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Article published In: Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism
Vol. 6:4 (2016) ► pp.467–503

Article

Aspects of interrogative use in near-native French

Form, function, and register

 | University of California, Santa Cruz
Published online: 1 March 2016
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.14024.don
Abstract
This paper reports on interrogative (question) use in the informal spontaneous speech of near-native second-language French speakers. Interrogatives present considerable variation in French, and choices of interrogative form depend on semantics, communicative function, and register. Using a corpus of spontaneous conversations between near-native (NNSs) and native speakers (NSs), the inventory of interrogatives used is described; A detailed examination is then given of the question marker est-ce que (“is it that”), a candidate for overuse in L2 French (Zwanziger, E. (2008). Variability in L1 and L2 French wh-interrogatives: The roles of communicative function, wh-word, and metalinguistic awareness. Unpublished PhD dissertation, Boston University.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). The results, from 825 occurrences of interrogative structures, reveal that the NNSs possess extremely similar inventories of interrogative forms to their NS interlocutors and that their interrogative choices are both communicatively and socio-stylistically appropriate. What appears quantitatively as overuse of est-ce que by two NNSs is, from a communicative point of view, entirely felicitous: Like NSs, the NNSs reserve est-ce que for several marked interrogative contexts. The results suggest that the NNSs successfully integrate syntactic, semantic, communicative, and sociolinguistic information in spontaneous conversation.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Interrogatives in French
    • 2.1Total interrogatives
    • 2.2Partial interrogatives
    • 2.3Frequencies
    • 2.4Register variation
    • 2.5Functional and formal constraints
    • 2.6 Est-ce que
  • 3.Second language acquisition
    • 3.1Sociolinguistic competence
    • 3.2Near-nativeness
    • 3.3French interrogatives
    • 3.4Summary
  • 4.Study
    • 4.1Objectives and research questions
    • 4.2Participants
    • 4.3Conversational data
  • 5.Results and discussion
    • 5.1Overall results
    • 5.2Total interrogatives
    • 5.3Partial interrogatives
    • 5.4Local syntactic priming
    • 5.5 Est-ce que
    • 5.6General discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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