The Grammaticalization of the Discourse Marker <i>genre</i> in Swiss French

Abstract

By conducting an apparent-time analysis of the OFROM corpus collected in Francophone Switzerland, this study examined the use of genre as discourse marker in the speech of 306 French L1 speakers. First, we examined the effect of extralinguistic factors on the discursive use of genre. The logistic mixed-effects regression analysis results revealed that the emerging use of genre is indeed an ongoing change led by female speakers in Swiss French. This use was favored by monolinguals in Francophone Swiss. Second, we examined the vowel reduction of the DM genre in the corpus. Our results revealed that speakers who received only a high school education favor the vowel reduction in the DM genre the most. Given the high percentage of phonological reduction in the DM genre, we believe that the grammaticalization of this particle has reached its advanced stage in Swiss French. Compared to previous findings on the emerging use of genre in Hexagonal French, we suggested that the grammaticalization of the particle genre in Swiss French may be independent of that in Hexagonal French. The grammaticalization in Swiss French was much more advanced than in Hexagonal French. This study supplied comparable results on the grammaticalization of the same particle in two different Francophone countries.

Keywords

• DM
• grammaticalization
• phonological reduction
• variation and change