Cette étude se penche sur le problème de l'occupation de la première et de l'avant-première positions dans des énoncés déclaratifs. Depuis Drach en 1937, on a en effet coutume de diviser l'énoncé allemand en champs. Ce travail s'appuiera sur un corpus (tome 2) composé d'exemples tirés aussi bien de la presse que de la littérature, le but étant de dégager des fonctions textuelles. Nous montrerons dans un premier temps qu'une différence syntaxique peut conduire à une différence sémantique. Puis nous présenterons un certain nombre d'expressions marquant le cadre énonciatif. Il sera enfin question de ce qu'il est convenu d'appeler la double occupation de la première position. L'ensemble des analyses se fera dans le cadre d'une analyse textuelle. / This case study looks into the specific case of the occupation of the prefield and pre-prefield position within a declarative utterance. Since Drach in 1937, the German utterance has often been divided into fields. This case will be composed of a corpus (tome 2) made up of examples from the press as well as from literary works and its purpose is to bring out textual functions. We will first demonstrate that a syntactic difference may lead to a semantic one. We will then present a certain number of phrases which are part of the enunciative framework. Finally, we will tackle what is commonly called the double occupation of the prefield. All the analyses will be performed through a textual analysis.

In this study the information structure in children´s picture books for the age range 3-6 is analyzed. The information structure is primarily visible in the word order and is largely language specific, which means that it plays a central role when a text is translated into a new language.  In this study the translations of children´s picture books between Swedish and German and their originals are analyzed. The purpose is to find what constituents are put in the initial position (Vorfeld). The initial position is important in terms of cohesion and thematic development and is generally where the topic is placed.  German is overall believed to have a bigger variation in the initial position, with more initial adverbials, whereas Swedish is more prone to place a subject in initial position. The languages are also believed to have different levels of markedness in terms of an object or a cleft-construction in the initial position. The results show that while the German books and translations do have a bigger variation and the Swedish books and translations have a higher subject frequency, the differences are not striking. This is partly attributed to the fact that an age range of three years is quite large and two of the three German books are written for younger children, while the Swedish books seem to have an older target group, which also means a higher rate of linguistic complexity. The marked structures object and cleft-construction in initial position do however follow strong language specific tendencies.

Notre recherche vise à enrichir la réflexion didactique sur les modalités d’un enseignement susceptible de favoriser dès les premières années d’apprentissage de l’allemand au collège (soit en 6ème et en 5ème) la mise en place de préférences discursives spécifiques à la langue-cible. Plutôt que de nous focaliser sur le placement verbal second dans les énoncés déclaratifs, nous avons fait le choix de nous intéresser à l’ouverture et à la position préverbale. Il s’agit en effet d’un champ que des apprenants même avancés n’investissent pas de manière conforme, en dépit d’une maîtrise avérée des règles morphosyntaxiques de la langue-cible. Dans la mesure où, en allemand, la position préverbale n’est pas déterminée sur le plan syntaxique, il est nécessaire de recourir à des catégories textuelles ainsi qu’à des critères pragmatiques liés à l’organisation informationnelle des constituants pour comprendre les phénomènes qui président au choix de l’élément à l’ouverture. Partant de là, nous avons incorporé ces aspects aux tâches proposées dans le cadre du cours afin de susciter une mise en œuvre de ces principes et de modifier les préférences de traitement des apprenants. Le travail d’appropriation relève aussi de processus intrapsychiques qui posent certes des limites à l’intervention enseignante mais dont la prise en compte permet d’élaborer des propositions didactiques étayées sur le plan linguistique et psycholinguistique. Adossée à la recherche en acquisition des langues (RAL), notre étude s’appuie sur l’analyse des réalisations de l’ouverture dans un corpus de productions d’apprenants de manière à recomposer nos propositions d’intervention en fonction des observations recueillies sur le terrain et de telle sorte qu’elle s’accorde à une progression d’apprentissage. Des notions linguistiques plurielles nous ont ainsi permis de mettre en lumière et d’exploiter à des fins d’enseignement des fonctions spécifiques liées à l’ouverture de l’énoncé en allemand. La RAL offre à notre travail un cadre d’analyse, des résultats permettant de comprendre la dimension cognitive de l’apprentissage et des notions qui fournissent un étayage théorique aux propositions didactiques que nous formulons. / This study concerns the acquisition of language specific discourse preferences in the first years of German as a foreign language in French secondary schools, and how new approaches could improve language instruction. Instead of focusing on verbal placement in declaratives, we decided to consider how learners start a sentence; that is, which constituent they decide to put before the finite verb form. The initial field in German (called pre-field) represents a syntactically undetermined position as it can be occupied by a variety of elements. To understand the constraints which influence the choice of the first constituent in a sentence, textual categories, as well as pragmatic and information-structural criteria, are required. These aspects were incorporated in the tasks the learners worked on in the classroom, in order to make them use such principles, and to modify the processing preferences they may have built up during acquisition of their L1. Acquisition draws on internal processes which set limits to instructional intervention. Practitioners should take these limitations into account if they aim to elaborate instructional proposals with linguistic and psycholinguistic relevance. Drawing on findings from the SLA research, we analyse the beginnings of sentences in a corpus of written and oral learner samples. We used these empirical observations as a guideline to redesign proposals for an instructional intervention which better fits a learning progression. Notions from different aspects of linguistics contribute to highlight specific functions of sentence beginnings in German. It would be possible to integrate these functions in a teaching programme. SLA research offers a theoretical framework to our research, as the findings provide a better understanding of the cognitive dimension of learning and the notions constitute a theoretical backing for our didactical proposals.

This essay deals with translation changes taking place when translating two information-dense German texts into Swedish. The study focuses on the preverbal position of V2 declaratives, i.e. on the so called pre-field in German and Swedish sentences. This position plays an important role for the structuring of information, both at the intra-sentential and at the inter-sentential level. The aim of the study is therefore to investigate to what extent the information structure of the source text is carried over to the target text. A quantitative sentence-by-sentence analysis of the pre-fields of the source and target text shows many cases of re-structuring and re-writing have taken place during the translation process. A closer examination of those changes reveals some tendencies regarding the translation of the German pre-fields. In many cases text-initial rhematic (not previously mentioned) subjects of the source text have been replaced with time adverbials which function as so-called frame topics in the target text. Also, heavy, information-dense pre-fields of the source text have been split into two or more sentences in the target text. Furthermore there has been a “neutralization” of so-called marked structures of the source text. While those marked structures are used to achieve communicative effects in the source text, equal effects are mostly achieved by lexical means in the target text. The genre and style of the texts proved to play an important role for the choice between keeping and abandoning the information structure of the source text.