A Corpus-Based Study of Grammatica and Lexical Features of Chiac (New Brunswick, Canada) as a Contact Variety with Code-Switching

The article explores the phenomenon of code-switching in a variety of Acadian French known as Chiac (or Chiaque) spoken in the south-east of New Brunswick. The study aims to present the results of the corpora analysis carried out by the author. The focus of the analysis was primarily on the functional and systemic characteristics of code-switching (CS), which commonly occurs in Chiac. Addressing the need for further discussion, the author provides a qualitative analysis of the existing classification of Chiac, presenting an overview of the most prominent opinions on its status and her position regarding this topic. The empirical data of the study comes from the corpus Chiac-Kasparian H99 and the micro-corpus Kasparian-Leger H2004 provided by Dr. Sylvia Kasparian, Head of the Textual Data Analysis Laboratory, University of Moncton, New Brunswick. The corpora consist of transcribed spontaneous oral conversations between young adults and their friends and families living in the south-east of New Brunswick. The analyzed material comprises 51,010 word forms, including headings and metacommentaries. The empirical material is accompanied by sociolin-guistic information about the speakers. The timeline of the recorded data is limited by the years 1999 and 2004. The age of the informants varies from 10 to 61; however, most of the informants were students and residents of the urban agglomeration of Moncton aged 18 to 24. The methodology relies heavily on content analysis; morphosyntactic analysis has also been incorporated. The first stage of the study included corpora formatting and manual annotation. To create a morphological markup of the corpora, the Russian National Corpus annotation model was used; a system of tags was developed to accommodate the need to tag code-switching, its classification and functions, variable inflections, and dialectisms. The second stage was the analysis of the juxtaposition of English and French (part-of-speech affiliation, CS typology, CS grammatical markers and restrictions imposed on CS, pragmatic functions). As a result, the author has revealed contexts with code-switching to English: intrasentential CS (single words and phrases), intersen-tential CS (sentences), and tag-switches (syntactically independent). The analysis has shown that the free morpheme constraint and the clitic constraint are usually respected; however, regarding the latter, the author introduces some insights into the function of code-switches that contain personal pronouns, questions the autonomy of the English conjunction "and" and the possible constraints on its use without English collocates. The use of English adjectives is investigated regarding the violation of the equivalence constraint due to their position. It is argued that the use of tag-switches may indicate a desire to use CS as a tool to structure the speech and enhance its emphatic effect.

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