LEXICAL AND GRAMMATICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF A CONTACT-INDUCED VARIETY: A CASE STUDY OF CHIAC
Authors: Зурабова Л.Р. , Борисова Е.Г. 
Published: July 2024

В статье представлены грамматические и лексико-семантические особенности субдиалекта шиак в контексте языкового контакта в историческом регионе Акадия(Канада), выявленные в ходе корпусного исследования. Анализу подвергаются функциональные возможности предлогов, в том числе вынесение предлогов в конец предложения; семантические характеристики наречий-интенсификаторов; вариативное использование вопросительных частиц -ti / -tu при образовании вопросов; специфика диалектной глагольной системы, включая инфинитивные формы, а также правила спряжения глаголов.

The article explores the dialectal features of Acadian French in New Brunswick (NB), Canada. Acadia has been developing as a region with distinctive linguistic and cultural characteristics since the early seventeenth century (1605) after Samuel de Champlain and Pierre Du Gua de Monts discovered Port-Royal (modern-day Nova Scotia). It encompasses the Atlantic provinces including New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and partially Quebec (Gaspesie, Cote-Nord and Iles de la Madeleine). The study focuses on a variety of French known as chiac (or chiaque), spoken in the province of New Brunswick. Despite its limited geographical distribution (south-east of NB), chiac proves to be of interest for research: it is highly variable, mostly spoken, and lexically, semantically, phonetically, and even grammatically influenced by English. Furthermore, it shows signs of language mixing. The author argues that the presented functional and lexical features are partially due to the longlasting language contact in Acadia and a specific sociolinguistic situation within the region. The source of evidence for the present study comes from the analysis of the oral corpus Chiac-Kasparian H99 and the mini-corpus Kasparian-Leger H2004 provided by Dr. Sylvia Kasparian, Head of the Textual Data Analysis Laboratory (Laboratoire d’analyse de donnees textuelles), University of Moncton. The corpus consists of transcribed spontaneous conversations of the inhabitants of the south-east of New Brunswick. The provided linguistic material comprises an unannotated text corpus, accompanied by partial sociolinguistic data about the speakers, including age, gender, place of study, place of residence, and status of participants to each other. Therefore, our first research step was to carry out the content analysis and subsequently interpret the results. At the initial stages of analysis, the authors annotated the text corpus which enabled them to highlight several distinctive characteristics of chiac, both as a subdialect of Acadian French and as a contact-induced variety, including signs of semantic transformation in both French and borrowed adverbs; dialectal interrogative morphemes -ti / -tu, and preposition stranding. Moreover, the authors postulate variability in verb forms, conjugation system, and functioning of auxiliaries. It must be noted, that the study relies on the theoretical and empirical body of work conducted by L. Peronnet, S. Kasparian, G. Chevalier, R. King, M. Roy, A. Thibault.