Digging into lexical variation: The restructuring of consequence markers in Montreal French
This paper examines the vernacular consequence marker ça-fait-que (CFQ) and its standard counterparts donc and alors in Montréal French. Previous studies have shown the effect of time on the variation: alors has decreased sharply and is being replaced by CFQ and donc. Our apparent-time analysis based on a 2012 sociolinguistic corpus of 50 interviews shows a further restructuring of the variants, as donc and CFQ compete to replace alors as the prestige variant. The analysis shows that the use of donc was of short duration, and confirms the take over of CFQ. We further examine the two phonological variants of CFQ, [fak] and [fɛk], and show that the variation is socially conditioned. We attribute the ultimate success of CFQ to its ability to phonologically encode social variation. The loss of alors created a vacuum, first filled by donc, but then replaced by a phonological variant of CFQ: [fɛk].
