Norm and Ideology in Spoken French

A Sociolinguistic History of Liaison

David Hornsby

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030492991
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030493004
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This volume offers a diachronic sociolinguistic perspective on one of the most complex and fascinating variable speech phenomena in contemporary French. Liaison affects a number of word-final consonants which are realized before a vowel but not pre-pausally or before a consonant. Liaisons have traditionally been classified as obligatoire (obligatory), interdite (forbidden) and facultative (optional), the latter category subject to a highly complex prescriptive norm. This volume traces the evolution of this norm in prescriptive works published since the 16th Century, and sets it against actual practice as evidenced from linguists' descriptions and recorded corpora. The author argues that optional (or variable) liaison in French offers a rich and well-documented example of language change driven by ideology in Kroch's (1978) terms, in which an elite seeks to maintain a complex conservative norm in the face of generally simplifying changes led by lower socio-economic groups, who tend in this case to restrict liaison to a small set of traditionally obligatory environments.

Part IModels

© The Author(s) 2020

D. HornsbyNorm and Ideology in Spoken Frenchhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49300-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Ideology and Language Change

David Hornsby¹

(1)

School of European Culture and Languages, University of Kent School of European Culture and Languages, Canterbury, Kent, UK

David Hornsby

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

1.1 Kroch’s Model of Language Variation

In a seminal article published in Language and Society in 1978, Anthony Kroch appeared to question one of the core tenets of linguistics. The axiom ‘Linguistics is descriptive, not prescriptive’ had become as much a raison d’être as a guiding principle for a discipline determined to challenge language-related prejudice. Linguists generally, and sociolinguists in particular, had been at pains to stress the equality of all varieties, and reject folk-linguistic stereotypes associated with regionally or socially defined speaker groups. So when Kroch observed, citing evidence from Labov’s famous (1966) New York City survey, that ‘prestige dialects require special attention to speech’ and ‘non-prestige dialects tend to be articulatorily more economical than the prestige dialect’ (1978: 19–20), he was acutely aware that his views could be characterised as reviving prescriptive stereotypes of ‘lazy’ working-class usage.

As he made clear, however, Kroch’s intention was not in any way to be judgmental or prescriptive. In claiming that ‘working-class speech is more susceptible to the processes of phonetic conditioning than the prestige dialect’ (p.18), Kroch was simply arguing that language change has an ideological component which, however inconvenient it might be, could no longer be ignored. While working-class speech follows ‘natural’ phonetic conditioning processes,¹ higher status groups, he claimed, actively resist these same processes in order to maintain social distinction (1978: 30):

Our position, as stated earlier, is that prestige dialects resist phonetically motivated change and inherent variation because prestige speakers seek to mark themselves off as distinct from the common people and because inhibiting phonetic processes is an obvious way to do this. Thus, we are claiming that there is a particular ideological motivation at the origin of social dialect variation. This ideology causes the prestige dialect user to expend more energy in speaking than does the user of the popular vernacular.

Presenting evidence from a range of studies, Kroch cites three examples of phonetic change, namely (i) consonantal simplification (ii) vocalic processes of chain shifting and (iii) assimilation of foreign phonemes to a native pattern, all of which, he argues, are further advanced in non-standard varieties. Among higher status groups, by contrast, resistance to such linguistic processes demands a particular effort ‘motivated not by the needs of communication but by status consciousness’ (p. 19), which procures social advantage for the user. Linguistic conservatism on the part of elite groups, viewed by Kroch as the embodiment of their ideological value-system, had also been observed by Bloomfield (1964 [1927]: 393–94) half a century earlier:

These dialects are maintained by social elites and such elites are by and large conservative. The use of conservative linguistic forms is for them a symbol of their whole value system. From this standpoint the conservatism of the literary language has basically the same source as that of the spoken prestige dialect, since the standards of the literary language are set by the elite.

Kroch’s emphasis on the ideological dimension has been challenged in recent years by commentators who associate linguistic conservatism not with ideology, but with isolation (see especially Trudgill 1992, 2011). Isolation may even promote the very opposite of the simplifying changes Kroch associates with low-status speakers. Milroy and Margrain (1980), for example, highlight the exceptional phonological complexity of the working-class vowel system of English in Belfast, a relatively peripheral city within the United Kingdom in which close-knit communities inhabit what Milroy (1980) describes as ‘urban villages’. Andersen (1988) has noted the prevalence of ‘exorbitant phonetic developments’ in isolated communities, such as kugv (‘cow’) /ku:/ > /kigv/ in Faroese (see Trudgill 2011: 153), which again appear to run counter to the expectations of Kroch’s model. One can also, moreover, point to counter-examples within the evidence which Kroch himself cites. He notes, for example, that /r/-deletion in New York is a simplifying change which, according to Labov’s (1966) evidence, is both further advanced among working-class speakers and stigmatised by elite groups. Within England, however, the pattern is reversed: the prestige accent RP (Received Pronunciation) is notably non-rhotic, while some low-status varieties retain non-prevocalic /r/; similar remarks apply to ‘happy-tensing’ in many British English varieties, where replacement of a lax unstressed final vowel by a tense one results in increased articulatory effort. But Kroch is careful not to claim that ‘regular phonological processes can all be reduced to simplification of some sort’ (p.23, fn. 9), and among the ‘established prestige dialects’ to which he restricts his remarks, his model has a clear and obvious relevance to the case of standard French, a language which has probably seen more rigid top-down codification than any other.

1.2 The ‘Least Effort’ Principle

Similar observations had certainly not been lost on French commentators. Kroch himself (p.18, fn.4) cites Schogt (1961: 91), who had drawn attention to class-based differences in speech, and notably the conservatism of upper-class varieties, contrasting ‘la langue populaire riche en innovations, qui a pour elle le grand nombre, et la langue des classes aisées, qui est plus conservatrice et qui s’impose par son pres...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Part I. Models
• Part II. Diachronic Perspectives on a Prescriptive Norm
• Part III. Variation and Change
• Part IV. Conclusions and Implications
• Back Matter