La morphosyntaxe dans les SMS suisse francophones: Le marquage de l'accord sujet – verbe conjugué

Abstract

The overall aim of this article is to show the stability of graphically marking morphosyntactic structures in French text messages. It presents a manual analysis of the first 400 French messages of the new corpus sms4science.ch, an analysis which focuses on subject-verb-agreement and its graphical marking in a form of communication commonly assumed to show a considerable amount of non-standard spelling. The overall results show two things: First, the marking of subject-verb agreement is closer to standard orthography when occurring with lexical subjects, which, however, are very infrequent in text messages, a hint at their variationist character as texts of 'communicative immediacy' ('oral discourse'). Second, this type of agreement, central both for typological and theoretical approaches to human language(s), is marked in almost 90% of the occurrences according to standard graphic regularities or by other devices, which leads to the conclusion that core syntax (grammar) is completely unaltered also in apparently 'non-standard' texts.