Academic literature on the topic 'Franco-Provençal dialects'

Summary Within the Gallo-Romance domain, Franco-Provençal and its western correlate Poitevin have been variously labeled ‘independent languages’, ‘dialects of French’, or ‘dialects of oc’. At least one attempt has been made to link these two lateral entities against both the north and the south. A historical survey of these conflicting claims encompasses non-partisan methodologies such as dialect geography and linguistic atlases as well as theoretical developments affecting Romance studies during the last one hundred years. Late 19th century research had not yet resolved antinomies between speech and script or between dialect study and historical grammar. Recent research into time and direction of Romanization, significantly clarifying the bi-(or tri-)partitioning of Gaul, has complemented increasingly sophisticated work in all these fields. Yet frequent overemphasis on segmentation, coupled with a failure to distinguish shared linguistic fate from ‘language’ in its general Romance acception, cannot be allowed to obscure the fact that both FP and Poitevin belong to Gallo-Romance; the successful investigation of either must continue to mesh grammar, lexis, scripta, and geohistory.

This contribution addresses a set of phenomena attested in the dialects spoken in Piedmont, including Franco-Provençal and Occitan varieties, and in West Liguria, concerning the interaction between subject and object clitics. Complementarily to these phenomena, we find the interplay between the realization of the 3rd person clitic and the auxiliary. More specifically, we will investigate the object-for-subject mechanism in the Piedmontese and Franco-Provençal dialects, the one of subject-with-object in some Franco-Provençal dialects and their possible interaction with the auxiliary. In some Piedmontese dialects, the alternation between be and have affects the distribution of subject and object clitics; in particular, the 3rd person clitic can occur in all persons, where it can be ambiguous between the subject or the object reading. The relation between the verb and the realization of its argumental clitics, and the interaction between auxiliaries and clitics are the main topics of this work. Our approach relies on the idea that clitics are the realization of φ-features associated with v and T and that auxiliaries are not functional elements but verbs with lexical properties. The theoretical frame we follow is the formulation recently proposed by Chomsky, based on the operation Merge and the Labeling Algorithm, leading to a more appropriate conceptualization of morpho-syntactic structures.

This article investigates indefinite DPs in some Romance varieties spoken in border contexts between linguistic groups. Specifically, we will consider Occitan and Franco-Provençal varieties of western Piedmont, the western Ligurian dialects, the Lombard-Alpine dialects, and Romansh, also in comparison with other North-Italian systems. The central issue is the nature of the construcs DE + article/Bare Noun of Italian varieties, where the preposition de/di (DE) ‘of’ does not introduce the usual possessive or partitive PPs, but DPs with indefinite reading. In negative contexts, such phrases mostly require the narrow scope interpretation. We argue that DE + bare noun constructs, as generally bare partitives, are based on the lexical properties of the preposition DE.

This article investigates the contact-induced reorganization of the possessive system in the Gallo-Romance dialects spoken from around the 12th century in the villages of Celle and Faeto in North Apulia and Guardia Piemontese in North-West Calabria. Gallo-Romance possessives exclude the article in the prenominal position, whereas in the Southern Italian dialects, possessives follow the noun preceded by the definite article. This original contrast is no longer visible in the varieties of Celle, Faeto and Guardia which changed the original prenominal position to the postnominal position combining with the article, except with kinship terms, preserving the original prenominal position. At the heart of contact phenomena, there are bilingualism and transfer mechanisms between the languages included in the complex knowledge of the speaker, suggesting a test bed for the treatment of language variation and parameterization. We propose an account of morpho-syntactic and interpretive properties of possessives, making use of the insights from the comparison of contact systems with prenominal (Franco-Provençal and Occitan varieties) and postnominal (Southern Italian dialects) possessives. The final part examines the distribution of possessives, tracing it back to the definiteness properties of DP and proposes a phasal treatment based on syntactic and interpretive constraints.

Unlike other officially multilingual states, Switzerland is often seen as a glottophile country, where linguistic minorities have few complaints. Its success is often attributed to the principle of territoriality (one official language per territory), but the principle of personality (free choice of by citizens of the language in State-citizen communications) is also important in bi/plurilingual cantons, in what appears to be a differentiated territoriality. The legal framework is based on cooperation between the cantons, which govern their own linguistic matters, and the federal State. The officialization of the three main languages (German, French, and Italian) was recently supplemented by that of Romansh, a vulnerable language from a demographic perspective. At the same time, the Swiss-German dialects have remained very much alive, despite their absence from constitutional texts. However, one should be wary of total acceptance of this idealised image of Switzerland, when the legislator seems indifferent to languages of immigration and, moreover, does not grant recognition to Franco-Provençal. This Romance language that is still spoken in parts of Francophone Switzerland is not protected by any policies aimed at ensuring its survival. This article aims to reflect on the applicability of the notion of glottophilia to Switzerland by focusing on the texts that constitute the architecture of language legislation in the country.

In this paper, based on several types of documents (legal texts, diplomatic correspondence, literary writings, educational works), I examine how factors external to the language, of various kinds, acting in a complex synergy, had an impact on the geographical development and functional diffusion of the idioms present in the ancient States of Savoy at a time when the vernacular languages were asserting themselves and consolidating. In particular, I focus on the ‘French’ side of the Duchy to show that in these territories the predominance of French in most communicative contexts and the confinement of Franco-Provençal to the sphere of family life and everyday activities depend on political decisions but also on the geographical context and the social and economic fabric: French is the prerogative of the highest classes, who use it carefully and rigorously, distancing themselves not only from Latin tradition but also from regional or dialectal popular culture, while Franco-Provençal remains the prerogative of the most isolated communities and those with more difficulty in accessing education. This divide is visible, on a literary level, by two distinct parallel traditions.

Mobilis é comme médecin pendant la Première guerre mondiale, Edouard Pichon est resté en relation épistolaire avec son oncle et collaborateur pour l’Essai de grammaire de la langue française, Jacques Damourette. Dans une série de missives de l’année 1915, il lui fait part des études qu’il mène sur les dialectes et les langues régionales. A partir de listes de mots et de paradigmes de conjugaison, il cherche à retrouver dans les formes du picard, du franco-provençal, du catalan et du languedocien la preuve d’une permanence de la mentalité française à travers ses différents parlers. Mettant à contribution ce qu’il entend chez les habitants du Santerrois et sollicitant comme informateurs les militaires des unités dans lesquelles il est affecté, il revient à une approche philologique en étudiant le provençal dans Mirèio de Mistral. Utilisant une notation phonétique idiosyncrasique, Pichon a une approche différentialiste. Il conçoit les dialectes comme l’interprétation prosodique, « affective », d’une même langue, le français, dont la fonction « représentative » resterait constante par l’effet d’un atavisme racial. Ainsi la grammaire devient l’illustration d’une théorie qui fait des langues, et des rapprochements entre elles, la preuve d’une transcendance des propriétés de race sur les formations sociales. S’il y a des affinités entre le français, l’occitan, le breton et l’alsacien, ce n’est pas un effet de contact mais la rémanence d’un substrat biologique commun. A ce titre, Pichon s’oppose à la vision historiciste de Gaston Paris en romanistique comme aux principes sociologiques d’Antoine Meillet.

We study the distribution of null subjects in one Franco-Provençal variety. These are possible in root declaratives, obligatory in embedded subject position, and impossible in root wh-questions as well as in the company of weather predicates. We approach null subjects indirectly, by investigating the distribution of one subject clitic, arguing that its optionality in some contexts is due to the possibility of moving pro to a peripheral topic position, where formal licensing is not required. We also discuss the circumstances in which an overt complementizer and a robustly inflected verb license pro, rendering the clitic redundant. The comparative interest of this dialect is that it reveals synchronically the three mechanisms of pro licensing available in Romance diachronically. These are (a) association with rich verbal inflection, (b) government by a complementizer, and (c) doubling by a clitic. We contend that the syntax is sensitive to the formal relationship between an XP and a head that these three mechanisms instantiate.

Aujourd'hui, la situation des langues régionales soulève de nombreuses questions, notamment en ce qui concerne les zones linguistiques charnières et de transition, comme le département des Alpes Maritimes. Zone de contact de langue entre le français, l’italien, et plus précisément le ligure – présent jusqu’à Menton, où il est en transition avec le provençal – la vallée de la Roya est un territoire plurilinguistique et pluriculturel complexe. Du côté français, notre étude porte sur les parlers des villages de Tende, la Brigue et Breil-sur-Roya (du nord au sud de la haute vallée de la Roya française), sur lesquels ont travaillé de manière plus importante les linguistes Werner Forner et Jean-Philippe Dalbera. Du côté italien, j’ai orienté mes recherches sur les villes de la basse vallée de la Roya, Sanremo et Vintimille, au Sud de la Ligurie occidentale, et sur les villages de Triora et Pigna, plus au nord.Au-delà des conflits d’identités et de l’urgence de sauvegarder les langues par leur transmission dans les associations, l’un des problèmes les plus épineux reste la classification linguistique des parlers locaux. En effet, si le territoire de la vallée est officiellement considéré zone occitane, les linguistes y opposent fermement une appartenance ligure-alpine. Dans une orientation sociolinguistique, notre propos sera de dépasser les considérations purement linguistiques pour faire émerger les représentations des locuteurs quant à leur culture et à leur parler.En ce qui concerne nos recherches sur le terrain, elles relèvent de « l’étude des pratiques langagières authentiques en contexte social relève de la sociolinguistique, au sens large » Gadet (2003 : 5) dans un cadre épistémologique socioconstructiviste de la pensée complexe et théorique de l’ethno-sociolinguistique (Calvet, 1993, Blanchet, 2000). Nos recherches se situent dans le domaine des langues en contact et s’orientent vers une sociolinguistique variationniste (Labov, 1976) et interactionnelle (Hymes, 1982 ; Gumperz,1989 a et b), avec l’étude de l’hétérogénéité des systèmes linguistiques et de l’hétérogénéité linguistique des groupes sociaux de notre enquête. Nous interrogeons également dans ce cadre la question des phénomènes de domination (Marcellesi et Gardin 1974, Blanchet 2018, Colonna 2020)
Today, the situation of regional languages raises many questions, particularly with regard to the hinge and transition linguistic zones, such as the Alpes Maritimes department. A language contact zone between French, Italian, and more precisely Ligurian - present as far as Menton, where it is in transition with Provençal - the Roya valley is a complex plurilingual and pluricultural territory.On the French side, our study focuses on the languages of the villages of Tende, La Brigue and Breil-sur-Roya (from the north to the south of the upper valley of the French Roya), on which the linguists Werner Forner and Jean-Philippe Dalbera have worked extensively. On the Italian side, I focused my research on the towns of the lower Roya valley, Sanremo and Ventimiglia, in the south of Western Liguria, and on the villages of Triora and Pigna, further north.Beyond the conflicts of identities and the urgency of safeguarding languages through their transmission in associations, one of the thorniest problems remains the linguistic classification of local languages. Although the territory of the valley is officially considered to be an Occitan area, linguists firmly oppose Ligurian-Alpine membership. From a sociolinguistic point of view, our aim will be to go beyond purely linguistic considerations to bring out the speakers' representations of their culture and of speaking to them.As far as our fieldwork is concerned, it is part of "the study of authentic language practices in a social context is a matter of sociolinguistics, in the broadest sense" Gadet (2003: 5) within a socioconstructivist epistemological framework of complex thinking and ethno-sociolinguistics theory (Calvet, 1993, Blanchet, 2000). Our research is situated in the field of languages in contact and is oriented towards a variationist (Labov, 1976) and interactional (Hymes, 1982; Gumperz, 1989 a and b) sociolinguistics, with the study of the heterogeneity of the linguistic systems and the linguistic heterogeneity of the social groups in our survey. We also interrogate in this framework the question of domination phenomena (Marcellesi and Gardin 1974, Blanchet 2018, Colonna 2020)

The present study is a collection of material in the Franco-provençal dialect of Valle d’Aosta aimed at highlighting how the animal world is constantly present in everyday language through proverbs, idioms, rhetorical figures, phytonymy... The corpus was created by consulting published sources, both lexicographical and botanical and, in particular, by turning to the author’s direct knowledge of the dialect of Ayas, a dialectal variety that plays a predominant role in the text. Given the impressive amount of data collected, the focus presented here is on a selection of the elements considered most interesting or characterised by out-standing originality.