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

Abstract

This study aims to advance the understanding of sociolinguistic competence among near-native speakers and to further knowledge about the acquisition of variable structures. We conduct a quantitative analysis of variable future-time expression in informal conversations between near-native and native speakers of French. In addition to examining linguistic constraints that have been investigated in previous research, we build on prior work by introducing a new factor that enables us to consider the role that formality of the variants plays in the use of variable future-time expression. We conclude by comparing these new findings to those for the same dataset and other variable structures (namely, negation and interrogatives, Donaldson, 2016, 2017) and by advocating for more research that consists of multiple, complementary analyses of the same dataset.

The Acquisition of French as a Second Language

“…Their use seems to develop with L2 proficiency, especially in an immersion context, as a result of exposure to French native input. While an exhaustive account of these studies is beyond the scope of this paper, we will detail the results of two studies that resonate with our own research questions: (Michot andPierrard 2017 andGudmestad et al 2020).…”

Future or Movement? The L2 Acquisition of Aller + V Forms

“…Their use seems to develop with L2 proficiency, especially in an immersion context, as a result of exposure to French native input. While an exhaustive account of these studies is beyond the scope of this paper, we will detail the results of two studies that resonate with our own research questions: (Michot andPierrard 2017 andGudmestad et al 2020).…”

“…In their 2020 study on the use of futurate forms in 10 unguided conversations between a near-native speaker and a native speaker of French, in an immersion context, and taking a variationist perspective, (Gudmestad et al 2020) found that both NS and NNSs used the periphrastic future more often than the inflectional future or the present indicative. NNSs frequently used PI in association with a temporal adverbial; and topic seriousness was identified as a variable triggering the use of inflectional future, especially among NNSs.…”

“…Although there is relatively scarce research on the second language acquisition of modal forms, the SLA field has recently seen a surge of interest in the expression of futurity, particularly in L2 French (see Ayoun 2014;Gudmestad et al 2020;Howard and Leclercq 2017 for a recent panorama). Authors usually identify three main ways of referring to the future in L2 French: inflectional future (IF), present indicative (PI) and periphrastic future (PF).…”

The interpretation of verbal moods in Spanish: A close replication of Kanwit and Geeslin (2014)

“…For example, it is now common to include task item as a random intercept in a regression to account for task-item-related variability (Winter, 2020, Section 14.4). Another change that has occurred in variationist SLA is the increased use of multinomial regression models (e.g., Gudmestad et al, 2020), which allow for the examination of three or more distinct levels of a dependent variable. The dependent variable in the current study has three levels (habitual, not-yet-occurred, both).…”