‘Le français,c'est le last frontier ’: The Status of English-origin Nouns in Acadian French

Abstract

The categorization of lone lexical items from one language embedded in another is often difficult due to their ambiguous status as either loanwords or codeswitches. Following variationist principles, we use a comparative method to disambiguate lone English-origin nouns in otherwise Acadian French discourse. Their exact status is important because it has been argued that the constraints on different manifestations of language contact differ. Incorporating the notion of structural conflict sites as diagnostics, we examine these items at the morphological (e.g., number marking), syntactic (e.g., adjective placement) and discourse (e.g., flagging) levels for evidence of system membership. Our method reveals that although most of these items can be unambiguously classified as borrowings, a small subset must be considered to be codeswitches.