Languages, Cultures and Visual Studies

Photo of Dr Zoë Boughton

Dr Zoë Boughton

Senior Lecturer in French

Z.C.Boughton@exeter.ac.uk

4209

01392 724209

Overview

I am a sociolinguist working primarily on phonological variation and change in the French of France. My research interests and publications cover topics including regional and social varieties of spoken French and the interaction between these dimensions; the attrition of distinctive regional accent features owing to processes of levelling and standardisation; and perceptual and attitudinal approaches to the study of dialect differences.

My teaching interests draw on this work. With Aidan Coveney, I offer an undergraduate pathway of modules in French linguistics covering articulatory phonetics, the external history of the language, aspects of the internal history including historical phonology and etymology, and French dialectology, both geographical and social. In addition, I have taught practical French language classes at all levels, and currently contribute to our final-year core module by teaching Translation both from and into French.

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Research

Zoë Boughton welcomes enquiries about postgraduate supervision (for MRes, MPhil and PhD degrees) in areas relating to the sociolinguistics and dialectology of French, such as: phonological and phonetic variation and change; French regional accents and social varieties; dialect and accent levelling; standardisation, purism and language ideology; language attitudes and perceptual dialectology; folk linguistics.

Sociolinguistics of Contemporary French, especially Standardisation and Social-Regional Accent Variation in Metropolitan France

I'm interested in all aspects of the linguistics, and particularly the sociolinguistics, of the French language, but my main area of research is variation and change in the pronunciation (phonetics and phonology) of metropolitan French. During my PhD, I gathered a large corpus (about 60 hours) of speech recordings by carrying out urban dialect surveys in the cities of Nancy and Rennes. The design of the corpus means that I can examine variation with regard to the major extra-linguistic variables of region, gender, age and social class. I'm especially interested in the apparent loss of traditional regional accents in France, whether this is owing to standardisation or levelling, whether uniformisation of speech is continuing and on what level, and how variation is expressed in contemporary French if regional features have been attenuated.

Perception, Salience and Connotations of Accents

Another key strand of my research is the investigation of ‘folk' (= non-linguists') perceptions of and attitudes towards language variation. This is important not least for the reason that speakers' beliefs and feelings about different varieties of a language can materially affect not only their own speech behaviour but potentially the direction of far-reaching linguistic changes. Most early language attitudes research in social psychology focused on hearers' attitudes towards speakers of certain types of language (for example, is a Brummie speaker friendly?; is a speaker of RP trustworthy?). More recently, the field of Perceptual Dialectology has sought answers to other questions, such as how many different varieties of a given language its native speakers believe to exist and where they think these are located geographically. My work on French has involved asking native speakers to listen to audio clips of other native speakers (from Nancy and Rennes) and say where they think they are from, what their socio-economic background might be, and so forth.

Forthcoming Research Projects

Current and forthcoming research projects include a study of discourse-pragmatic écoute in an audio-visual corpus (in collaboration with Marianne Connors) and the analysis of morpho-syntactic features of Multicultural Parisian Vernacular (in collaboration with Laurie Dekhissi and Aidan Coveney). In addition, I continue to pursue my interests in phonological variation and its interaction with Vernacular Universals, and in evaluative reactions to non-reference accents of French, especially in relation to the perception of speakers' social class.

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Supervision

Postgraduate Supervisions completed since 2006:
  • MRes on ‘"Levelling" in Metropolitan French: The Role of the Younger Middle-Class Female', Sophie Nicholson, 2006-07.
  • Three MA dissertations.
  • MRes on 'Guernsey Norman French', Helen Simmonds, 2007-8, funded by the AHRC.
  • PhD on 'Channelling Change: Evolution in Guernsey Norman French Phonology', Helen Simmonds, 2008-11, funded by a University of Exeter Department of Modern Languages Graduate Teaching Assistantship.
  • MRes on 'Français populaire', Charlotte Fry, 2008-9.
  • (Second Supervisor) PhD on 'Variation syntaxique dans le francais multiculturel du cinema de banlieue', Laurie Dekhissi.
  • (Second Supervisor) PhD on 'The Agreement of the Past Participle in Spoken French as a Sociolinguistic Variable: Production and Perception', Damien Gaucher.
  • (Second Supervisor) PhD on 'Le desaccord et la critique entre amis: strategies d'adoucissement dans le discours pre-conflictuel', Lucie Riou.
  • MRes on 'Phonological Variation and Change in Alsatian French', Katharine Pipe, 2009-10, part-funded by a University Merit Scholarship.
  • PhD on 'Accent Levelling in the Regional French of Alsace', Katharine Pipe, 2010-13, funded by the AHRC.
  • PhD on 'The Pragmatic Particles ENFIN and ECOUTE in French Film and TV Dialogue', Marianne Connors, 2012-15, funded by the AHRC.
  • (Second Supervisor) PhD on 'A Sociolinguistic Profile of Gallo in Eastern Brittany', Adrian Chrimes, 2012-15, funded by the AHRC.
  • (Second Supervisor) PhD on 'Variation in the Use of Prepositions in Quebec French', Elizabeth Latimer, AHRC-funded.
  • PhD on 'Phonological variation, perception and language attitudes in the (Franco-)Belgian borderland', Sarah Foxen, 2013-17, funded by the AHRC.

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Publications

Copyright Notice: Any articles made available for download are for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and the copyright holder.

| 2020 | 2015 | 2013 | 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2001 | 2000 | 1998 |

2020

2015

2013

  • Boughton ZC. (2013) Locating variation in French: Geolinguistic patterns, levelling and the 'French exception', Language and Social Structure in Urban France, Legenda. [PDF]

2011

  • Boughton ZC. (2011) La standardisation continue de la langue française: l'apport des perceptions et attitudes langagières, La Bretagne Linguistique, volume 16, pages 37-57. [PDF]

2010

  • Boughton ZC. (2010) Perzeption und Evaluation der Variation im gesprochenen Französisch, Perzeptive Varietätenlinguistik, Peter Lang, 103-121.

2009

  • Armstrong NR, Boughton ZC. (2009) Perception and production in French dialect leveling, Sociolinguistic Variation in Contemporary French, John Benjamins, 9-24. [PDF]

2008

  • Boughton ZC. (2008) La géographie d'abord? Phonological variation in contemporary French, Le français parlé au XXIe siècle: Normes et variations géographiques et sociales, Volume 1, L'Harmattan, 259-272. [PDF]

2007

  • Boughton ZC. (2007) Ce que prononcer veut dire: The social value of variable phonology in French, Nottingham French Studies, volume 46, no. 2, pages 7-22. [PDF]

2006

2005

2001

  • Boughton ZC. (2001) Methodological approaches to the study of French accent identification, French Accents: Phonological and Sociolinguistic Perspectives, CILT & AFLS, 218-239.

2000

  • Armstrong NR, Boughton ZC. (2000) Absence de repères régionaux et relâchement de la prononciation, LINX (Revue des linguistes de l'Université Paris-X Nanterre), volume 42, no. 1, pages 59-70. [PDF]

1998

  • Armstrong NR, Boughton ZC. (1998) Identification and evaluation responses to a French accent: Some results and issues of methodology, Revue PArole, volume 5/6, pages 27-60. [PDF]

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External impact and engagement



Contribution to discipline

Editorial and Refereeing:   I have served previously as a Co-Editor of the Journal of French Language Studies (Cambridge University Press), and as a member of its Advisory Editorial Board. I am a current member of the Editorial Board of French Studies (Oxford University Press).   I have acted as a Referee for several other international journals: Journal of Sociolinguistics; Journal of Linguistic Geography; Transactions of the Philological Society; Glottopol; Cahiers internationaux de sociolinguistique; Modern and Contemporary France.   I have served as Referee/Reader of books for various publishers, including Hodder, John Benjamins, Cambridge University Press, Palgrave Macmillan, Oxford University Press, Routledge.   I have evaluated funding applications on behalf of the Nuffield Foundation, the ESRC, the Agence Nationale de la Recherche, the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme and the British Academy.     External examining:   I have acted as External Examiner on BA French degree programmes at Newcastle University and on BA and MA French programmes at Queen's University Belfast. I have examined PhDs for QUB and for the University of Melbourne.      Memberships of Societies:   I am a long-standing member of the Association for French Language Studies and the Philological Society.     Innovations in methodology or approach:   I pioneered the study of the perception of linguistic variation in French, developing methods in the identification and evaluation of French accents by native speakers. This is exemplified in my articles published in 1998, 2001 and 2006, among others. This work has been widely cited, currently features on Wikipedia pages on Perceptual Dialectology, and has elicited media interest.    

Media

My doctoral research on phonological variation and change in French was the subject of a profile article in The Guardian newspaper:

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2004/feb/17/workinprogress.highereducation

Later work on the Perceptual Dialectology of French featured in the erstwhile 'On Language' column in the Chicago Tribune.

In addition, I have given interviews on BBC Radio Devon, in person and by telephone, on topics relating to sociolinguistic variation and evaluative judgements of linguistic differences.

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Teaching

I regularly teach modules in the Linguistics of French, including a final-year module in Dialectology that both draws on and feeds into my research. I also have long experience in teaching Translation both from and into French at final-year level and have contributed to the teaching and supervision of MA students in Translation Studies.

Modules taught

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Biography

I completed my BA Hons in French (First Class), MA Linguistics and PhD in French at Newcastle University. My doctoral research focused on sociolinguistic variation in the phonology of metropolitan French.

During my PhD, I taught classes in French Language and Linguistics at Newcastle, and delivered evening classes for advanced adult learners at Northumbria University on behalf of the Institute of Linguists.

I was appointed Lecturer in French at Exeter in 2001, and Senior Lecturer in 2006.

I have served in a variety of administrative and leadership roles over the years, including Programme Director in French, Deputy Director of Education in Modern Languages, and Chair of the Ethics Committee in the erstwhile College of Humanities. From 2020 to 2023, I was Assessment Officer for Languages, Cultures and Visual Studies, incorporating Art History & Visual Culture and the Language Centre.

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More information

International Conference Papers (since 2001)

  • ‘Investigating purism in France: Folk perceptions of variation in standard French'
    April 2003 at the University of Bristol,  Linguistic Purism in the Germanic Languages
  • ‘Social-regional variation in metropolitan French: Perceptions and behaviour'
    September 2003 at the University of Sheffield, UK Language Variation and Change 4
  • ‘Accent variation in France: Perceptions, attitudes, behaviour and the ideology of the standard'
    October 2004 at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (travel funded by British Academy), New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) 33
  • ‘La géographie d'abord? Phonological variation in contemporary French'
    June 2005 at the University of Oxford, Le français parlé au XXIe siècle: Normes et variations
  • ‘The interaction between regional, social and stylistic variation: The case of French'
    September 2005 at the University of Aberdeen, UK Language Variation and Change 5
  • ‘Is perception reality? Perceptual dialectology, accent identification and variation in French'
    January 2006 at Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge, Romance Linguistics Seminar XXXIV
  • ‘Sociophonetic variation in "levelled" metropolitan French: Perception, reality and linguistic change'
    July 2006 at the Université Catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium (travel funded by British Academy), Colloque international pfc2006 (Approches phonologiques et prosodiques de la variation sociolinguistique: le cas du français)
  • ‘Mind the gap: When perception isn't reality'
    September 2006 at UWE, Bristol, AFLS Conference: Variations, variétés
  • ‘The perception of variation in French: Sex, class and stereotypes'
    September 2007 at the University of Lancaster, UK Language Variation and Change 6
  • ‘La perception et l'évaluation de la variation dans le français parlé'
    September 2007 at the University of Vienna (invited paper, travel funded by British Academy, other expenses paid by the conference organisers), XXX. Romanistentag (Sektion 21: Perzeptive Varietätenlinguistik)
  • ‘Variation et constitution de la norme en français parlé: le rôle de la perception'
    November/December 2007 at the University of Innsbruck (invited paper; expenses paid by the conference organisers), Faut-il réécrire l'histoire du français? Les variations diachroniques et synchroniques du français
  • ‘Variable deletion of /l/ and /R/ in word-final clusters: the interplay of social and linguistic factors'
    September 2008 at the University of Oxford, Congrès AFLS «Les voix du français: usages et représentations»
  • 'La standardisation continue de la langue française: perception et production', December 2009 at the Université de Bretagne Occidentale, Brest (invited paper; expenses paid), Séminaire de la Bretagne Linguistique du Centre de Recherche Bretonne et Celtique (CRBC)
  • 'Chercher la diatopie: is social variation in French regionally localised?', September 2010 at the University of Cambridge, Congrès AFLS «Le français: langue une, langue plurielle»
  • 'Space and standardised French: the final frontier?', January 2011 at Peterhouse, Cambridge (invited paper; expenses paid), The Linguistic Correlates of Space, second workshop of the AHRC research network Language and Social Structure in Urban France
  • 'Locating Variation in French', September 2011 at Peterhouse, Cambridge (invited paper; expenses paid), AHRC network conference Language and Social Structure in Urban France

In addition, four invited papers at research seminars outside Exeter (Bristol, York, Oxford, Cambridge) and four in Exeter.

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