This thesis deals with the polyphonic and argumentative functions of the French negation marker, ne, in editorial texts from the daily press. The concept ‘polyphony’ relates to the presence of multiple voices within one and the same utterance. According to this view, negation triggers a subdivision of an utterance in two points of view. Thus the sentence Sweden will not be a part of the monetary union can be divided in two points of view, the underlying ‘Sweden will be a part of the monetary union’, and the explicit ‘Sweden will not be a part of the monetary union’. First, I study the polyphonic structure of negative utterances, notably their division in two points of view, by taking into account their specific linguistic features. This is done so as to identify the relevant linguistic criteria that determine the polyphonic interpretation of the negation. The study demonstrates that contextual elements, including pragmatic connectors, presuppositions contrastive elements, and several other devices constitute the primary source of polyphonic markers. Negation is furthermore approached from a textual perspective. I explore how the two opposite points of view that are associated with negation form polyphonic sequences with other points of view carrying the same semantic content, and how these dynamic points of view are associated to the different discourse beings that are found in the newspaper article. I found that these sequences often embrace the central polemic theme of the article and, also, that the polyphonic function is not restricted to the negative utterance but constitutes an element that ensures textual and argumentative coherence. These two analyses are carried out within Jean-Claude Anscombre’s and Oswald Ducrot’s Theory of Structural Argumentation, which has recently been formalised by Kjersti Fløttum, Coco Norén and Henning Nølke. Finally in this thesis, I analyse the relation between the discourse beings associated with the negative utterance and real beings that exist outside the text, and then consider what rhetorical implications that correspondence or no correspondence has on the polyphonic interpretation of the negation. I also examine whether polyphonic negation can be considered to be a feature of newspaper editorials that identifies these texts as a genre. This study shows that the locuteur, the discourse being responsible for the enunciation of the negative utterance on a textual level, links to the real being, the editorial writer, who then refutes points of view associated to other discourse beings, often by use of nominalizations that refer to community voices. The locuteur also intrudes into an argument or claim, and refutes it in the name of a community or an authority. By defining genre, as does the media researcher Patrick Charaudeau, as a correspondence between the constraints imposed by the discursive situation and the constraints imposed by the discursive features, and by considering that one of the editorial’s constraints is to persuade its readers, this study shows that the phrasal negation ne in its polyphonic function, constitutes a distinguishing feature in the genre of editorials. The refutations that are made by an editor constitute a distinctive argumentative strategy since it permits the editorial writer to present external points of view in order to refute them and thereby impose his or her own, subjective point of view.

This study investigates the use of formulaic language in spoken French produced by native and non-native speakers. It aims at describing the development of formulaic sequences in learners ranging from beginners to very advanced users. It draws on data from the InterFra corpus, which includes both formal and semi-formal learners. Four measures are used to characterize this development: extent of formulaic language used, category distribution, type / token ratio and frequency of types. It has been shown that a user’s knowledge of formulaic sequences impacts heavily on language proficiency and idiomaticity. Because these sequences follow neither grammatical nor lexical rules, they constitute the last threshold for advanced L2 learners. In second language acquisition, the term formulaic sequence not only applies to strict idiomatic constructions, but it is also used to refer to sequences that appear to be acquired in a holistic manner during the first phases of acquisition. A categorization is therefore proposed that can account for native and non-native usage of formulaic sequences (prefabs). Five categories of prefabs are included: Lexical, Grammatical, Discourse, Situational and Idiosyncratic. The extent of a learner’s use of formulaic language increases as the learner progresses, the largest amount found in the production of native speakers and very advanced learners. The learner’s distribution of categories moves towards native speaker distribution, albeit slowly. Situational and Idiosyncratic prefabs are found to characterize the early phases of acquisition, while Lexical prefabs are mastered later and are a major difficulty for L2 learners. Only very advanced learners who have spent considerable time in France produce the same proportion of Lexical prefabs as native speakers. Discourse prefabs constitute the most important category for all groups, including natives and non-natives. It can therefore be postulated that the main function of formulaic sequences in spoken French is that of discourse structuring and speech management. The development and use of formulaic language is explained within a framework of Frequency Effects. Coupled with other factors, frequency can account for why Lexical prefabs are hard to acquire and why formulaic sequences take a long time to master. / The thesis is published and can be purchased by Peter Lang http://www.peterlang.com/index.cfm?vID=11369&vLang=E&vHR=1&vUR=1&vUUR=38

This thesis investigates acquisition of negation and focus particles in oral L2 French. It concerns adverbs of addition (aussi, encore), restriction (seulement) and temporal contrast (déjà, encore). These items all lack independent referential value i.e. they depend on other constituents in an utterance for their interpretation, they are not structurally obligatory and they variably affect other constituents in an utterance. The learner has to capture the significance of each item, its syntactic position and its pragmatic function in a given context. The study aims at describing the development in oral production of 24 Swedish learners, beginners to very advanced, and 6 native speakers, in all together 80 interviews, in order to postulate an acquisitional itinerary. The analysis consists of two parts. The first one concerns negation types such as non in various functions, constituent negation (pas X), phrasal negation (ne…pas) and semi-negations (ne…aucun/jamais/personne/rien). The results show, inter alia, that non is used in different pragmatic functions at different levels of acquisition. At the initial stage, non is also used idiosyncratically as a constituent negation and as a preverbal phrasal negation. At the post-initial stage, where also the verbs are mainly finite, phrasal negation (ne) pas is post-verbal. Furthermore, the analysis showed that jamais and rien appear prior to the other semi-negations. In the second part, the use of focus particles is analyzed. The study revealed that the additive particle aussi appears first, in an initial or final position of an utterance, followed by additive encore and restrictive seulement at the post-initial stage and that the temporal adverbs encore and déjà are almost solely used by advanced learners. An acquisitional sequence was postulated, with idiosyncratic negation and additive focus particles appearing previous to post-verbal negation and restrictive particles. The temporal adverbs of contrast appear at the advanced stages.

This dissertation analyses seven modern Bible translations in French with respect to their renderings of Koine Greek participles. The sample consists of the Passion Story from the four Gospels (Matt 26-28, Mark 14-16, Luke 22-24 and John 18-21), and is comprised of 603 Hellenistic participles in all. The participle forms are studied in six categories according to their syntactic function. The comparison focuses on differences in translation strategy, i.e. formal equivalence, omission and different kinds of transpositions, with special attention given to the choice of verb form. There is a discussion of the adequacy of contemporary, explicative theories of systemic differences between the passé simple/passé composé and the imparfait. A large number of examples are analysed in detail. The results of the survey show that the most prominent differences in translation strategies concern the predicative participle. Furthermore, this was the category that occurred most frequently in the sample. The Catholic scientific and literary translation La Bible de Jérusalem (1998) is the most literal of the seven versions. A high level of formal equivalence is also registered in the other scientific translation, La Traduction Œcuménique de la Bible (1988), even though application of this strategy outweighs the use of finite verbs, that is to say, the most common transposition. La Bible en français courant (1996) is the least literal: generally, it transposes the participle of the source text with a finite verb. This transposition is also very frequent in the literary La Bible de la Pléiade (1971). Most of the omissions are recorded in the recent literary La Bible, Nouvelle traduction (2001), which is shown to be the most divergent translation. Omissions are also frequent in the pastoral La Bible des moines de Maredsous (1968) and the liturgical La Traduction liturgique de la Bible (1977). When translated in conjunction with an element comprising a verb in one of the non-indicative moods (infinitive, imperative, participle and subjunctive), both the present and the aorist predicative participles are, to a large extent, rendered by a simple form, expressing non-accomplishment. However, the Bible de Jérusalem stands out with its greater use of compound present participles than any other version. When the predicative participle of the source text is transposed with a verb in the indicative mood, the passé simple is generally used to render the aorist; for the present participle, the imparfait is more frequent than the passé simple. Nevertheless, here too the passé simple accounts for a significant portion of the equivalents, especially in the two translations where transpositions formed by finite verbs are particularly important. There exist a few cases where some translators chose to use the passé simple/passé compose, while others chose the imparfait. The various details, tables and linguistic analyses in this dissertation provide a solid basis for accurately characterizing the various modern attempts made at reproduce this ancient text – a text so often translated, paraphrased, interpreted and deeply integrated in our cultural heritage.

This study explores the use of war metaphors, more specifically metaphors centred on the verb, in modern French newspaper prose from three principal angles.  The first part of the analysis shows that the verbs of war used are metaphorical rather than concrete. However, the vast majority of the metaphors stem from only five verbs, namely attaquer, affronter, combattre, défendre and lutter.  The second part of the analysis focuses on these five verbs and their metaphorical uses. It is shown that it is the semantic role of patient that separates a metaphorical use from a concrete use. A classification of the patients according to semantic fields reveals that each of the five verbs shows a distinct preference for a certain type of patient and the verbs also differ in whether their patients have negative or positive connotations. This creates an image of five verbs, each of which is conventionalised in a certain linguistic context.  The final chapter of the analysis investigates war metaphors from a textual perspective, analysing their usage according to three parameters: position, function and target domains. The position that is the most susceptible to war metaphors is the initial position. The textual functions of metaphors are divided into one semantic and three pragmatic functions. The semantic function structures the theme of an article in terms of war, construing an antagonism by means of elaborating or extending a conventional metaphor. The pragmatic functions considered are argumentative, descriptive and expressive. In the articles studied, war metaphors have mostly a descriptive or argumentative function. Finally, the target domains and their interconnections with the source domain WAR are considered, showing that the war metaphors are linked to power or the lack thereof. The metaphor often describes the person in power, but the case can be reversed with the metaphor describing the powerless resisting or fighting the person in power.

This thesis investigates the use and development of dislocations in oral productions by Swedish users of French as a second language (L2). Dislocations are highly frequent in French oral speech and play an essential role in building utterances. L2 users of French must therefore acquire the grammatical means necessary to build this structure as well as the pragmatic principles underlying its use. The study is empirical, and based on a corpus of oral productions from a wide range of non-native speakers (NNS), from beginners studying at university to L2 users who have spent many years in France. The analysis also includes oral productions from a control group of native speakers (NS). The aim is to identify a path of development by which the different forms and functions of dislocations are acquired. Furthermore, the study examines the influence of tasks on the use of dislocations, by analysing two tasks which place very different demands on the informants in terms of cognitive effort, namely interviews and retellings. The analysis focuses on two main kinds of dislocations: on the one hand, [moi je VP] (and its syntactical variants); on the other hand, dislocations referring to third entities (such as [NP il VP] and [NP c’est X]). The results show that both kinds go through a process of development in French L2. However, French learners seem to master the lexical dislocations referring to third entities as well as their pragmatic rules of use from the first stages of acquisition, yet with deviances in some cases. On the other hand, the frequency of use of [moi je VP] and its syntactical variants correlates highly with the level of development of the NNS. Moreover, there is a significantly greater frequency of dislocations in the NNS retelling tasks than in their interviews. In the NS group, the frequency of use remains comparable in both tasks. This difference between NS and NNS is probably due to the additional cognitive load that retellings demand compared with interviews—e.g., recalling the succession of events, solving the lexical problems posed by the story that is to be retold. It is proposed that this additional load may trigger, as a compensation strategy, an increase in the frequency of use of dislocations in the NNS speech.

The present study addresses, in a comparative Swedish-French perspective, the derived adverb and its modification by a following adjective. From a translational point of view, the structure derived adverb + adjective is interesting, since its translation into French is reputed to generate problems. In this study, a linguistic approach is adopted to these translation problems. For the investigation, a corpus of 510 Swedish tokens representing the structure derived adverb + adjective, and their respective translations into French, was compiled. The tokens originate from 22 contemporary Swedish novels. The number of translators represented in the corpus amount to 14. The tokens were classified into two major groups: intensifying adverb + adjective and qualitative adverb + adjective. The former group was further divided into subcategories according to the semantic nature of the adjective from which the adverb is derived. The main objectives of the study are (1) to investigate the solutions adopted by the translators when rendering the construction derived adverb + adjective in French, (2) to analyse the factors − those inherent to the language and those situated on the contextual level − involved in the cases where the original structure is not maintained in the French translations, (3) to show that the solutions adopted by the translators differ according to which semantic category the adverb belongs to − the intensifying group or the qualitative group. Furthermore, the difficulties of making a clear division between intensifying adverbs and qualitative adverbs placed before the adjective are discussed at some length. The results show that when the adverbial element is intensifying, the same structure is more often maintained in the French translations than in those cases where the adjective is modified by a qualitative adverb. The study also demonstrates the great variety of factors involved in the cases where the structure derived adverb + adjective is not maintained in the French translations. These cases may be due to the fact that the equivalent of the Swedish phrase in question would form a non-established unit in French, to the lack of an equivalent adverb in French, to the tendency of the French language to favour nominal constructions, or to individual preferences of the translator.

The overall aim of the present study is to investigate how teachers deal with linguistic and cultural otherness in the French foreign language classroom at upper secondary school level in Sweden. The foreign language classroom is seen as a cultural meeting place where images of otherness are natural elements. In this respect, otherness should be regarded as one cultural aspect among others implying human as well as language phenomena. Analyzing the way in which the teachers in the study mediate this otherness to their students is expected to contribute to the pedagogical debate on intercultural understanding in language teaching and learning.   The study is based on empirical data consisting of video recorded observations in three different classrooms. One class (class A) is treated as primary data where two activities are especially focused, namely working with texts and working with grammar. The verbal interaction from these activities has been transcribed and analyzed qualitatively.   The first step of analysis concerns the learning aims which are transmitted to the students in the teacher’s introduction to the two activities. The second step deals with the teacher’s procedures to involve the students in the construction of knowledge which focuses on linguistic and cultural otherness.   Finally, a comparative perspective is adopted. On the one hand, the two different activities are compared with each other, while on the other hand, the findings from class A are compared with class B and C. From a dialogical point of view, the way in which the classroom setting and the teachers’ acting can favour intercultural understanding is discussed.   The results of the analyses highlight the fact that teachers seem to pay more attention to linguistic otherness than to cultural otherness. Furthermore, the study shows that the foreign language classroom has a dialogical potential when it comes to human relations and discourse. More attention could be paid to these aspects of teaching in order to pave the way for better intercultural understanding. The teachers in the present study seem to favour dialogical relationships in the classroom and neglect discursive issues in the situation. Our conclusion is that the way in which teachers deal with otherness is tradition-bound. Texts, for instance, even those with an obvious intercultural content, are treated as pre-texts for studying linguistic phenomena. Cultural phenomena, when dealt with, are limited to a product paradigm and are transmitted without reflection and with no apparent awareness of any intercultural understanding.

This thesis deals with the correlative markers d’une part… d’autre part, d’un côté… de l’autre and non seulement… mais in French and their Swedish counterparts dels… dels, å ena sidan… å andra sidan and inte bara… utan. These markers are composed of two separate parts generally occurring together, and announce a serial of at least two textual units to be considered together. The analyses of the use of these three French and three Swedish markers are based upon two corpora of non-academic humanities texts. The first, principal corpus, is composed only of original French and Swedish texts. The second, complementary corpus, is composed of source texts in the two languages and their translations in the other language. By the combination of these two corpora, this study is comparative as well as contrastive. Through application of the Geneva model of discourse analysis and the Rhetorical Structure Theory, a semantic and functional approach to correlative markers and their text-structural role is adopted. The study shows similarities as well as differences between the six markers, both within each language and between the languages. D’une part… d’autre part and dels… dels principally mark a conjunctive relation, whereas d’un côté… de l’autre and å ena sidan… å andra sidan more often are used in  a contrastive relation, even though they all can be used for both kinds of relations. Non seulement… mais and inte bara… utan mark a conjunctive relation, but can also indicate that the second argument is stronger than the first one. By the use of these two markers, the language users also present the first one as given and the second one as new information. In general, the French correlative markers appear to have a more argumentative function, whereas the text-structural function is demonstrated to be the most important in Swedish.

Idag växer var femte barn i Sverige upp med fler än ett språk i sin vardag. Flerspråkiga barn följer samma steg i sin språkutveckling som barn som växer upp med endast ett språk. Deras språkutveckling har dock några särskilda egenskaper, som kan te sig som avvikelser när man bedömer barnets språk med de aktuella tester i grammatik, ordförråd, fonologi, som oftast är normerade för enspråkiga barn. Det är mycket svårt att urskilja en typisk flerspråkig utveckling från en språkstörning med dagens kunskap och material. Denna studie har för syfte att undersöka barnets narrativa förmåga, med fokus på makrostrukturen i berättelsen, och undersöka om det föreligger en skillnad mellan enspråkiga och flerspråkiga barn, samt hur de flerspråkiga barnen presterar på sitt starkaste respektive svagaste språk. För detta ändamål har vi samlat in och jämfört berättelser hos 21 enspråkiga och 21 tvåspråkiga barn födda 2005 och 2006 (medelålder 6 år och 9 månader), med franska och/eller svenska som modersmål, både i Sverige och i Frankrike. Barnen har fått i uppgift att berätta två olika sagor, utifrån två bildserier med tydlig och identisk makrostruktur. Både bildsekvenserna och bedömningsmaterialet har utvecklats inom projektet Bi-SLI (Cost Action IS0804). Berättelserna har sedan analyserats och poängsatts utifrån makrostrukturen. Huvudresultatet visar att det inte finns någon signifikant skillnad mellan enspråkiga och flerspråkiga barns prestationer i vår studie (medelvärde 9,24p för de enspråkiga och 9,40p för de flerspråkiga, av 17p möjliga). Vårt resultat visar också att de flerspråkiga barnen presterar lika bra på båda sina språk, oavsett om ena språket är starkare än det andra (identiska medelvärden på 9,40p för både det svagaste och det starkaste språket). Dessa resultat tyder på att berättelsens makrostruktur kan vara en pålitlig markör för avvikande språkutveckling, oavsett om barnet har ett eller flera språk. Det innebär också att det kan räcka med att testa barnet enbart på ett av sina språk för att få en pålitlig uppfattning av hens narrativa förmåga. / In Sweden today one in five children grow up with more than one language in their environment. Multilingual children follow the same stages of language development as children who grow up speaking just one language. This language development of multilingual children however, has a set of distinctive characteristics that could be misinterpreted as anomalies when the available grammar, vocabulary and phonology tests created for monolingual children are used. It is very difficult to distinguish a typical multilingual development from a speech impairment, given today’s knowledge and material. The present study aims to look at children’s narrative abilities using a story’s macrostructure, and examine the possible differences between monolingual and multilingual children, as well as how the multilingual children perform in both their stronger and their weaker languages. To this end we have collated and compared narratives from 21 monolingual and 21 multilingual children born 2005 and 2006 (average age 6yrs 9months), with French and/or Swedish as their mother tongue, both in Sweden and France. The children were given the task of telling two different stories from two separate picture cards with clear and identical macrostructures. Both picture stories and assessment forms were developed within the Bi-SLI project (Cost Action IS0804). The stories were then analysed and scored based on their macrostructure.The main results showed that no significant difference was found between monolingual and multilingual children’s performance in our study (an average of 9,24p for the monolingual and9.40p for the multilingual children, out of 17 possible points). Our results also showed that the multilingual children performed equally well in either of their languages, even if one language was stronger than the other (identical average marks of 9,40 for both the weaker and the stronger language). These results indicate that a narrative’s macrostructure can be a reliable indicator for an anomalous language development, regardless whether the child has one or several languages. The results also show that it may be enough to test a child solely on one of his or her languages to obtain a reliable indication of their narrative abilities.