International audienceThe present contribution intends to analyse patterns of full and reduced forms of because inLancashire (Bolton) English, as observed in its ca. 300 occurrences in the semi-guided andfree conversations in the corpus of spoken Lancashire English of the PAC project (Carr,Durand & Pukli 2004, Durand & Pukli 2004). This component of the PAC project, collectedon the networking principle used by Labov and the Milroys in various studies and recorded inlate 2002, comprises recordings from 10 speakers (1 male and 9 females) between 23 and 83years of age, with the interviews running to a total of 5 hours. While the data can be regardedas relatively small, they are varied enough to make sense of the observable patterns in termsof apparent-time changes, both as far as the phonological variants of because and itspragmatic uses are concerned.It will be demonstrated that the distribution of the phonological variants showschanges in apparent time. Firstly, the oldest speaker did not use monosyllabic forms at allwhile the two next oldest speakers still did not have the same range of variants as middle-agedand youngest speakers in the corpus did. Secondly, even the occurrence and distribution ofmonosyllabic forms confirms an apparent-time change in the corpus. The LPD (Wells 2008)lists variants across standard varieties that can differ according to 4 factors: the identity of thestressed vowel: /ɒ ɔ: ʌ ɑ:/ (even /ə/!); the voicing of the final sibilant: /s/ vs. /z/; the amount ofreduction in the unstressed vowel: /ə i/; and mono- or disyllabicity. Corpus data from Boltonreveal, beyond the variants just mentioned, further reduced variants. A variant [bʊ'kɒz], with alabial, or at least labial-coloured, unstressed vowel, occurs a few times in one speaker in themore formal semi-guided interview. In the same type of dialogue, a curious variant [tə'kɒz]occurs in another speaker a number of times. Finally, the data clearly show that thedistribution of mono- and disyllabic forms does not depend either on speech rate or on theinformality of the context: in other words, this variation is not a fast speech reduction process.From a pragmatic point of view, because occurs in various discourse functions, not allof which are found equally across different ages. This also points towards changes in apparenttime. For example, the discourse progression structure A–because B–so A' (described byPassot 2007 based on another spoken corpus of RP) is virtually absent in the data from olderspeakers in Bolton. Corpus data further reveal occurrences of a modified template for thisstructure, apparently not discussed in the literature so far, where A' is supplied by theconversation partner. Finally, younger speakers frequently use because to elicit furtherinformation on the topic under discussion (absent from middle-aged and younger speakers)and use 'style disjuncts' (Quirk et al. 1985:615) much more readily to ''[define] in some wayunder what conditions [they are] speaking as the 'authority' of the utterance''.ReferencesCarr, Philip, Jacques Durand & Monika Pukli. 2004. PAC project: Principles and Methods. InLa Tribune Internationale des Langues Vivantes (TILV), Vol. 36: 24-35.Durand, J. & M. Pukli. 2004. How to construct a phonological corpus: PRAAT and the PACproject. Tribune Internationale des Langues Vivantes (TILV), Vol. 36: 36-46.Passot, Frederique. 2007. A because B so A'. Circularity and discourse progression inconversational English. In: Agnes Celle & Ruth Huart (eds.) Connectives as DiscourseLandmarks. John Benjamins Amsterdam/Philadelphia. pp.117-134.Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, Jan Svartvik. 1985. A ComprehensiveGrammar of the English Language. Longman, London and New York
