear in informal French: ne-deletion (ND) and subject doubling (SD). I examine the interlocutor effect on these variables in two groups of learners: study-abroad students at low-advanced proficiency and highly proficient near-native speakers. Both groups were recorded in informal one-on-one conversations with a native and non-native French interlocutor. Study-abroad students demonstrated significantly higher rates of ND and SD (characteristic of more informal, nativelike speech) in conversation with a native French speaker than when speaking with another study-abroad student. Furthermore, a variationist analysis revealed interlocutor language status as the most significant social factor influencing variation for ND and SD. In near-native speakers, only marginal differences in ND and SD frequency were detected vii across interlocutor language statuses, suggesting a diminishing influence as proficiency increases. The results demonstrate that researchers must be aware of this interlocutor effect when designing tasks that evaluate sociolinguistic performance in learners. viii Table of Contents Chapter 1: Introduction ............................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 2: Review of the literature: SLA, sociolinguistic variation, and interlocutor effects ..... 5 2.1 Second language acquisition outcomes ............................................................................ 5 2.1.1 The syntax-discourse interface ................................................................................. 7 2.2 Factors influencing sociolinguistic variation ................................................................... 8 2.3 A definition of “interlocutor” ......................................................................................... 11 2.4 Accommodation Theory and Audience Design ............................................................. 12 2.4.1 Accommodation Theory in SLA ............................................................................. 14 2.4.2 Priming effects on convergence .............................................................................. 16 2.5 Interlocutor language background influencing native speakers ..................................... 17 2.6 Interlocutor language background and SLA .................................................................. 18 2.7 Sociolinguistic variables and study abroad .................................................................... 24 2.8 Type I and Type II variation .......................................................................................... 25 2.9 Sociolinguistic variation in L2 French ........................................................................... 32 2.9.1 Sociolinguistic variation in L2 French: The question of interlocutor L1 effects .... 38 2.10 Variationist approaches to SLA .................................................................................. 45 2.11 Summary of Interlocutor effects, SLA, and sociolinguistic variation ........................ 48 Chapter 3: Methodology............................................................................................................. 50 3.1 Informal discourse .......................................................................................................... 50 3.2 Research questions ........................................................................................................