A tale of two corpora of French dislocations

Abstract

A comparison of dislocated subject noun phrases in two corpora of French, one Standard Metropolitan French and one Québécois French, reveal some interesting differences and similarities. Speakers of both varieties double subject NPs with the pronoun ça much more often than with il or elle. However, speakers of Metropolitan French double subject NPs far more frequently than do the Québécois. It is argued that this difference is due to register: the Québécois corpus is more formal than is the French corpus. The data given here supports Sankoff's observation that the frequency of subject-doubling declines in formal situations.