La variation stylistique en maltais : étude des usages concrets de la langue appuyée sur une approche contrastive des phénomènes variationnels en maltais et en français

Abstract

Intraspeaker variation takes place according to relevant situational conditions of language use, such as the spoken/written order, the framework and degree of formality of the situation, topic, tone, participants' aims and identity issues, and context, which is co-constructed and reconstructed throughout the interaction. A distinction is made between institutional or protocol formality, practised by public speech professionals in serious, public, sometimes mediatic situations, and individual speakers' formality, practised by all, normally within transactional frameworks. The type of bilingualism which characterises the Maltese language situation is described as relatively diglossic, from a social rather than an institutional point of view. This characterisation is based on the functional distribution of Maltese and English, and on the prestige associated with English, considered by the community and the private sector as the H variety, whilst Maltese is the H variety chosen by government institutions for protocol situations. A questionnaire delves into language use and attitudes on a societal level. Ambivalent attitudes emerge regarding regional dialects, as well as veneration of Semitic Maltese, and conflicting attitudes regarding the use of English. These results allow a better understanding of the sociolinguistic value of data obtained from a Maltese corpus. The spoken corpus is obtained thanks to eight key speakers (among which three public speech professionals), recorded in a variety of situations ranging from the formal to the informal. The written corpus is divided into informal (emails, chat) and formal (articles, literary prose, administration texts) sections. The corpus shows that variation takes place in Malta through register shifts and codeswitching, thus covering variation patterns associated with both monolingual and bilingual situations. A study of adverb and conjunction distribution in Maltese confirms their susceptibility to formality, channel and genre. Clause junction and dislocation also vary according to style. Code-switching appears motivated by a will to teach children English and, for adults, by the prestige and the connotations of education associated with this language. The language situation in France is known for the significant difference between standard and non-standard forms; its causes are mentioned. In the Maltese context, variation inherent to Maltese and the possibility to resort to code-switching also provide a wide margin of variation possibilities. The standardisation process in the two situations diverges on several levels; language attitudes converge through an idea of language purity. Language areas susceptible to variation are analyzed, and it is proposed that variation is mostly tolerated in Maltese at the syntactic level. Stylistic variation dominates the non-diglossic French context; a hypothesis is proposed that social variation dominates the Maltese context.