Inflection dropping in the English-origin verbs of present-day French: A Twitter-wide exploration
Résumé
Fifty frequent English-origin verbs extracted from a corpus of 100 million French tweets from 2020-2022 were analyzed for uninflectedness in two composite verb forms -the passé composé construction and the periphrastic future construction. It was found that a majority of these verbs show a substantial preference for the nonstandard practice of dropping inflectional marking on the past participle (for the passé composé) and the infinitive (for the periphrastic future). This salient feature of written social media discourse is unexpected as it violates a presumably categorical norm but it is not truly exceptional in light of other underreported phenomena of verbal uninflectedness, especially when French is in contact with other languages. It is also suggested that unadapted forms are not only a marked choice flagging foreignness and peripherality, but also, in some cases, markers of ingroup membership.
Domaines
Sciences de l'Homme et SociétéOrigine | Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s) |
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