Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Posted on the LINGTYP (Linguistic Typology) mailing list today, reproduced in this posting to illustrate one of the ways linguists play around with data and ideas as they try to figure out what’s going on on some specific case — looking for inspiration in (roughly) similar cases in other varieties of language.

If  that’s what you want to do, you want to go where the linguistic typologists hang out. On LT, from Wikipedia (very briefly):

Linguistic typology (or language typology) is a field of linguistics that studies and classifies languages according to their structural features to allow their comparison. Its aim is to describe and explain the structural diversity and the common properties of the world’s languages.

LTists have a society, the Association for Linguistic Typology (webpage here), which organizes meetings, publishes a journal, and sponsors that mailing list, for open discussion of typological matters. Like the one I brought up today:

Had a long visit [on 6/28] from my linguistics colleague Luc Vartan Baronian, at UQ à Chicoutimi, during which he asked if I knew about cases where a subordinating adverbial of place — ‘where’ — has developed a use as a preposition, as French où has in Québec. This from a joint research project with Hugo Saint-Amant–Lamy, at UQ à Rimouski. (Some examples, from a large database, below.) I dimly recalled a discussion on this list about such examples (possibly involving other subordinating adverbials as well, though in Québec French it’s just the place adverbial that’s affected). Can someone point me to this discussion? Luc isn’t a subscriber to this list, but I’ll forward responses on to him. (Or you could add  baronian@uqac.ca as a recipient of your mailing.)
…
Exemples de <où SN> [AZ: SN abbreviating “syntagme nominal” = Noun Phrase)]:
— Va te placer où l’étoile.
— Il faut tourner à droite où l’église.
— Où les lilas, on mettrait des chaises longues.
— J’ai laissé mes clés où l’ordinateur.
— J’ai mal au pied, où la petite bosse.

[AZ: They’re also researching the geographical distribution of the variant within Québec.]

A playful note. While I wait for comments to crop up, I am enchanted by the found poetry of one of the example sentences; I might have left my heart in San Francisco, but now

J’ai laissé
mes clés
où l’ordinateur

Aide-moi,
mon cher!

It needs further development, and of course a tune.

This entry was posted on July 1, 2024 at 4:07 pm and is filed under French, Language change, Languages, Linguistic diversity, Poetry, Syntactic categories, Variation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.