| 1. |
- Dilks, Charlotte, 1973-
(author)
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Les métaphores de guerre dans la prose journalistique du français
- 2009
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This study explores the use of war metaphors, more specifically metaphors centred on the verb, in modern French newspaper prose from three principal angles. The first part of the analysis shows that the verbs of war used are metaphorical rather than concrete. However, the vast majority of the metaphors stem from only five verbs, namely attaquer, affronter, combattre, défendre and lutter. The second part of the analysis focuses on these five verbs and their metaphorical uses. It is shown that it is the semantic role of patient that separates a metaphorical use from a concrete use. A classification of the patients according to semantic fields reveals that each of the five verbs shows a distinct preference for a certain type of patient and the verbs also differ in whether their patients have negative or positive connotations. This creates an image of five verbs, each of which is conventionalised in a certain linguistic context. The final chapter of the analysis investigates war metaphors from a textual perspective, analysing their usage according to three parameters: position, function and target domains. The position that is the most susceptible to war metaphors is the initial position. The textual functions of metaphors are divided into one semantic and three pragmatic functions. The semantic function structures the theme of an article in terms of war, construing an antagonism by means of elaborating or extending a conventional metaphor. The pragmatic functions considered are argumentative, descriptive and expressive. In the articles studied, war metaphors have mostly a descriptive or argumentative function. Finally, the target domains and their interconnections with the source domain WAR are considered, showing that the war metaphors are linked to power or the lack thereof. The metaphor often describes the person in power, but the case can be reversed with the metaphor describing the powerless resisting or fighting the person in power.
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| 2. |
- Engel, Hugues, 1974-
(author)
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Dislocation et référence aux entités en français L2 : Développement, interaction, variation
- 2010
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This thesis investigates the use and development of dislocations in oral productions by Swedish users of French as a second language (L2). Dislocations are highly frequent in French oral speech and play an essential role in building utterances. L2 users of French must therefore acquire the grammatical means necessary to build this structure as well as the pragmatic principles underlying its use. The study is empirical, and based on a corpus of oral productions from a wide range of non-native speakers (NNS), from beginners studying at university to L2 users who have spent many years in France. The analysis also includes oral productions from a control group of native speakers (NS). The aim is to identify a path of development by which the different forms and functions of dislocations are acquired. Furthermore, the study examines the influence of tasks on the use of dislocations, by analysing two tasks which place very different demands on the informants in terms of cognitive effort, namely interviews and retellings. The analysis focuses on two main kinds of dislocations: on the one hand, [moi je VP] (and its syntactical variants); on the other hand, dislocations referring to third entities (such as [NP il VP] and [NP c’est X]). The results show that both kinds go through a process of development in French L2. However, French learners seem to master the lexical dislocations referring to third entities as well as their pragmatic rules of use from the first stages of acquisition, yet with deviances in some cases. On the other hand, the frequency of use of [moi je VP] and its syntactical variants correlates highly with the level of development of the NNS. Moreover, there is a significantly greater frequency of dislocations in the NNS retelling tasks than in their interviews. In the NS group, the frequency of use remains comparable in both tasks. This difference between NS and NNS is probably due to the additional cognitive load that retellings demand compared with interviews—e.g., recalling the succession of events, solving the lexical problems posed by the story that is to be retold. It is proposed that this additional load may trigger, as a compensation strategy, an increase in the frequency of use of dislocations in the NNS speech.
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| 3. |
- Lindqvist, Christina, 1975-
(author)
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L'influence translinguistique dans l'interlangue française : Étude de la production orale d'apprenants plurilingues
- 2006
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The present study concerns cross-linguistic influence in the spoken French of multilingual learners. The main purpose is to investigate to what degree, and in what manner, previously acquired languages (L1, L2(s)) influence the target language, L3. Given the fact that the study only concerns spoken interlanguage, it makes use of a psycholinguistic perspective, which takes models of oral production into account. The analysis is divided into two main parts. The first concerns the oral production of 30 Swedish learners of French, who fall into three groups according to their previous exposure to French: beginners, secondary school students and university students. The results show that proficiency in the L3 is crucial in at least two ways. First, there is a correlation between the level of proficiency in the L3 and the number of instances of cross-linguistic influence in that the least advanced learners produce the highest number of cross-linguistic lexemes, whereas the most advanced learners produce the lowest number. Second, the level of proficiency in the L3 is decisive for the number of background languages (L1, L2) used during oral production in L3: the lower the proficiency in the L3, the more background languages are used, and vice versa. The second part of the analysis contains six case studies of learners with partly different L1s and L2s. It focuses on the roles of the background languages during conversation in L3 and on the factors contributing to the attribution of these roles. The results point at both similarities and differences between the learners with respect to the roles of the background languages. A result common to all the learners is the use of Swedish L1/L2 and English L1 as an instrumental language, i.e. a language used rather strategically with a communicative purpose. The use of these languages in this function seems to be due to the fact that Swedish and English are shared languages between the learner and the interlocutor.
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| 4. |
- Lindström, Eva, 1965-
(author)
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L’acquisition du genre en français L2 – développement et variation
- 2013
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This thesis investigates the developpment of gender agreement in determiners and adjectives in the spontaneous speech of L2 French by five groups of Swedish learners: beginners at the university, secondary school students, university students, teacher candidates and PhD students. Different types of determiners are examined, such as definite and the indefinite articles. Adjectival agreement is studied in different positions in relation to the noun, such as the attributive anteposition, the attributive postposition and the predicative position. The aim is to identify the developmental sequence of gender agreement through a longitudinal study of learners at different levels of acquisition. The analysis is based on spoken language, i.e. 81 interviews belonging to the InterFra-corpus, Stockholm University. Our data also includes 8 oral productions from a control group of native speakers.The study is in three parts: one for the agreement between determiners and nouns, another for the agreement between adjectives and nouns and, finally, a study considering agreement between all three items within the noun phrase, i.e. determiner, noun and adjective (Det-N-Adj). A sequence of acquisition for gender agreement on determiners and adjectives is proposed based on the productions of four learner groups and compared to the six developmental stages suggested by Bartning and Schlyter (2004).Results have showed that there is an acquisition order of gender agreement in different parts of the nominal phrase, according to the type of determiner and the positions of the adjective. A qualitative analysis has shown a random use of gender agreement on determiners and some nouns are used with both genders on the determiner. Also, the type-token ratio is very low at the beginning of the acquisition, which partly explains the high accuracy rate (100 %). The study considering agreement between all three constituents within the noun phrase revealed that advanced learners have higher accuracy rate for gender agreement on adjectives within the noun phrase with the presence of a determiner that marks gender distinction (i.e. a non-elided, singular determiner). Results also showed that the feminine form of the adjectives remains difficult at higher acquisitional levels.
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| 5. |
- Nilsson, Anna, 1977-
(author)
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L'influence translinguistique dans la compréhension du texte en français, langue étrangère : Les pratiques de lecture des apprenants
- 2006
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Licentiate thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Syftet med den här studien är att undersöka hur inlärare av franska (främmande språk) går tillväga för att förstå text samt hur tvärspråkliga och inomspråkliga lexikala likheter, inlärarnas kompetensnivå och tillvägagångssätt påverkar läsförståelsen. De 21 deltagarna har olika kompetensnivåer i franska: nybörjare, mellan- eller avancerad nivå. Inlärarnas läsförståelse utvärderas framförallt genom en översättningsuppgift medan deras tillvägagångssätt observeras med hjälp av tänka högt-metoden. Tillvägagångssätt omfattar inlärarnas strategier, teknik för att förstå texten samt deras reaktioner på textens innehåll, översättningsuppgiften samt förmågan att genomföra den.Resultat från den här studien visar på att tre av de tolv vanligaste tillvägagångssätten inbegriper hantering av inomspråkliga eller tvärspråkliga likheter mellan texten och tidigare kunskap i franska, svenska och engelska. Inlärare uppmärksammar i större utsträckning lexikala likheter mellan målspråket och deras modersmål än franska ord som påminner om varandra. Den inomspråkliga och tvärspråkliga texthanteringen är vanligare hos inlärare med lägre kompetensnivå i franska än hos avancerade inlärare. Avancerade inlärare använder i större utsträckning tillvägagångssätt som inte bygger på jämförelse av liknande ord än inlärare med lägre kompetensnivå. En parallell kan urskiljas mellan en bättre läsförståelse och en mer effektiv hantering av inomspråkliga och tvärspråkliga likheter då dessa kombineras med andra tillvägagångssätt.
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| 6. |
- Nilsson, Anna, 1977-
(author)
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Lire et comprendre en français langue étrangère : Les pratiques de lecture et le traitement des similitudes intra- et interlexicales
- 2007
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This thesis investigates learners’ reading practices and especially the processing of cross-linguistic similarities at the lexical level. The aim is to determine how learners proceed in order to understand text in French (L3). Data were collected using various reading comprehension tasks in combination with the think-aloud method. Reading comprehension was mainly assessed through a translation task while the reading practices were observed in think-aloud protocols. According to a reading comprehension score, 20 learners were divided into high level and low level groups. The majority of participants were Swedish learners who are also proficient in English L2. Another group of 10 Swedish learners and 10 French native speakers participated in a cross-linguistic word association task. Reading practices were defined as including skills, strategies and readers’ reactions to the text, the tasks and their own capacities. A typology of twelve reading practices was established including three categories based on intralingual and interlingual similarities. Results from the translation task and the think-aloud protocols show that interlingual processing is more important when learners have difficulties in understanding text content. The more learners in the low level groups relied on intralingual and especially interlingual similarities the less they understood the text content. The high level groups on the other hand used reading practices such as reformulation or translation procedures. The think-aloud protocols also show that learners believe that they compare words in the French text (L3) with English similar words (L2) although their interlingual processing during translation actually confirms the dominance of Swedish (L1). Moreover, results from a cross-linguistic word association task suggest that French Swedish/English cognates and false friends activate this type of words more often than French control words. Cross-linguistic stimuli actually triggered patterns of potential interlingual similarities, for example sacrifice (stimulus) – religion (response), even more than words that are similar to the stimulus diplomate – diplom ‘diploma’.
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| 7. |
- Sanell, Anna, 1959-
(author)
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Parcours acquisitionnel de la négation et de quelques particules de portée en français L2
- 2007
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This thesis investigates acquisition of negation and focus particles in oral L2 French. It concerns adverbs of addition (aussi, encore), restriction (seulement) and temporal contrast (déjà, encore). These items all lack independent referential value i.e. they depend on other constituents in an utterance for their interpretation, they are not structurally obligatory and they variably affect other constituents in an utterance. The learner has to capture the significance of each item, its syntactic position and its pragmatic function in a given context.The study aims at describing the development in oral production of 24 Swedish learners, beginners to very advanced, and 6 native speakers, in all together 80 interviews, in order to postulate an acquisitional itinerary.The analysis consists of two parts. The first one concerns negation types such as non in various functions, constituent negation (pas X), phrasal negation (ne…pas) and semi-negations (ne…aucun/jamais/personne/rien). The results show, inter alia, that non is used in different pragmatic functions at different levels of acquisition. At the initial stage, non is also used idiosyncratically as a constituent negation and as a preverbal phrasal negation. At the post-initial stage, where also the verbs are mainly finite, phrasal negation (ne) pas is post-verbal. Furthermore, the analysis showed that jamais and rien appear prior to the other semi-negations. In the second part, the use of focus particles is analyzed. The study revealed that the additive particle aussi appears first, in an initial or final position of an utterance, followed by additive encore and restrictive seulement at the post-initial stage and that the temporal adverbs encore and déjà are almost solely used by advanced learners. An acquisitional sequence was postulated, with idiosyncratic negation and additive focus particles appearing previous to post-verbal negation and restrictive particles. The temporal adverbs of contrast appear at the advanced stages.
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