Subject NP Doubling, Matching and Minority French

Abstract

Our study presents a variationist analysis of subject doubling in the French of Ontario, Canada. Two principal variants are distinguished: a non-doubled variant and a doubled variant containing a clitic agreement marker. In our analyses, both linguistic and social factors are taken into account and analyzed using GOLDVARB2. It is proposed that subject clitics are marked for default features, and that the doubled variant is favored when the clitic's default features match those of the subject NP; lack of matching favors the non-doubled variant. Discussion of linguistic factors for the present study, therefore, is limited to those factors which can be explained in terms of matching. The principal social factor studied is restricted language use (cf. Mougeon & Beniak, 1991). Our results show that the greater the restriction, the fewer doubled subjects one finds.