Omission de l'article et du pronom sujet dans le français abidjanais

Abstract

This study examines the omission of the article and of the subject pronoun in the spoken French of Abidjan, economic capital of Côte d'Ivoire. The occurrence of the bare nouns (NSDs for Noms Sans Déterminant) and subject-less tensed verbs (SujNuls for Sujets Nuls) in question is contrary to common use in standard as well as ordinary French. The findings made show that both kinds of omissions are particularities of Abidjan French, since neither kind of omission is produced by the French-speakers from France included in the corpus. Among the ten adults interviewed in Abidjan, however, there are differences in the distribution of the omissions. An important framework to this study is the sociolinguistic perspective. The Abidjan speakers are divided into three subgroups, according to their educational situation in French: Group A1 (n = 4) consists of illiterates with no or very little schooling, Group A2 (n = 2) of speakers who left school after the first five or six years, and Group A3 (n = 4) of speakers with at least nine years' schooling. In line with our primary hypothesis, the findings from our analysis of the nominal references, presented in Chapter 4, show that the less education in French received by the Abidjan speakers, the more occurrences of NSDs they exhibit. The analysis of the pronominal references, presented in Chapter 5, partially confirms a similar hypothesis: there is a clear difference between the A1 and the A2 speakers on the one hand and the A3 speakers and the speakers from France on the other. There are also differences in distribution between the two kinds of omission, that of the article being the more frequent one in the texts analysed. From a survey of earlier studies presented in the first two chapters, it appears that these omissions often occur in French-based varieties with African substrates, in 'semantactic' structures emanating from common modes of categorisation of experience as reflected in African languages. Typologically, French has developed into a very restrictive language for the omissions in question. Some of its articles, e.g. the partitive one, are marked structures in the languages of the world. The source language of most of the speakers studied, Baoulé (which is presented with some examples), has zero marking for nouns with generic or non-specific reference, whereas the definiteness mark is used only with specific referents. The plural is marked only when relevant. Further, the zero pronoun can appear in the serial-verb construction in Baoulé. The hypotheses about contexts favourable to NSDs in the texts analysed are drawn up on the basis of several criteria. The findings validate the typological and semantic criteria. Except for a single occurrence, the article is always present when reference is made to a noun with the feature 'animate'; these referents are always countable and mostly specific. In some frequent lexical domains (namely 'language/school', 'food' and 'work/profession'), the article is absent much more often than is the case for nouns belonging to other lexical domains. Moreover, the NSDs are often inanimate mass nouns and have a non-specific or generic reference. The NSDs produced by the Abidjan speakers are therefore interpreted as unmarked structures transposed from African languages to the local French variety. Out of the contexts mentioned in earlier research as favourable to the omission of the subject pronoun, the only one found here more than occasionally is that of serialisation of verbs. The most frequent context for the SujNuls in these texts is that of repetition. Here, the zero anaphor before the repeated predicate relies on an extremely high accessibility level and saliency, as the antecedent is explicitly mentioned in one of the preceding clauses. The transposition of typologically African features into Abidjan French is considered to be reinforced by general evolutionary tendencies, such as the avoidance of marked structures. The study concludes with a discussion of the tendencies towards a possible propagation of the omission of the article and the subject pronoun to new kinds of contexts, considering the multi-linguistic situation of the inhabitants of Abidjan and a seemingly growing awareness of the characteristics of Abidjan French