This thesis presents the results of a mixed methods study examining L2 utterance and perceived fluency in French under three different task conditions, an area in which little empirical research has been conducted from a psycholinguistic perspective. It investigated the following speech production and perception issues: (1) automated utterance fluency measures and their relationship to perceived task difficulty, (2) participants' and raters' perceptions of fluency and their link to utterance fluency measures and task complexity, and (3) speech characteristics that most influenced judgments of fluent performance. The study took place in a French immersion context in a university setting in Quebec, Canada. Forty English-speaking adults, varying in proficiency level, responded to three narrative speech tasks differing in cognitive demand. Utterance fluency was operationalized by a set of six temporal variables and measured by automated speech analysis software. Perceived fluency was assessed quantitatively by participants' and raters' fluency ratings, and qualitatively by justifications of the speech characteristics which most influenced raters' impressions.

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Following Andersen's (1986, 1991) study of untutored anglophone learners of Spanish, aspectual features have been at the centre of hypotheses on the development of past verbal morphology in language acquisition. The Primacy of Aspect Hypothesis claims that the association of any verb category (Aktionsart) with any aspect (perfective or imperfective) constitutes the endpoint of acquisition. However, its predictions rely on the observation of a limited number of untutored learners at the early stages of their acquisition, and have yet to be confirmed in other settings. The aim of the present thesis is to evaluate the ex planatory power of the P AH in respect of the acquisition of French past tenses, an aspect of the language which constitutes a serious stumbling block for foreign learners, even those at the highest levels of proficiency (Coppieters 1987). The present research applies the PAH to the production of 61 anglophone 'advanced learners' (as defined in Bartning 1997) in a tutored environment. In so doing, it tests concurrent explanations, including the influence of the input, the influence of chunking, and the hypothesis of cyclic development. Finally, it discusses the cotextual and contextual factors that still provoke what Anderson (1991) terms "non-native glitches" at the final stage, as predicted by the PAH. The first part of the thesis provides the theoretical background to the corpus analysis. It opens with a diachronic presentation of the French past tense system focusing on present areas of competition and developments that emphasize the complexity of the system to be acquired. The concepts of time, grammatical aspect and lexical aspect (Aktionsart) are introduced and discussed in the second chapter, and a distinctive formal representation of the French past tenses is offered in the third chapter. The second part of the thesis is devoted to a corpus analysis. The data gathering procedures and the choice of tasks (oral and written film narratives based on Modern Times, c10ze tests and acceptability judgement tests) are described and justified in the research methodology chapter. The research design was shaped by previous studies and consequently allows comparison with these. The second chapter is devoted to the narratives analysis and the third to the grammatical tasks. This section closes with a summary of discoveries and a comparison with previous results. The conclusion addresses the initial research questions in the light of both theory and practice. It shows that the PAH fails to account for the complex phenomenon of past tense development in the acquisitional settings under study, as it adopts a local (the verb phrase) and linear (steady progression towards native usage) approach. It is thus suggested that past tense acquisition rather follows a pendular development as learners reformulate their learning hypotheses and become increasingly able to shift from local to global cues and so to integrate the influence of cotext and context in their tense choice. Key Words: French language Aspect - Aktionsarl - French as a foreign language - Corpus analysis

Using a panel of administrative data and regression discontinuity analysis, this paper examines how the introduction of preferential tax regimes for Georgian micro and small businesses in 2010 affects formal firm creation and tax compliance. The results show that the new tax regime for micro businesses increased the number of newly registered formal firms by 18-30 percent below the eligibility threshold during the first year of the reform, but not in subsequent years. The analysis does not find an effect of the new tax regime for small businesses on formal firm creation in any year. Policy makers are often concerned about abuse risks stemming from differentiated tax treatment of micro and small businesses. The analysis in this paper reveals reduced tax compliance in 2010 around the micro business eligibility threshold, but does not find significant evidence of reduced compliance by Georgian firms in later years. The results also do not show any significant evidence of strategic sorting around the regime eligibility thresholds. (authors' abstract) / Series: WU International Taxation Research Paper Series

This study represents a sociolinguistic contribution to the analysis of Past Participle Agreement (PPA) in [avoir+PP] constructions. In spoken French, this agreement is marked only for gender, and is subject to much variation in the production of speakers of French. The objectives of this thesis are twofold: firstly, to observe the variable in the context of production, by a quantitative study of several corpora. Variation in the production of PPA is tested against linguistic factors, such as the position of the participle in the verbal group where it appears. Social and stylistic factors are also considered, notably the socioprofessional category of the speaker. These analyses reveal that agreement is conditioned by a complex interaction of these factors. The second objective is the design of a Matched Guise Test, based on scripted conversations. This test was carried out with a view to measuring the extent to which the presence or absence of marked PPA, often considered a typical result of normative pressures, affects the stereotypical social representation of a speaker. Differences in informants' judgements were modest, and two issues are discussed with regard to this: firstly, the validity of the methodology, and secondly, the evaluation of PPA as a sociolinguistic marker. Both parts of this thesis reflect the methodological issues pertaining to the investigation of a rare variable.

Bibliography: p. 87-88. / Contract no. DA36-039-AMC-03200(E).

Notre thèse porte sur l’étude linguistique contrastive de la référence aux couleurs dans les proverbes à partir d'un corpus de 208 proverbes recueillis en France et en Irak. Nous étudierons la manière dont les couleurs sont exprimées dans les deux langues (catégories grammaticales, structure grammaticale et prosodique des énoncés, outils rhétoriques appliqués aux couleurs pour renforcer leur valeur expressive), ainsi que le rapport des locuteurs à l'usage des couleurs dans les proverbes qu'ils utilisent. Nous essayerons également d'explorer dans les deux langues les différences liées à l'époque où le proverbe a été le plus utilisé, ainsi que le degré de connaissance des proverbes selon l'âge, le sexe, la profession et la région du locuteur. La langue française, ainsi que le dialecte irakien contiennent une grande proportion de mots indiquant la couleur dans les proverbes. Et c’est la connotation de ces mots qui est à l’origine de la difficulté de compréhension. De plus, selon les pays, les cultures et les époques, les couleurs revêtent des significations différentes, parfois aux antipodes de celles des cultures voisines, comme le blanc, associé en occident et dans les pays arabes (comme en Irak) à la pureté, alors qu’il est lié au deuil dans la plupart des pays asiatiques. Grâce à la langue, comme nous le savons, l’homme peut communiquer, échanger les informations, les idées et les sentiments. En d’autres termes, les parleurs peuvent exprimer ce qu’ils veulent exprimer, ce qu’ils veulent dire et les auditeurs peuvent recevoir les informations. Cependant, dans la communication, il n’est pas toujours facile de comprendre complètement et exactement ce qui est dit et écrit, parce que le sens du mot est compliqué et sophistiqué. Le même mot, utilisé dans ces différentes situations, aura différentes significations. Les mots indiquant la couleur se heurtent aux mêmes problèmes. Fonctionnant comme une unité isolée, le proverbe est une combinaison de mots tirés du vocabulaire général de chaque langue. Nous considérons les mots indiquant la couleur dans les proverbes et les locutions proverbiales comme l’objet de notre étude parce que la couleur est partout dans notre vie : la couleur des plantes et des animaux, la couleur du ciel et de la terre, la couleur des aliments, mais aussi parce que les proverbes constituent une source de vocabulaire riche pour ceux qui apprennent la langue. Les proverbes portent divers champs sémantiques et ils reflètent bien les difficultés culturelles liées à l’apprentissage du français en Irak. En outre, nous essayerons de prouver, à travers des transformations et des manipulations, que ces proverbes peuvent être figés. Une étude approfondie de ces traits sémantiques et syntaxiques nous a paru de première nécessité pour rendre compte de l'existence du figement dans les proverbes, phénomène linguistique à la fois très important et très complexe. Par ailleurs, la comparaison critique entre ces deux langues, le français et l’arabe en l’occurrence, affirme que ce phénomène du figement n’est qu’un fait linguistique universel, et révèle que chaque langue a ses propres mécanismes de figement. Nous pouvons noter que du point de vue sémantique, le sens des proverbes n’est pas calculé selon les règles de la compositionalité ; autrement dit, le sens global des proverbes n’est pas l’addition du sens des éléments qui les composent. / Our thesis concerns the contrastive linguistic study of The reference to colors in the proverbs from a corpus of 208 proverbs collected in France and in Iraq. We shall study how the colors are expressed in both languages (word classes, grammatical and prosodic structure of the statements, the rhetoric tools applied to colors to strengthen their meaning value) as well as the link of the speakers for colors in the proverbs they use. We shall also try to explore in both languages the differences related to the period when the proverb was the most used as well as in the degree of knowledge of the proverbs according to age, sex, profession and the region of the speaker. The French language as well as the Iraqi dialect contain a big proportion of words indicating the color in the proverbs. And it is the connotation of these words that is the origin of the difficulty of understanding. Furthermore, according to countries, cultures and times, the colors take on different meanings sometimes to the antipodes of those of the nearby cultures like the colour white, associated in the West and in Arab countries to purity, while it is refers to mourning in most of the Asian countries. Thanks to the language, as we know it, the man can communicate, exchange information, ideas and eelings. In other words, the speakers can express what they want to express, what they want to sayand the listenerscan receive the information. However, in communication, it is not always easy to understand completely and exactly what is said and written, because the meaning of the word is complicated and sophisticated. The same word, used in these various situations, will have various meanings. The words indicating the color come up against with the same problems. Working as an isolated unity, the proverb is a combinatio of words taken from the general vocabulary of every language. We consider the words indicating the color in the proverbs and the proverbial expressions as the object of our study because the color is everywhere in our life : the color of the plants and animals, the color of the sky and the earth, the color of food, but also because the proverbs constitute a source of rich vocabulary for those who learn the language. The proverbs refers to diverse semantic fields and they reflect nicely the cultural difficulties related to learning of the French language in Iraq. Besides this, we would try to prove through transformations and manipulations that these proverbs can be frozen. An elaborate study of these semantic and syntactical features seemed to us absolutely essential to report the existence of the congealing in the proverbs, a very important and very complex linguistic phenomenon at the same time. Besides that, the critical comparison between these two languages : French and Arabic in this particular case, asserts that the phenomenon of the congealing is just a universal linguistic fact, and reveals that each language has its own mechanisms of congealing. We can note that, from the semantic point of view, the meaning of the proverbs is not calculated according to the rules of the compositionality ; in other words, the global meaning of the proverbs is not the addition of the meaning of the elements which compose them.

Second language (L2) decoding – the sub-lexical process of mapping the graphemes of an alphabetic writing system onto the phonemes they represent – is argued to underpin various aspects of L2 learning, particularly vocabulary acquisition. Recently, second language acquisition research has shown increased interest in decoding, consistently finding evidence for L1-to-L2 transfer effects on learners’ processing mechanisms and outcomes. Correspondingly, studies conducted in Modern Foreign Language (MFL) classrooms in English secondary schools – an under-researched context – have found that beginner learners of French tend to (a) pronounce L2 words according to English decoding conventions and (b) make poor progress in this aspect of L2 learning. Recent official guidance for MFL teachers has addressed this problem by advocating an explicit focus on decoding, but there is a lack of convincing evidence (both in the MFL context and more widely) that explicit L2 decoding instruction can be effective. The current study therefore trialled two programmes of French decoding instruction for beginner MFL learners, delivered in ten- to fifteen-minute segments over around thirty lessons. Three intact secondary school classes followed a phonics-based approach; three classes from another school followed a programme in which learners were encouraged to derive the pronunciations of French graphemes from ‘source words’ in a memorized poem; and six classes in two other schools received no explicit decoding instruction. Participants (N=186) completed pre- and post-tests of French decoding; a sub-sample (N=15) also completed task-based self-report interviews. The two intervention groups made significantly more progress than the comparison group in terms of the number of graphemes pronounced ‘acceptably’, although the magnitude of the difference between the groups was small. Compared to the comparison group, the two intervention groups also appeared to show different and more extensive patterns of change in their realizations of individual graphemes, even where their pronunciations were still not ‘acceptable’. Finally, self-report data generally revealed little change in participants’ strategic reasoning, either in the intervention or comparison group. Together, these findings suggest that explicit instruction can improve beginner learners’ proficiency in decoding L2 French, but that their progress may follow a longer and more complex trajectory than simply moving directly from ‘incorrect’ to ‘correct’ forms. Further research is required to assess the effects (if any) of a given improvement in decoding proficiency on other language-learning outcomes; and to design and evaluate alternative programmes of instruction.

L’objectif de cette recherche est d’étudier le comportement orthographique des élèves de l’école primaire face à l’hétérographie, réalité linguistique difficile à acquérir. Les différentes ressources du système graphique pour distinguer, à l’écrit, ce qui se confond à l’oral constituent un confort pour le lecteur mais une difficulté pour le scripteur, surtout pour les mots grammaticaux les plus fréquents. Pour produire les graphies normées de a/à, la/là, ou/où, et/est, son/sont, on/ont, mes/mais, ce/se, les élèves doivent apprendre la polyvalence des graphèmes et s’affranchir de la correspondance phono-graphologique. La difficulté n’est pas la même pour chaque paire d’homophones. Ces mots-outils sont enseignés par paires formées sur le critère de l’identité phonique. La méthode utilisée en classe repose sur deux grands principes, les procédés de substitution et leur application dans des exercices. Chaque paire a son propre procédé. Les productions écrites et les commentaires métagraphiques recueillis auprès d’un échantillon de 240 élèves scolarisés du CE2 à la 6ème ainsi qu’une enquête auprès des enseignants et l’examen de manuels scolaires ont permis de mettre en regard les méthodes d’enseignement et l’interprétation que les élèves en font. Les résultats de l’analyse témoignent de la difficulté des élèves à mettre en œuvre les procédés appris, en fonction des contextes. Si les élèves sont capables de citer les paires apprises, leurs emplois en production écrite révèlent une insécurité linguistique. Les conclusions de ce travail permettent de formuler des propositions didactiques. / The aim of this research is to study the spelling practice of primary school pupils facing the heterography of homophonic words, a linguistic reality difficult to acquire. The different resources of the graphic system to distinguish, in writing, what is confused orally, constitute a comfort for the reader but a difficulty for the writer, especially for the most frequent grammatical words. To produce the graphics for a/à, la/là, ou/où, et/est, son/sont, on/ont, mes/mais, ce/se, pupils have to learn the polyvalency of the graphemes and get away from the phonographological connection. The difficulty is not the same for each pair of homophones. These tool words are taught in pairs based on identical phonics. The method used in class rests on 2 main principles, the process of substitution and their application in exercises. Each pair has its own process. Written work and metagraphic commentaries taken from a sample of 240 pupils aged 8-12 as well as a survey of teachers and a study of school textbooks allow us to focus on the teaching methods and pupils’ interpretations. The results of the analysis demonstrate the difficulty pupils have putting learned procedures into practice, in keeping with the context. While the pupils are able to quote the learned pairs, their use in written work demonstrates a linguistic insecurity. The conclusions of this work allow us to formulate some didactic proposals.

Cette thèse a pour objectif de mettre en évidence le caractère original des langues française (hypotactique) et chinoise (paratactique) et la raison profonde des différences entre elles. Relevant de la linguistique contrastive, plutôt théorique, cette étude porte sur les comparaisons sous trois aspects. En premier lieu, les comparaisons diachroniques générales du français et du chinois nous permet de mieux comprendre les filiations entre le latin et le français, entre le chinois archaïque et le chinois contemporain. En deuxième lieu, afin de montrer leur caractère original – hypotactique en latin et en français, paratactique en chinois archaïque et contemporain, les comparaisons sont effectuées entre le français et le chinois, ainsi qu’entre leurs origines immédiates – le latin et le chinois archaïque – sous trois aspects syntaxiques : l’ordre des mots, la correspondance entre les classes de mots et les fonctions syntaxiques dans la phrase simple et le rapport entre les propositions structurant la phrase complexe. Finalement, la comparaison des réflexions philosophiques sur le langage entre l’Antiquité grecque et l’Antiquité chinoise et la présentation de la divergence culturelle entre l’individualité et la globalité, en montrant les originalités intellectuelles occidentale et chinoise, nous permet de détecter dans une perspective philosophique et culturelle la raison profonde de leurs caractères originaux divergents. / This thesis aims to highlight the originality of French (hypotactic) and Chinese (paratactic) languages and the reasons of their differences. Falling within contrastive linguistics mostly theoretical, this study focuses on the comparisons with regard to three aspects. Firstly, the general diachronic comparisons of French and Chinese allow us to better understand the affiliations between Latin and French, between archaic Chinese and contemporary Chinese. Secondly, to show their original character – hypotactic in Latin and French, paratactic in contemporary and archaic Chinese, the comparisons are implemented between French and Chinese, and between their origins, Latin and archaic Chinese, on three syntactic aspects: the word order, the correspondence between word classes and syntactic functions in the simple sentence and the ratio of proposals in the complex sentence. Finally, the comparison of philosophical reflections on language between the Greek antiquity and the Chinese antiquity, and the presentation of cultural divergence between individuality and global nature showing the Western and Chinese intellectual originality, allow us to detect from a philosophical and cultural perspective the underlying reason for their different original characters.