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Articles

Vol. 9 No. 2 (2006)

La mutation achevée du connecteur ça fait que dans le français acadien des Iles-de-la-Madeleine

  • Anika Falkert
Submitted
October 15, 2012

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine the status of the connective ça fait que in the French spoken in the Magdalen Islands, by taking into account the distributional characteristics of this ambiguous junctor. Among all the locutions that figure in the category of conjunctions, the expression ça fait que plays an important role in both Acadian and Quebec French. According to Grevisse, its meaning in Popular French in France is close to donc, ainsi and alors, whereas recent research indicates that the connective seems to have partially lost the notion of consequence in North American French varieties. Previous studies by Roy (1979), Léard (1986) and Wiesmath (2000) show that ça fait que (which may be reduced to ça fait or fait que) tends to be used more and more as a discourse marker. This gradual loss of semantic value goes along with a modification of the pragmatic status of the connective. Our analysis, based on a number of examples found in our corpus of spoken French in the Magdalen Islands, focuses on syntactic behaviour and pragmatic functions in order to reveal the types of possible operations and various combinations of the marker with other discourse particles.