Je m'ai fait mal quand j'ai tombé: a real- and apparent-time study of auxiliary alternation in intransitive and pronominal verbs in spoken Montréal French (1971-2016)

My thesis investigates auxiliary alternation in spoken Montréal French between avoir ‘have’ and être ‘be’ in the twenty or so intransitive verbs that prescriptively require the latter (tomber ‘to fall’, partir ‘to leave’, rester ‘to stay’, etc.):
(1) J’ai tombé (AVOIR) vs Je suis tombé (ÊTRE) I fell/have fallen
This phenomenon has been documented in virtually all the French-speaking communities of North America. Sankoff & Thibault (1977, 1980) observed a rate of avoir generalization of 34% in the Sankoff-Cedergren Montréal Corpus (1971), and hypothesized that greater exposure to the standard “acts as a brake on the regularization of conjugation through the extension of avoir” (1980: 345). Using a trend study, I attempt to determine whether their ‘prediction’ is confirmed in real time and in apparent time. I also explore the alternation between auxiliary avoir and être within pronominal forms because they were not studied by Sankoff & Thibault:
(2) Je m’ai fait mal (AVOIR) vs Je me suis fait mal (ÊTRE) I (have) hurt myself
In 2016, I interviewed 48 native speakers of Montréal French and, with the mixed-effects statistical software Shiny Rbrul (Johnson 2017), I test various (socio)linguistic factors on the recorded intransitive and pronominal periphrastic tense tokens in order to determine the main influences on avoir selection.
The real-time comparison of my results with those of Sankoff & Thibault (1977, 1980) reveals that the auxiliary alternation observed in intransitive verbs has, overall, significantly decreased in Montréal French. The absence of any age effect in apparent-time suggests that in 2016 the change to être has almost reached completion, despite the lingering of a small stable variation in the lowest SPS. My data also show that avoir use in the periphrastic tenses of pronominal verbs is highly socially marked. This decline of avoir in Montréal French appears to illustrate a (re)alignment with standard French or dévernacularisation, thus confirming Sankoff & Thibault’s conclusions.
I then triangulate these findings through an analysis of grammaticality judgements performed by my 48 participants and of self-reporting judgements on auxiliary choice from 821 Montréalers of the crowdsourced corpus Français de nos régions (Avanzi et al. 2016). My 48 speakers were much more willing to accept avoir variants, with pronominal verbs even more so than with intransitive ones, than what could have been inferred from their own actual auxiliation patterns. As for the self-reporting judgements, the effects of the level of education of the participants and their gender were highly significant on the choice of auxiliary verb.
By investigating both intransitive and pronominal verbs and by analysing newly collected (production and grammaticality judgement) data, this sociolinguistic study of auxiliary alternation in Montréal French is the first of its kind.

Keywords: multivariate analysis
variationist methodology
sociolinguistics
auxiliary verbs
Montréal French
alternation
Advisor: Maiden, M
Temple, R