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The Social Conditioning of Syntactic Variation in French 1
Author(s) -
Lindenfeld Jacqueline
Publication year - 1969
Publication title -
american anthropologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.51
H-Index - 85
eISSN - 1548-1433
pISSN - 0002-7294
DOI - 10.1525/aa.1969.71.5.02a00100
Subject(s) - variation (astronomy) , categorization , linguistics , transformational leadership , sentence , sociology , class (philosophy) , grammar , psychology , computer science , artificial intelligence , social psychology , philosophy , physics , astrophysics
This is an attempt to correlate nonlinguistic and linguistic events in order to make explicit some of the “rules” by which members of a given society can intuitively categorize speakers and speech situations within that society. Syntactic variation in French, as analyzed within the framework of transformational grammar, is shown here to be conditioned by both sociological and contextual factors. This pilot study is based on twenty‐four samples of spoken French obtained in two different contexts from subjects of two different social classes. The speech samples are analyzed in terms of complexity of sentence structure as measured by the occurrence of certain transformational operations. A clear correlation obtains between sociological variation (socioeconomic Class I/Class II), contextual variation (formal/informal situation) and syntactic variation (particularly in terms of nominalization).