Second language acquisition of evidentiality in French and English in a narrative task

Abstract

Evidentiality, i.e. the linguistic encoding of the mode of access to information (direct perception, inference, hearsay), despite not being fully grammaticalized in English and French, is expressed through a variety of means. This paper seeks to determine how a relatively non-salient concept in the source and target languages can be acquired by L2 learners. Using an oral elicited narrative task, we determine what markers of direct perception and inference are commonly used by native speakers of French (n = 10) and English (n = 10) and L2 learners of those two languages (at three levels of proficiency, n = 10 per group), and at which level they emerge. Our results point to a much more frequent use of inferential markers than direct perception markers, to slightly different patterns of evidential marking in French and in English, and to a late emergence of evidential markers in the speech of learners, who display sensitivity to their discursive functions, with types and tokens increasing as a function of proficiency level.

Stance, Inter/Subjectivity and Identity in Discourse

“…In short, Aijmer (2002) and Zhang & Sabet (2016) concur in their finding that L2 speakers of different mother tongues use 'I think' much more than L1 speakers in their productions, while Baumgarten & House (2010), Mullan (2010Mullan ( , 2012, Gablasova et al (2017), Leclercq (2021) and Leclercq & Mélac (2021) observe different stylistic preferences in the choices of native speakers, and advanced learners, with Gablasova et al (2017) showing that advanced learners are sensitive to the discursive contexts in which 'I think' is used, and Mullan (2012) and Leclercq (2021) illustrating how L1 patterns influence L2 choices.…”

“…Taking a developmental approach to the L2 acquisition of the evidentiality, Leclercq & Mélac (2021) show that the use of evidential markers strongly increases with proficiency level in an oral narrative task, with advanced learners slightly overusing evidentials compared to native speakers. At lower intermediate level, French learners of English mostly use perception verbs to express direct perception, while at the upper intermediate level, 'maybe' is the most frequent evidential.…”

“…Previous research has shown that evidentiality and epistemicity are developed quite late by second language learners of French and English, with large inter-individual variation (Baumgarten & House, 2010;Leclercq & Edmonds, 2017;Leclercq & Mélac, 2021;Mifka-Profozic 2017;Gablasova et al 2017). It is interesting to see how advanced learners develop the use of 'I think', a polyfunctional verbal marker, in different discursive contexts.…”

“…In certain languages such as Turkish or Tibetan, it is an obligatory grammatical category and it is expressed through highly grammaticized morphemes, with specific suffixes for the expression of direct evidentiality (the speaker has witnessed a given state of affairs), hearsay (the speaker has heard about a given state of affairs), or inference (the speaker infers what the given state of affairs might be based on circumstantial evidence or on reasoning). In Romance and Germanic languages, however, evidentiality is an optional category, which can be expressed through a variety of linguistic markers, ranging from lexical means (adverbials, discourse markers) to verbal means (perception and cognition verbs such as 'I think' or 'I guess', modals, verbal morphology such as the conditional in Spanish) (see, among others, Marín-Arrese, 2015;Hassler, 2015;Leclercq 2021, Leclercq & Mélac 2021. In French and in English, some of these markers can also express epistemicity.…”