Le statut variationnel du sujet clitique dans deux corpus de la Suisse romande: Une comparaison entre sms4science.ch et OFROM

Abstract

This contribution proposes a comparative analysis of two corpora containing informal and more formal Swiss French: a written corpus of text messages and a corpus of spoken French. We test two hypotheses based on recent approaches to language variation in French. Firstly, we challenge Koch & Oesterreicher’s (2011) model, which denies an influence of the code of a message on its linguistic form, giving precedence to its conception. We show that there are differences between the corpora that are partially induced by the code of the message, i.e. the possibility of dropping the referential subject. Secondly, there are indications in favour of the hypothesis which states that clitic subjects in informal French have to be analysed as agreement markers rather than as proper arguments of the verb (cf. e.g. Culbertson 2010 , among many others). We conclude by proposing that there is a difference between written and spoken language in non-standard varieties.