%0 Journal Article
%T The acquisition of four adverbs in a learner corpus of L2 French
%A Anna Sanell
%A Victorine Hancock
%J Discours : Revue de Linguistique, Psycholinguistique et Informatique
%D 2009
%I Universit¨¦ Paris Sorbonne-Paris IV
%R 10.4000/discours.7368
%X This empirical study of a learner corpus of 40 interviews, investigates the acquisition of the four adverbs aussi, peut-¨ºtre, seulement and vraiment (also, mayby, only and really). Although these four adverbs are non-obligatory elements in the utterance, they seem to have two fundamental modifying functions, namely enhancement (aussi and vraiment) and mitigation (peut-¨ºtre and seulement). They also appear at early stages of acquisition. The study concentrates on the positions and discourse functions of the adverbs in a developmental perspective. Each adverb is characterized with respect to these two parameters across six developmental stages (Bartning, Schlyter, 2004) and a ¡°near-native¡± learner variety. We combine a functional framework for acquisition (cf. Klein, Perdue 1997; Benazzo 2000, 2005) with earlier observations from corpus studies concerning the positions and the semantics of the adverbs (Schlyter, 1977; Chanet, 2004; Bilger, 2004). We expected that the number of functions of the adverbs would increase with the stages and we focus on the very advanced levels (stages 5-6). The study is to our knowledge one of the first to cover learner production from beginners to very advanced and ¡°near-native¡± speakers. One hypothesis generated by the study is that frequency patterns of the target language could be acquired earlier than positional patterns. As a result of the study, we propose an order of acquisition of the four adverbs.
%K modifying adverbs
%K placement
%K discourse functions
%K learner corpus
%K acquisition order
%K developmental stages
%K fran ais
%K peut-¨ºtre
%K aussi
%K vraiment
%K seulement
%U http://discours.revues.org/7368