L’appariement forme-fonction en FL2 : le développement de l’emploi des formes verbales du passé et la primauté du marquage de l’aspect

What is it about?

A key dimension of the acquisiton process of a second language (L2) is the link between a form and it's function, but this form-function pairing emerges rather lately. In order to express certain functions, the L2 learner first uses semantico-pragmatic resources, chunks and intermediate forms before being able to progressively grammaticalise his utterances and finally to adequately use the grammar to mark different grammatical categories (e.g. number, gender, tense, etc.). The L2 acquisition process evolves thus from a lexicalisation to a morphologisation stage, which progressively enables the L2 learner to adequately combine form and function (Noyau 1997). Regarding the acquisition process of verbs, most studies have examined the pairing of finite verbs and the expression of tense (temps in French) and aspect (aspect). The marking of these two functions is intrinsically linked in French. The progressive exploitation of the conjugations of the past (passé composé, imparfait, passé simple) offers in particular a rich investigation field (cf. i.a. Kaplan 1987; Noyau et al. 1995; Kihlstedt 2002; Ayoun 2001, 2004, 2005). Several studies have revealed that the reference to the past is limited to the passé composé at first, which is consequently overused, even in contexts where the imparfait should appear. The imparfait develops progressively afterwards, in the first place with the verbs être and avoir and later with the other lexical verbs. The plus-que-parfait is the last conjugation of the past to develop in the interlanguage of FL2 learners. This contribution will first describe the development of the different conjugations of the past in the interlanguage of Dutch speaking FL2 learners, by examining oral data. The focus of this contribution is the temporal and/ or aspectual functions expressed by these conjugations. This paper will more particularly enable us to answer the following research questions, that are derived from Andersen's Aspect Hypothesis (Andersen 1986, 1991):Is aspect actually marked before tense in FL2? Does the imperfective emerge after the perfective in FL2? Is the perfective first marked with telic verbs and afterwards marked with atelic verbs? Is the imperfective first used with atelic verbs and only afterwards used with telic verbs? The data of our corpus cautiously confirm the primacy of aspectual marking in the interlanguage of FL2 learners. This primacy of aspect seems to explain the primacy of the passé composé forms, since they express the perfective in opposition to the present tense which expresses the imperfective. The later emergence of the imparfait seems to go hand in hand with the actual reference to the past with passé composé forms and therefore with the necessity to introduce an imperfective dimension in the past. The detailed analysis of the produced verbs indicates that the inherent lexical aspect also plays a role in the developmental order of the conjugations of the past, even though certain elements of Andersen's Aspect Hypothesis have not been fully confirmed by the data.

Featured Image