Abstract
This study examines the way in which French-speaking learners of L2 Chinese construct a type of discourse called static spatial description. It involves the analysis of an oral corpus collected from two groups of native speakers of Chinese and French, and two groups of learners of L2 Chinese at two proficiency levels (low and intermediate). The data collected consist of the description of a poster. The results show that linguistic devices used in Chinese and French to encode the locative phrase and its syntactic functions have an impact on the presence and placement of the locative in utterances encoding spatial localization. These properties in turn influence the way in which the informational content develops across the utterances in the discourse. There is a clear development of proficiency between the two L2 groups. However, intermediate learners are not yet able to organize information on the discourse level like native Chinese speakers do.
摘要
本研究分析了母语为法语的学习者如何用汉语进行“静态空间描述”。为此本文收集了汉、法两种口语语料，被试者分为四组：汉语母语者、法语母语者以及两组法语为母语的汉语学习者（初级组和中级组）。语料收集使用的测试材料为一张街景图。研究结果表明，母语分别为汉语和法语的被试者所使用的空间短语类型与语法功能都有所不同，此差异在语篇层面上造成两组被试者之间主位推进模式不同。两组学习者之间的语言水平亦有明显差别，但中级组在语篇中的信息组织与汉语母语者相比，仍有较大的差异。
About the authors
Arnaud Arslangul is Associate Professor in the Department of Chinese Studies at the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations (Paris, France) where he teaches Chinese language and linguistics. He is affiliated to the Center for East Asian Linguistic Research (CRLAO, UMR 8563). His research focuses on the acquisition of L2 Chinese, especially on the expression of motion events and on the reference to space and entities in discourse.
Marzena Watorek is Full Professor at the Université Paris 8 and member of the Laboratoire Structures Formelles du Langage (UMR 7023/CNRS), France. Her research focuses on comparative approaches in SLA, in particular the phenomena of discourse production in first and second language acquisition relative to cross-linguistic influence and age factors, as well as the input processing in the earliest stages of L2 acquisition. She also investigates the interface between language acquisition and teaching.
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