Article
French
ID: <
10670/1.znarel>
Abstract
The close contact of the Acadian French-speaking population in southeastem New-Brunswick with the Anglo-dominant population of Moncton led to the emergence of a mixed language called « chiac ».A superstratum of code-switching phenomena at the lexical, morphological, syntactic and pragmatic level adds to the French substratum. This paper deals with the status of the discourse marker well borrowed in « chiac ». In a corpus consisting of dialogues between fourteen-years old classmates, two-thirds of the subjects use well as well as ben in similar contexts. The uneven distribution of the occurrences among the subjects could indicate that sociolinguistic factors are at work, but looking at the spécifié contexts of use of the markers, it appears that ben is used more frequently in monologues and fonctions as a connecter, whereas well acts as a marker of speech interaction. Finally, although both can be markers of illocutionary acts, the nature of the linguistic context indicates some kind of a functional specialization.