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Abstract
According to prescriptive grammar, the French complementizer que is obligatory. However, the absent form has been attested in more than one variety of French in informal spoken language. A combination of social, linguistic, and stylistic factors has been shown to condition que realization (Cedergren & Sankoff 1974; Connors 1975; Sankoff 1980; Martineau 1985; Warren 1994; Blondeau & Nagy 2008; Liang et al. 2021). Yet, there is disagreement among scholars as to which factors condition the absent variant and to what extent. This dissertation examines the absent complementizer in Europe, Quebec, and Africa in the early 21st century. The objectives are to determine how widespread absent que is in each region, the conditioning factors, and the trajectory of the phenomenon in Quebec since the first studies in the 1970s and 1980s. Using two online corpora of informal spoken language, the Corpus of French spoken in Quebec (CFPQ) and Phonology of Contemporary French project (PFC), all examples where the complementizer could occur with 25 selected matrix verbal elements were extracted. Generalized linear mixed-effects models were fit using the lmer function in the lme4 package (Bates et al. 2015) of R (R Core Team 2022). Absent que was found to exist in each region at a rate of at least 20%. None of the social factors was statistically significant. The lexical identity of the matrix verbal element, the phonological and syntactic contexts following the complementizer, and intervening material in the matrix clause were significant for at least one model. It was determined that the matrix verb is the most important conditioning factor followed by the phonological context. The results indicate that the overall absent que rate has not changed since previous studies in Quebec. However, individual speaker use suggests that linguistic change may be occurring.
This study is the first to compare absent que rates in three geographically separated francophone regions. It is one of two studies to use mixed-effects models, which have several advantages over the methods used in previous studies. Additionally, this study proposes that syntactic analogy plays a role in que realization.