Variation morphosyntaxique et langue minoritaire : le cas du français ontarien

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the potential influence of language restriction (LR) on the use of clitic pronouns in Ontario French. Drawing on variationist methodology, I also consider the importance of several key linguistic factors for the presence/absence of French clitics. The thesis begins by showing that French clitic pronouns are best characterized as verbal affixes. Drawing on generative descriptions of clitic phenomena, I suggest that these affixes be generated in a morphological component and that their concatenation be regulated by templatic configurations. Since previous studies have shown that verbal affixes are used with less frequency by restricted speakers, I test the hypothesis that clitics too will be used less often by speakers whose use of French is restricted. The first alternation used to test this idea is that of presence vs. absence of a subject clitic in clauses already containing a lexical subject. My results demonstrate that the doubled variant is used less often among restricted speakers, thus supporting the claim that clitic use diminishes as LR increases. The quantitative analysis of subject doubling also reveals a number of linguistic factors influencing the presence of this structure, notably the specificity of the lexical NP, highly specific NPs being most often doubled. Next, direct and indirect object clitics are considered. In both cases, the clitic variant alternates with a free pronominal form. In all variables studied, LR is shown to have an unfavourable effect on the use of clitics, the restricted speakers using relatively more free morphemes. The study of object clitics also reveals that restricted speakers use structures where, contrary to the verb's subcategorization features, no object is used. This is again interpreted as evidence that restricted speakers use fewer bound forms than their unrestricted counterparts. I then address the question of why restricted speakers use relatively fewer clitics. Two types of explanations are considered: interference from English and internal restructuring. It is argued that although English presents a model for using non clitic variants, the use of these forms can also be analyzed in terms of regularization or simplification. As such, English interference is considered to play at best a supporting role.