The acquisition of four adverbs in a learner corpus of L2 French

This empirical study of a learner corpus of 40 interviews, investigates the acquisition of the four adverbs aussi, peut-être, 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-être 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.