Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
We are grateful to the National Science Foundation for funding this research ("Language Change Across the Lifespan,â[euro] BCS-0132463). Thanks in particular to Pierrette Thibault for consultation at many stages of this work, and to Julie Corder Medero, who wrote and revised our Python scripts. For comments, corrections, suggestions, and additional readings, we also thank Hélène Blondeau, Michael Friesner, Rick Grimm, Damien Hall, Laura Jensen, Mike Jones, Bill Labov, Marcin Morzycki, Terry Nadasdi, Kali Bybel, audience members at NWAV (New Ways of Analyzing Variation) 34, and two anonymous reviewers for Language Variation and Change. All remaining errors are entirely our own.
Over the past 120 years, the inflected future in Canadian French has been steadily giving way to the periphrastic future (PF), with the result that PF has now become the default for expressing the future across a wide range of linguistic contexts (Poplack, 2001; Poplack & Dion, 2009; Poplack & Turpin, 1999). Whereas PF accounted for 56% of the 4691 instances of the future analyzed in the 19th-century Récits du français québécois d'autrefois corpus, it represented 73% of the 3594 tokens in the late 20th-century Ottawa-Hull corpus (Poplack & Turpin, 1999:148).
Our goal in the current study is to explore the micro-trajectory of this very slow change in progress by tracking it across the lifespan of individual speakers, and in the process, to elucidate the relationship between age grading and apparent time. To this end, we selected the 60 speakers of the 1971 Sankoff-Cedergren corpus of Montréal French (Sankoff & Cedergren, 1972; Sankoff & Sankoff, 1973) who were reinterviewed in 1984 (Thibault & Vincent, 1990) and examined all of their relevant data from both years. In the terminology used in longitudinal research, these people constitute a panel. We occasionally refer to the entire group as panelists or panel members.
Previous sociolinguistic research on speakers across a substantial age range has revealed that age is a significant factor in conditioning the use of the inflected future (IF), with younger speakers being more advanced than their elders in preferring PF (Blondeau, 2006; Emirkanian & Sankoff, 1985; Zimmer, 1994). Under the hypothesis that people's grammars are stable after L1 acquisition in childhood, the most likely interpretation for such a...