Het Gebruik Van Connectieven Door Franstalige Leerders Van Het Nederlands

This article examines first tendencies towards connective usage by French-speaking learners of Dutch. Two sorts of discursive markers were analyzed, viz., attitude and relational markers. The results show two main tendencies. On the one hand, the learners seem to overuse attitude markers. This has been explained by stating that it could be a sign of the difficulty they experienced in organizing texts, establishing coherence and introducing their opinion. This inclination has also been observed for the learner use of the causal connective dus ('so, therefore'). On the other hand, the investigation of the learner usage of backward causal connectives suggests that beginners use a reduced set of frequent connectives, while more experienced learners make use of a more varied set of connectives. The tendencies observed and hypotheses advanced will have to be quantitatively and qualitatively elaborated further in future research as well as expanded to other kinds of connectives.