Aspects of interrogative use in near-native French

Abstract

This paper reports on interrogative (question) use in the informal spontaneous speech of near-native second-language French speakers. Interrogatives present considerable variation in French, and choices of interrogative form depend on semantics, communicative function, and register. Using a corpus of spontaneous conversations between near-native (NNSs) and native speakers (NSs), the inventory of interrogatives used is described; A detailed examination is then given of the question marker est-ce que ("is it that"), a candidate for overuse in L2 French (Zwanziger 2008, p. 91). The results, from 825 occurrences of interrogative structures, reveal that the NNSs possess extremely similar inventories of interrogative forms to their NS interlocutors and that their interrogative choices are both communicatively and socio-stylistically appropriate. What appears quantitatively as overuse of est-ce que by two NNSs is, from a communicative point of view, entirely felicitous: Like NSs, the NNSs reserve est-ce que for several marked interrogative contexts. The results suggest that the NNSs successfully integrate syntactic, semantic, communicative, and sociolinguistic information in spontaneous conversation.

Near-Native Sociolinguistic Competence in French: Evidence from Variable Future-Time Expression

“…Our primary goals are to examine the linguistic and sociostylistic constraints that condition NNSs' use of future-time expression in French and to compare their variable use to that of NSs with whom the NNSs have close relationships. 2 As a secondary goal we briefly compare our results on future-time expression to findings from previous investigations that have examined how the same group of NNSs uses other variable structures (Donaldson, 2016(Donaldson, , 2017. In so doing, we argue for the importance of multiple, complementary investigations of a single group of participants for advancing knowledge of sociolinguistic competence.…”

“…Afin de comprendre ce cas de variation, nous faisons appel à des facteurs linguistiques qui ont été identifiés dans des recherches précédentes, et nous proposons un nouveau facteur qui nous permet d'étudier le rôle joué par la formalité des variantes dans l'expression du futur. Pour conclure, nous comparons les résultats de cette analyse aux recherches précédentes qui ont examiné d'autres structures variables dans le même corpus (notamment, la négation et les interrogatives, Donaldson, 2016Donaldson, , 2017 et nous soulignons l'intérêt et l'importance de faire de multiples analyses complémentaires d'un seul corpus.…”

“…Thus, we aim to continue this line of inquiry by studying a near-native population living in the target language environment. Importantly, our participant group has already been investigated with respect to two other variable structures -interrogatives (Donaldson, 2016) and negation (Donaldson, 2017) -allowing us to consider findings from multiple variable structures and, consequently, advance the understanding of near-native sociolinguistic competence for this group of participants. Among other issues, both of these studies have examined the sociostylistic value of these variable structures' variants and whether the NNSs' use is targetlike.…”

“…This research draws on informal conversation data from ten NNSs and ten NSs of Hexagonal French. Donaldson (2016) detailed the full range of interrogative forms that NNSs and NSs used and compared their communicative function and how they were used in sociostylistic terms. The results showed that the NNSs converged toward NS use, both in terms of repertoire and use of formal and informal variants.…”

Intonation and (re)syllabification in L2 French interrogatives produced by L1 German learners: Comparing different proficiency levels

“…As final rises (H%) are used in French and German to signal interrogativity, German learners might tend to generalize the H% pattern (and the marker ECQ) for all types of questions -in spite of the pragmatic differences between and the alluded intonational variability in both languages (see studies on interrogatives and their prosody in L2: [21], [22], [23] Earlier research on L2 intonation has shown that learner data are characterized by a narrower pitch range and a lower degree of F0 variability (see [24] for L2 French read data produced by German learners). The same holds true for speech rate: L2 speech is known to be typically slower than L1 speech ( [25]).…”