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The future of Martinique French: The role of random effects on the variable expression of futurity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 November 2016

Nicholas S. Roberts
Nicholas S. Roberts*
Affiliation:
Independent Researcher
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

This article adds a Caribbean perspective to the analysis of futurity by presenting a quantitative variationist investigation of the competing forms used by speakers to encode future time in the French département et région d'outre-mer of Martinique. The two variants under investigation are the inflected future (je partirai ‘I will leave’) and the periphrastic future (je vais partir ‘I am going to leave’). In this variety, the periphrastic future is identified as the most frequent variant. Fixed-effects and mixed-effects models furthermore tease apart the complex set of constraints governing variant selection and demonstrate the repercussions of considering speaker and lexical effects when analysing sociolinguistic data. Indeed, once individual speaker and word-level variation are controlled for, the future variable in Martinique French is constrained purely by temporal distance: while the periphrastic future acts as the default option in the majority of time contexts, the inflected future functions as the marker of distal time.

Résumé

Cet article ajoute une perspective caribéenne à l'analyse du futur en présentant une étude quantitative variationniste des formes en concurrence employées par les locuteurs pour exprimer le temps futur dans le département et région d'outre-mer de la Martinique. Les deux formes à l’étude sont le futur fléchi (je partirai) et le futur périphrastique (je vais partir). Dans cette variété, on identifie le futur périphrastique comme étant la variante la plus fréquente. De plus, des modèles à effets fixes et à effets mixtes dégagent l'ensemble complexe de contraintes gouvernant la sélection des variantes et démontrent les conséquences du fait de considérer le locuteur et les effets lexicaux lors de l'analyse de données sociolinguistiques. En effet, lorsque l'on contrôle l'effet du locuteur et de la variation au niveau du mot, la variable du futur en français martiniquais est contrainte purement par la distance temporelle : alors que le futur périphrastique constitue l'option par défaut dans la majorité des contextes, le futur fléchi sert de marqueur du futur éloigné.

Keywords

FrenchfuturityMartiniquesociolinguisticsvariationistFrançaisfuturMartiniquesociolinguistiquevariationniste
Type
Articles
Information
Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique , Volume 61 , Issue 3: Future temporal reference in French/La référence temporelle au futur en français , November 2016 , pp. 286 - 313
Copyright
© Canadian Linguistic Association/Association canadienne de linguistique 2016 

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Footnotes

I would like to express my deepest thanks to Isabelle Buchstaller, Karen Corrigan, Rick Grimm, Catherine Morley, and Cathleen Waters for all your insightful comments and helpful advice on earlier drafts. I am also very grateful to audience members at NWAV (New Ways of Analyzing Variation) 41, AFLS (Association for French Language Studies) 2012 and SSS (Sociolinguistics Summer School) 4 whose useful feedback and suggestions have helped improve this article. This research was made possible thanks to a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

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