This special issue of the Journal of French Language Studies participates in the ‘methodological turn’ (Byrnes, 2013) in the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA), by presenting five original articles that focus on different methodological issues in studies on various aspects of the acquisition of French as an additional language. We highlight the contributions of the five articles and situate them within the larger discussion on research methodology. We end by arguing for the need for additional attention to methodology in SLA.

The majority of previous studies on nasal coarticulation in French find an inversely proportionate relationship between vowel opening and nasality, such that high vowels are the most nasalized, sometimes exceeding 50% nasality. However, it has been unclear whether this is a mechanical or controlled property of French, given the typically short duration of high vowels in natural speech, as well as the aerodynamic and acoustic factors rendering them more susceptible to spontaneous nasalization. This study uses nasometric data to quantify progressive and regressive nasalization in 20 Northern Metropolitan French speakers as a function of vowel height. Furthermore, the relationship between degree of nasal coupling and overall vowel duration serves as a proxy for distinguishing mechanical from controlled nasalization, in the spirit of Solé (1992, 2007). This study finds evidence that high vowel nasalization in French is mechanical in pre-nasal position, but controlled in post-nasal position. Meanwhile, nasalization of mid and low vowels is blocked in pre-nasal position but, at most, mechanical in post-nasal position. In consequence, French appears to block nasalization in otherwise lexically impossible positions (*ṼN), while passively allowing, though not actively requiring, nasalizing in positions where conflation is possible (both NṼ and NV being permitted in the lexicon).

Dans l’objectif de contraster deux sous-genres du roman contemporain, l’article analyse les réalisations lexicales, syntaxiques, sémantiques et discursives de 8 constructions lexico-syntaxiques (CLS) dans un corpus français constitué de romans historiques (HIST) et de romans de littérature blanche (GEN) postérieurs à 1950. Ces unités phraséologiques récurrentes ont été repérées grâce à la technique des ALR développée dans le Lexicoscope, un outil de linguistique de corpus créé pour fouiller des textes. Les 8 CLS retenues pour cette étude interviennent dans (ou initient) une interaction verbale. Notre propos est de démontrer que ces CLS représentent bien des motifs qui occupent des fonctions discursives (FD) précises dans chaque genre sous-romanesque qu’elles permettent de mieux définir. Nous verrons ainsi que ces motifs de l’interaction verbale peuvent occuper des FD narrative, descriptive et pragmatique dans HIST et GEN mais que seule la FD cognitive est représentée dans GEN.

Nous proposons une réflexion méthodologique sur les choix adéquats dans le cadre d’une étude sur les stratégies d’acquisition du français écrit (L2 pour les sourds) chez quatre enfants sourds profonds de 5 ans, locuteurs L1 de la langue des signes française, notre hypothèse étant que, du fait de leur surdité, ces enfants empruntent des voies différentes de celles des enfants entendants. Nous rendons compte des questionnements méthodologiques posés par l’élaboration des critères d’analyse du corpus d’écrits, questions liées au grand nombre de variables à prendre en compte, aux dimensions à la fois linguistiques, cognitives, sociolinguistiques et didactiques de l’étude et à la nécessité d’adapter le cadre théorique choisi, conçu pour des entendants et impliquant d’autres langues. Nous présentons au final les tout premiers résultats de l’analyse conduite sur des échantillons d’écrits.

This study considers the subjunctive mood in one of the most conservative varieties of Acadian French, that spoken in the Baie Sainte-Marie region in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia. A number of claims made in the literature are considered: whether the subjunctive mood is undergoing loss, whether it expresses semantic meaning, and whether it is lexically-conditioned. Unlike most spoken varieties of French where the subjunctive is argued to be a linguistic variable (i.e., it varies with other moods), the results for Baie Sainte-Marie show that it varies very little. The analysis reveals that the few cases of variation can be accounted for by formal theoretical approaches to the subjunctive where this mood is argued to express modality. With limited variation, the subjunctive is not showing signs of loss. These findings suggest that the subjunctive is not part of a linguistic variable and so is not subject to inherent variability. I further argue that the retention of the imperfect subjunctive in this variety, along with a tense concordance effect, can help us understand why the subjunctive became a linguistic variable in other varieties of French, which ultimately contributes to our understanding of the actuation problem.

Dont has been claimed to be an exception to the ‘subject island’ constraint (Tellier, 1991; Sportiche and Bellier, 1989; Heck, 2009) and to contrast with true relative pronouns such as de qui. We provide corpus data from a literary corpus (Frantext), which show that relativizing out of the subject is possible with dont and de qui in French relative clauses, and is even the most frequent use of both relative clauses. We show that it is not a recent innovation by comparing subcorpora from the beginning of the twentieth century and from the beginning of the twenty-first century. We also show, with an acceptability judgement task, that extraction out of the subject with de qui is well accepted. Why has this possibility been overlooked? We suggest that it may be because de qui relatives in general are less frequent than dont relatives (about 60 times less in our corpus). Turning to de qui interrogatives, we show that extraction out of the subject is not attested, and propose an explanation of the contrast with relative clauses. We conclude that in this respect, French does not seem to differ from other Romance languages.

This article addresses the question of gender bias observed in constructed examples of French syntax articles. Drawing our inspiration from Macaulay and Brice (1997) and Pabst et al. (2018)’s studies of English, we investigate the way women and men are depicted in constructed examples in syntax articles in French. We looked at grammatical functions, thematic roles and lexical choices and found a strong male bias in the use of gendered noun phrases (i.e. more references to men than to women; men are more likely to be in a subject position as well as being referred to via pronouns, and more likely to be agents and experiencers). Furthermore, women and men are not related to the same lexical choices. Besides, since French is a grammatical gender language where masculine gender can also be intended as gender neutral, we designed a second study to investigate masculine marked noun phrases (ambiguous masculines, AMs). When we compared AM noun phrases to female and male arguments in terms of grammatical functions and thematic roles, we found that, in production, they were different than true masculines. We discuss the implications of our results for the meaning of ‘gender neutral masculines’ and for practices anchoring gender discrimination.

Measures of second language (L2) learners’ vocabulary size have been shown to correlate with language proficiency in reading, writing and listening skills, and vocabulary tests are sometimes used for placement purposes. However, the relation between learners’ vocabulary knowledge and their speaking skills has been less thoroughly investigated, and even less so in terms of pronunciation. In this article, we compare vocabulary and pronunciation measures for 25 Italian instructed learners of L2 French. We measure their receptive (Dialang score) and productive (vocd-D, MTLD) vocabulary size, and calculate the following pronunciation indices: acoustic distance and overlap of realizations for selected L2 French vowel pairs, ratings of nasality for ratings of foreign-accentedness, fluency metrics. We find that vocabulary measures show low to medium correlations with fluency metrics and ratings of foreign-accentedness, but not with vowel metrics. We then turn our attention to the impact of research methods on the study of vocabulary and pronunciation. More specifically, we discuss the possibility that these results are due to pitfalls in vocabulary and pronunciation indices, such as the failure of Dialang to take into account the effect of L1-L2 cognates, and the lack of measures for evaluating consonants, intonation and perception skills.

Cette étude propose d’explorer et d’identifier des moments particuliers où le changement linguistique se produit, afin de confirmer ou de rejeter l’idée d’une période spécifique désignée par le terme « français préclassique », avec une rupture – ou frontière chronolectale – détectable autour de 1630 (cf. Ayres-Bennett et Caron, 2016). Afin de vérifier dans quelle mesure cette chronologie peut être confirmée, il est nécessaire de multiplier des analyses fines et pointues sur des traits linguistiques qui ont subi des changements à l’époque en question et d’interroger une gamme de textes qui reflètent la variation discursive et pragmatique, au lieu de consulter le canon des traditions textuelles actuellement disponibles sur des bases numérisées, qui sont essentiellement littéraires. C’est pourquoi nous avons consulté des sources de nature différente, qui pourraient attester des usages émergents, à savoir les corpus du Réseau Corpus Français Préclassique et Classique (RCFC). Seront présentés les résultats de deux études de cas (la recatégorisation des formes dedans/dessous/dessus/dehors et la montée des clitiques), abondamment discutés par les remarqueurs.

This article examines patterns of variation and change in the phonology of the regional French of Alsace, within an overarching framework of regional dialect levelling (Kerswill, 2003) in the French of France. Data are drawn from an original corpus gathered in Strasbourg and a small village in a rural area of the Bas-Rhin. We analyse two well-known regional features in spontaneous speech: (h), the variable realisation of initial [h], and (ʒ), the non-assimilatory devoicing of /ʒ/. We focus on the effect on the variation observed of the major extra-linguistic variables of age, gender and social class as well as urban or rural community. While the results for class and location follow expected patterns, whereby working-class and rural speakers show higher rates of traditional non-standard variants, the principal observation is the decline and, in the case of (ʒ), apparent loss of such features. We thus provide new evidence in support of supralocalization, not only in the urban context but also in the rural location. The results for gender are however less clear-cut: there is an interaction with age, class and location, and disruption of the usual pattern of female-led adoption of supralocal norms.

This study investigates the variation in the expression of Future Temporal Reference in text messages in Belgian and Québécois French. Three variants are considered: the Futurate Present, the Synthetic Future and the Analytic Future. The results of multivariate analyses show that the use of the Futurate Present does not appear to be subject to dialectal variation: both communities use this variant at similar rates, and the use of the variant is constrained by the same linguistic factors. The two dialects show differences in their choice of the Synthetic vs the Analytic Future. Unlike Québécois French, Belgian French strongly favours the Synthetic Future. The two dialects also differ with respect to the linguistic constraints in effect. Our analysis shows the need to explore the relationship between variants, and to distinguish between Covert T (realized as Present tense) and Overt T (either Synthetic or Analytic Future). Our results point toward the hybrid nature of text messages: while our results show patterns of use in line with oral/conversational corpora as reflected by the dialectal variation observed, text messages are not exempt from the influence of written French, as shown by the use of Synthetic Future forms in affirmative sentences in the Québec corpus.

L’objectif de cet article est de déterminer l’impact de la tâche sur la prononciation du FLE, en l’occurrence sur le comportement du schwa. Dans cette perspective sont étudiées les productions de 145 apprenants autrichiens du FLE de niveau débutant à B1 dans la lecture d’une liste de mots et de deux textes, dans une tâche de répétition de mots ainsi que dans un entretien guidé (corpus de 87 heures et 45 minutes). L’étude se concentre sur la production du schwa dans huit mots et constructions : s(e)maine, ch(e)mise, premier, m(on)sieur, tout l(e) temps, tout l(e) monde, appartement et gouvernement. Nos résultats montrent que les 35 heures de parole spontanée ne contiennent que peu ou même pas d’occurrences de ces mots pour la moitié des cas analysés. Bien qu’il s’agisse d’une méthode valable pour l’analyse du système linguistique, il s’avère dans la recherche de la prononciation des apprenants indispensable de la compléter par des tâches d’élicitation. L’élicitation par des formes graphiques présente pourtant l’inconvénient d’influencer la prononciation par la présence visuelle des lettres (sans différence notable entre la liste de mots et les textes). Cette influence ne se limite pas au processus de décodage en temps réel.

Based on two syntactically annotated corpora, and within the theoretical tradition of dependency grammar, the current study investigates the quantitative differences and similarities between written and spoken French. Our findings support the assumption that spoken and written French are two realizations of one language that do not differ in the syntactic categories, but in the frequency of these categories, and also in their organization in sentence. The subjects in spoken French are mostly pronouns, whereas in written French the subjects are mostly nouns and pronouns. Spoken and written French share many syntactic relations, but with different frequencies. For instance, dislocations are more diverse and frequent in spoken French. Spoken French and written French differ in the word order of vocative nominal phrases. Finally, written French is slightly more difficult to process than spoken French.

Despite the ample database of research findings on the benefits of Processing Instruction (PI), research thus has primarily made use of offline measures to establish how L2 learners comprehend and process sentences. Using online methodology, such as eye-tracking, allows research to more directly measure implicit knowledge. The sensitivity of these measures requires meticulous design choices to ensure validity and replicability. This study provides an overview of the linguistic and physical design considerations necessary for creating eye-tracking materials in SLA research. The present study demonstrates the application of these design considerations in an eye-tracking study, comparing the changes in processing patterns between two types of instruction: PI and Traditional Instruction (TI) on low intermediate L2 adult learners’ acquisition of the French imperfect aspect. The results of the experimental study show beneficial gains made by L2 learners who received PI on the French imperfect tense, this was seen in both a significant increase in accuracy scores from pre-test to post-test and change in their cognitive processing as shown by eye-movement data. The present study emphasizes the need for future studies to consider methodological reflections and key design principles in eye-tracking research.

This article discusses some methodological issues that arose when analysing data collected in a pilot study of the SOFRA project. We aimed at piloting a semi-structured interview protocol designed to collect qualitative data with nine Syrian asylum seekers and refugees studying French at university, using an interview schedule that targeted, among other things, information about learners’ interaction opportunities and attitudes about their new environment and learning experiences. Analysing the manners in which the interviewer asked the questions and coped with comprehension difficulties, as well as the way the interviewees responded to the questions, led to the identification of a number of problems that are partly related to question type and wording. The article concludes with a reflection on how to elicit relevant answers during a semi-structured interview with migrant learners.