Le récit conversationnel en situation exolingue de français : Formes, types et fonctions

Sammanfattning: The aim of this study is to examine, through a mainly qualitative description, the narrative in exolingual conversations in French between non-native speakers (NNS) (Swedish students) and native speakers (NS). The theoretical frame ranges from text linguistics (Revaz, Adam, Bronckart etc.) to conversation analysis (Labov, Sacks, Norrick, Laforest, Kerbrat-Orecchioni, Bres, Norrby etc.). The study is based on Corpus Westin which consists of 35 informal spontaneous conversations (24 exolingual and 11 endolingual, 3 in French and 8 in Swedish). Each chapter deals with a certain aspect of the conversational narrative. After a first introductory chapter, chapter 2 deals with the narrative text as a thematic development in the flow of conversation following Traverso’s model of familiar conversations (1996). Chapter 3 compares the basic structures of written and conversational narrative and discusses some particular characteristics of the conversational narrative: the inscription in the act of production, the use of verbal tempora, the phenomenon of background and foreground, reportability, multiplicity of voices, generalisations and back-channel signals. Chapter 4 analyses three aspects of the conversational narrative in exolingual interactions: forms (auto- / heterointroduction, continuity / discontinuity, co-narration and echoic narration), types (private, cultural, historical and fictional) and functions (explicative, argumentative and anecdotal). Chapter 5 deals with a particular form of conversational narrative, the retold story, where the same event is told by the same narrator to different narratees. The main results of this study are that the linguistic competence of the participants as well as their profile and conversational styles play an important role in the structure of the conversational narrative. Its inscription in the conversation is intimately related with manners of dominance so that the NNS tend to request narrations from the NS to facilitate their own conversational task whereas the NS often auto-introduce their narratives. Narratives produced by NNS tend to be more discontinuous than those produced by NS. The examples of co-narration, rare in our corpus, deal with cultural or historical themes since the speakers do not share any personal experiences. Echoic narrations are problematic for the NNS since they require good linguistic skills. The analysis of the types of narratives reveals that private as well as cultural ones are produced in almost equal numbers by NS and NNS whereas historical and fictional narratives are almost exclusively produced by the NS. Concerning the functions, the argumentative and the explicative are the ones most frequently used. When comparing types and functions it was found that historical narrations often have an explicative function and that the functions are equally distributed over the cultural and the private narrative. The profile of the narratee and the insertion of the narrative in the conversation were found to be the most important factors for the differences in retold stories. The versions of NNS tended to be more continuous and coherent when retold for the second or third time.