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Dr Janice Carruthers

Janice Carruthers MAMPhilPhD(Cantab)

Senior Lecturer

Janice Carruthers took her BA in Modern and Medieval Languages at Cambridge University in 1987 (St Catharine’s College), where she subsequently took an MPhil in Linguistics in 1988, followed by a PhD in French Linguistics in 1993. She was appointed to Queen’s in 1989 where she teaches and researches in French Language and Linguistics. She is Head of French (on leave 2006-7) and Director of the French and Francophone Studies Research Cluster. Since 2005 she has been on the Editorial Board of the Legenda Research Monographs in French series and is a member of the Advisory Board of the Journal of French Language Studies (CUP), having been an Editor and Associate Editor for many years.

Her antidote to work is her young children but another form of escape is a glass of Pouilly fumé and/or some Palestrina, Byrd, Tallis, Victoria, Bach, Fauré or Duruflé.

Research

Her most recent book (2005) examines tense and temporality in three corpora of oral French, one of conversational narrations, one of traditional contes and one of new storytelling. Tense (especially tense switching), aspect and temporal connectors are the central preoccupation. Most of her articles are also in the area of tense and aspect in contemporary French but she also has a strong interest in sampling and fieldwork methodology for research on oral language.In her 2001 co-authored book, she writes on word formation and linguistic borrowings in French, on word order in the contemporary language, and on subordination and coordination.

Her current research interest has two connected strands. One is the oral/written interface in the conte, in particular the stylistic and syntactic make-up of contemporary oral storytelling, with a particular interest in negation, inversion, detachment, and speech and thought presentation. She is currently working on two edited books, one which brings together literary and linguistic scholars working on the oral/written interface in the conte and one, with Patrick Caudal in Paris 7, entitled La Narration orale. Temporalité et Structuration du discours. The other research strand is in corpus linguistics as she is currently constructing, with the help of one of the cluster’s research assistants (Dehra Scott) the first transcribed and annotated corpus of new storytelling in collaboration with the Centre de Littérature orale in Vendôme and the Oxford Text Archive, a project which is funded by the British Academy and the AHRC.

She would be interested in supervising theses on aspects of the syntax or lexis of contemporary French, particularly projects which are based on data analysis, variationist methodology, or corpus-based research.

Publications

Authored Books

Carruthers, J. (2005). Oral Narration in Modern French. A Linguistic Analysis of Temporal Patterns. Oxford: Legenda Monographs in French. ISBN 1904713114

Ayres-Bennett, W. and Carruthers, J. (2001).Problems and Perspectives.Studies in the Modern French Language. London: Longman. ISBN 0-582-29345-6

Edited Books (in preparation)

Caudal, P. and Carruthers, J. Temporalité et Structuration du discours. Cahiers Chronos, Rodopi.

Carruthers, J. The conte. Oral and written interfaces.

Annotated corpus (in preparation)

An annotated corpus of new storytelling in French with methodological framework. To be deposited in the Oxford Text Archive in 2008.

Articles

In preparation

Carruthers, J. (in preparation, commissioned for 2008). ‘Annotating an oral corpus using the Text Encoding Initiative codes: methodology, problems, solutions’, special issue of the Journal of French Language Studies edited by Jacques Durand.

Carruthers, J. ‘The oral/written interface in new storytelling in French’.

Forthcoming

Carruthers, J. (forthcoming, 2008). ‘Oralité et l’expression de la séquence temporelle’, in Caudal and Carruthers above)

Carruthers, J. and Marnette, S. (at press, 2007). ‘Tense, voices and point of view in medieval and modern ‘oral’ narration’, in P.Caudal, E. Labeau and C.Vetters (eds), Sémantique et diachronie du système verbal français to be published by Rodopi.

Published

Carruthers, J. (2006). ‘Temps et oralité dans le conte oral’, La Linguistique, 42.1, 97-114.

Carruthers, J. (2006). ‘The Syntax of oral French’, French Studies, LX.2, 251-60.

Carruthers, J. (2003). ‘Tense, orality and narration’. The case of the néo-conte’. French Studies, LVII, 501-520.

Carruthers, J. (2003). ‘The Walloon-Scots comparison. Are there further parallels with other langues d’oïl?’, in J.M. Kirk and D.P. O Baoill (eds), Minority Languages in Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland and Scotland, Belfast: BSLP, pp.303-308.

Carruthers, J.(1999).‘A Problem in Sociolinguistic Methodology: Investigating a Rare Syntactic Form’,Journal of French Language Studies, 9:1, 1-24.

Carruthers, J.(1998).‘Surcomposé général et surcomposé régional: deux formes distinctes?’,Atti del XXI Congresso Internazionale di Linguistica e Filologia Romanza, ed Giovanni Ruffino, II Morphologia e sintassi delle lingue romanze, Tubingen: Niemeyer, 143-154.

Carruthers, J.(1996).‘The passé surcomposé général: on the Relationship between a Rare Tense and Discourse Organization’, Romance Philology, L (2), 183-200.

Carruthers, J.(1994).‘The passé surcomposé régional: Towards a Definition of its Function in Contemporary Spoken French’, Journal of French Language Studies, 4:2, 171-190.

Carruthers, J. (1993).‘Passé composé, passé surcomposé: marqueurs de l’antériorité en français parlé’, Actes du Xx^e congrès international de linguistique et philologie romanes, I, 111-122.

Ayres-Bennett, W. and Carruthers, J. (1992).‘“Une regrettable et fort disgracieuse faute de français”? The Description and Analysis of the French surcomposés from 1530 to the Present Day’, Transactions of the Philological Society, 90/2, 219-257.

Carruthers, J. (1992).‘Une étude sociolinguistique des formes surcomposées en français moderne’, Actas do XIX Congreso Internacional de Lingüística e Filoloxía Románicas, III, 145-162.

Teaching

Janice Carruthers teaches undergraduate modules and filières on French Phonetics (part of FRH201), French around the world (part of FRH302), Linguistic Variation in French (FRH210), the Structure of Modern French (FRH315) and Le Bon Usage (part of FRH102). She co-ordinates the MA in French and Linguistics on which she teaches elements of research methodology and a module entitled ‘The French Language. Structures and Analyses’ (FRH707) which focuses on current developments in the morphosyntax and lexis of French.

She is a member of the Higher Education Academy.