Le paragraphe oral en français L1, en suédois L1 et en français L2 : étude syntaxique, prosodique et discursive

Sammanfattning: This study examines the structure and the use of the speech paragraph (le paragraphe oral), as defined by Morel and Danon-Boileau 1998, in L1 French, in L1 Swedish and in the L2 French production of two advanced Swedish learners. The corpus examined consists of seven informal spontaneous endolingual and exolingual conversations. The study is not only contrastive, but also longitudinal, in the sense that each of the two learners has been recorded before and after a one-term long stay at a French university.

After a short introductory chapter, chapter 2 discusses various methods used in analysing spoken discourse and prosody in French and Swedish. Chapter 3 presents the speech paragraph theory of Morel and Danon-Boileau. The analysed corpus is described in chapter 4. The analyses of the corpus are presented in chapters 5 to 9. Chapter 5 contains an analysis of the préambule, the first speech paragraph segment. Chapter 6 deals with the second speech paragraph segment, the rhème, and chapter 7 with the third segment, the posthème. Chapter 8 examines the ponctuants in the three productions. Chapter 9 includes a brief description of the speech paragraphs in the three productions examined. It also contains analyses of the incises and of the régulateurs (backchannels) in the corpus. At the end of the chapter different types of speech paragraphs are shown and the defining criteria of the speech paragraph are discussed.

The main differences between the L1 and the L2 French productions are found in the structure and the use of the préambules and in the use of modal elements in all positions within the speech paragraph. It is observed that the préambules in L2 French are less developed than those in L1 French. This difference is particularly visible in the use of initial préambules having a primarily textual function. The structure of the L2 French préambules is partially explained by an influence of the L1 Swedish préambule structure. As for the use of modal elements, the analyses show that both the learners use a significantly smaller number of different words and expressions than the native speakers to express each type of modal element (le point de vue and the modus dissocié in the préambule, the modal elements in the rhème, the modal postrhèmes and the ponctuants). Another difference between the L1 and the L2 French productions is that the learners produce a much smaller number of "mono-constructed" speech paragraphs than the native speakers. This indicates that the learners contribute less to the development of the conversation than the native speakers. Comparatively few changes can be seen in the learners? speech paragraph production after their stay in France.