Variation in the use of discourse markers in a language contact situation

TLDR

Mastery of discourse markers, a skill not formally taught, signals a speaker’s integration into the local speech community. In a study of 17 Anglophone Montreal French speakers, marker use varied greatly, with only five matching native or L1 English rates; frequent use correlated with French grammatical knowledge, and English influence was limited to the marker “comme,” suggesting fluent speakers employ markers more often.

Abstract

ABSTRACT Use of discourse markers by 17 speakers of Anglophone Montreal French (AMF) showed great variation in individual repertoires and frequency of use. Only five subjects manifested rates of usage comparable to those of native speakers or to their own LI usage in English. In decreasing order of frequency, the speakers used tu sais ‘y'know’; là ‘there’ (the most frequent among L1 Montreal French speakers); bon ‘good’, alors ‘so’, comme ‘like’, and bien ‘well’; and the local discourse conjunction fait que ‘so’. The subjects occasionally made use of the English markers you know, so, like , and well . Québécois French markers with no English equivalent were used by the speakers who had been exposed to French in their early childhood environment. The one marker that showed influence from English was comme , apparently calqued on English like . Overall, frequent use of discourse markers correlated only with the speakers' knowledge of French grammar – evidence that a higher frequency of discourse marker use is the hallmark of the fluent speaker. As a feature that is not explicitly taught in school, mastery of the appropriate use of discourse markers is thus particularly revealing of the speakers' integration into the local speech community.