ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at (L)-deletion on the part of five young Anglophone bilinguals recorded in a research project that involved three of the current coauthors. This chapter focuses on the five individuals whose (L)-deletion in subject clitics in that study fell within the range of native Francophone Montrealers. Analyzing the five bilingual subjects both clause-initial and intonational phrase-initial environments and found no cases of (L) being deleted in articles. As explained, even restricting the envelope of variation in this way is too broad, since intonational and prosodic considerations further narrow the domain in which deletion is possible. Each of the five fluent bilinguals reported on in this paper was observed to place object clitics correctly, but Sandra and Tony used only first person as pronominal objects. This chapter considers how this variation is influenced by prosody. This paper discusses a body of data that bridges the gap between researches on well-documented variation processes among L1 speakers of French.
