Le redoublement du sujet en français parlé. Motivations rythmiques
The repetition of the subject in spoken French: Rhythmic motivations

Summary/Abstract: French subject doubling can be attributed to extralinguistic factors (e.g. register, geographic origin of the speaker, etc.) as well as to linguistic factors (e.g. verbal person, sentence type, etc.). The present contribution investigates whether the realization of 'redundant' preverbal subject clitics could be explained by rhythmic factors such as the number of syllables of the noun phrase or the verb phrase. The analysis compares duplicate and simple structures in Valais French, only taking into account contexts where speakers can actually choose between the two variants: left dislocations, first or second person subjects and idioms are thus excluded. The statistical evaluation of the results focuses on the influence of subject length as well as on the impact of the difference in length between subject and object on the doubling rate.

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