Contact, cognates, and the Dictionary of Canadianisms Online

Conference item

The Charter of the French Language (1977) made Quebec a unilingual francophone province. Most Quebec anglophones lives in Montreal; 70% report that they are bilingual (2006 census). Bilingualism is also high in young francophones and allophones, making Montreal a perfect site for contact phenomena. Borrowings from Quebec French (QF) are common in Quebec English (QE), e.g. dépanneur, 'corner store' and guichet, 'bank machine', 'cash point'. The use of "false friends" or cognates with clearly distinct meanings in QF and QE has increased-one hears and occasionally reads library for bookstore or circulation for traffic. The primary focus of this paper is on partial cognates, "pairs ... that have the same meaning in some, but not all contexts" (Frunza & Inkpen 2007). For example, the primary meaning of primordial in English is "primeval", while in French it is "essential," leading to sentences like "The freshness of the fish is primordial." Using dictionary definitions to test for the effects of QF on QE sometimes fails, however. In QE, security is often used where Canadian English speakers would choose safety although the Canadian Oxford and the OED give 'safety' as the first sense: "The left-turn ban was part of a plan ... to improve security at the rail crossing." Other cognates have different frequencies, connotations, or degrees of formality that affect QE usage. Evidence on these differences for about 30 cognates will come from the English-language Montreal daily, the Gazette, with control data from The Toronto Star. The newspaper corpus will be supplemented with correctness / acceptibility judgements by Vancouver and Montreal speakers. The results will directly inform how the second edition of the (DCHP-Online) should document such differences, if at all. Sample dictionary entries will be provided for several new senses for cognates along with the supporting evidence. Existing work (e.g. Poplack, Walker and Malcolmson 2006) does not apply the fine-grained semantic analysis proposed here and therefore tends to under-report the nature of French influence.

Authors: Fee, M; Dollinger, S

• Alternative title: Presented at Modern Lexicographical Challenges session
• Publication status: Not published
• Peer review status: Reviewed (other)
• Language: English
• Keywords: cognates
• Subjects: Lexicography; English Language and Literature; French