Subject Doubling in Spoken French: A Sociolinguistic Approach

The canonical sentence pattern is rivaled in informal French by Subject Doubling. This article reviews attitudes to doubling, and examines the frequency of the two structures in speech. Previous frequency estimates have varied greatly, partly because they have not always compared like with like. The question of "what to count" is addressed explicitly here, leading to the exclusion of the moi + je pattern. Analysis of a corpus of northern French suggests that doubling is less common than has sometimes been supposed, but younger adults use it more than older speakers, a pattern found previously for the variable omission of ne.