![](//s1.studylibfr.com/store/data-gzf/859e7928d09244f73a102d1218a28863/1/001946999.htmlex.zip/bg2.jpg)
Thèse pour le doctorat Doctoral dissertation
Département de français, d’italien Department of French, Italian
et de langues classiques and Classical Languages
Université de Stockholm Stockholm University
S-106 91 Stockholm S-106 91 Stockholm
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.
Keywords: advanced learner, adverbs, negation, focus particles, developmental stages,
L2 French, second language acquisition, itinerary, finiteness, Interfra corpus, scope,
focus.
© 2007 Anna Sanell ISSN 1654-1294
Printed by Universitetsservice US-AB, ISBN 978-85059-28-7
Stockholm 2007