Séminaire de Recherche en Linguistique

In this talk, we will comment on the results of some questions asked in the frame of the surveys "Le français de nos régions". More than 20'000 Internet users originated from France, Switzerland and Belgium took part in these surveys. The results have enabled us to obtain statistically usable information regarding "rare" morphosyntactic phenomena in corpora of spoken French, especially as regards to the composition and the internal ordering of clitic-clusters (je le lui donne vs je lui le donne ; donne-le-moi vs donne-moi-le vs donne-me-le ; ça, je le mange vs ça, j'y mange, etc.) ; the grammar of verbs hesitating between accusative and dative regimes (aider à/0 N, faire chier à/0 N, empêcher à/0 N). We will show some intriguing new insights into the regional distribution of non-standard variants and discuss two hypotheses to explain their coming into being, i.e. language-contact (with Francoprovençal and Occitan, two Galloromance languages genetically close to, but not identical with French) and/or analogical leveling.