...
f
Aspect€'of the acquisition of the ,French verb system
by young speakers of, English and French in Quebec and Ontario
-41 o
,
~'\ Edouard Beniak ,~ ~ ~
A thesis submitted to the Graduate Faculty, McGill
University, in partial fulfillment of the requlre-
ments for the degree of Master of Arts
Departrnent of Linguis"tics
McGill University rbvember 1981 c (
f '\ ,--:; ... f"'~'~+...,.""~.o;_,,o; ...... __ ~_....---....~
Beniak M.A. Linguistics' Short title: . ~spects of the ~cquiaition of the French ve system
.------
\ \ \ \ . ,~
1
\ \ \' \ \ \ 1 \
(. 'Sommaire \- ,>
Aspects of the acquisi tion\ of the French verb ;~stem \ \ by young speakers of Epglish and French
in Quebec and \Ontario
\ \ \
Edouard Ben ak \ ..
Ce mémoire comporte t'ro(is études dont chacune consiste en 1 ~ , "une comparaison de l' acquis~ tion d'ut aspect du systême verbal du français par trois groupes de loc teurs différents. Le~ lo
cuteurs sont des jeunes anglophones ·bui apprennent le franFais comme deuxi~me langue dans un prograbne d'immersion hâtivé' au Québec, des jeunes francophones unilingues inscrits dans d~S écoles élémentai res de langue franç~is~ au QuéD~c et des jbunes francophones bilingues inscri ts dan~ des écoles ~ langue (ran
çaise en Ontario. Les trois aspect~ du syst~me verbal du 1fran-
ça~s, a,. l'''teue d son t 1 a syn t axe d e l~'~n f'1n1tl "f pur ('1.e., sans1 ,/ préposi tion) aprês les' verbes de mouvement, la morpholog±e des
verbes pronominaux (i.e., pronom réfléchi + verbe) et la morpho-
10gie de~ participes passés (i.e., th~me + désinence). ChaÇIue
étude présente et tente d'expliqueE les erreurs d'apprentissage
commises par les trois groupes de locuteurs ainsi que les diff~- \ rences qu'il Y a entre eux par rapport aux stades d' acquisi ti'on
qu'ils ont atteints. ( \ \ \ \ r
i
r Abstract "
Aspects of the acquisition of the French verb system
by young ~peakers of English and French
in Quebec and Ontario
Edouard Beniak
This thesis consists of three studies each one of which is
a comparison of the acquisition of an aspect of the French verb
system Dy three different groups of speakers. The speakers are
young Anglophones learning French as a second language in an
early French inunersion program in Montreal, "young ;nonolingual 1 Francophones attending elementary French lang,uage schools in
Quebec and young bilingual Francophones enrolled in elementary
French language s chools in Ontario. The three aspects of the
French verb system under study are the syntax of the bare (i.e. 1
prepos i tian ~ess) infini ti val complement of motion verbs, the
morphology of the pronominal verbs (i.e. , reflexive pronoun +
verb) and the morphology of the past participles (Le. 1 stem +
/~ , " J, affix). Each study presents and attempts to explain the lan-
guage acquisition errors c,?mmi tted by the three speaker groups
as weIl as the di fferences in the language acquisition stages reached by the three speaker groups.,
( Preface ( In its publication enti tled General Information and Fa:culty , r > Regulations, the Graduate Faculty (1981:24) states:
,/ The Candidate has the option, subject to the approval of the Department 1 of including as part of the thesis the text of an original paper, or papers, suitable for submission. to learned jour na.ls for publication. In this 'case the thesis must still conform to aIl other requiremen~ts ex plained in tbis document 1 and a,dditional material (e.g., experimental data, details of equipment and experimenta;L design) may need féo be provided. In any case abstract, full introduction and con- ; cl usion must be incl uded, and where more than one manuscript appears, connecting texts and c.mmon abstract 1 introduction and conclusions ale re quired. A mere collection of rnanuscripfs is not acceptable; nor can reprints of published papers be accepted. While the inclusion of manuscripts co-author ed by the Candidate and others is not prohibi ted for a test period, the Candidate is warned ta make an explicit statement on who contributed to such wor"k and to what extent, and 'Supervisors and others wi 11 have to bear wi tness to the accuracy of such claims before the Oral Committee. It should also be noted that: the task of the exter nai examiner is much more difficult in such cases .
• l have availed myself of this option in the present thesis.
Since it is probably unusual for a student seeking the degree
of Haster of Arts to be in a position to do 50, l think it is
appropriate that l provide a few :,ords of explanation before
identi fying my col1aborators and stating their contribution.
In the winter of 1977 , as l was busy completing the depart-
mental course requiremen ts for the t-laster' s degree in linguis-
tics 1 l decided to write a thesis in the area of second lan- ' guage learning.- l set out ta perform an error ana1ysis of
selected aspects of the spoken French of young English-Canadian ( "
iii
( students learning French as a second language. To this end l ) obtained tape-recorded speech sarnples from students attending
'7'n early French immersion prograrn offered by the Protestant
School Board of Greater Montreal. For comparative purposes, l
also obtained, tape-recorded speech samples trom francophone
students attending a private French language school in Montreal
as weIl. This data collection phase took place during the
spring of 1977. In the early sununer of that same year, however,
l took leave of McGill to accept fuil-time ernployment as a
research officer at the Ontario Insti tute for Studies in Educa-
tion in Toronto. There l joined a team of researchers working
in the Franco-Ontarian Centre. In the now over four years that
l have been part of the Franco-Ontarian Centre, I have had the
unique opportuni ty to instigate and carry out comparative re-
search on the acquisition of French by three different groups
of young speakers: early French irrunersion students, Québécois
students in primary school and Franco-Ontarian stûdents in pri-
mary school. This research was based on the irrunersion and Qué-
bécois corpora which l had constituted in Montreal and -on the
Franco-Ontarian and Québécois corpora to which l had access as
a member of the Franco-Ontarian Centre. It gave rise to a total
of three papers each one of which compared the th;r-ee student
\ groups' acquisition of a different aspect of the French verb
system. One paper has been published in a journal (Beniak, Mou-
geon and Canale 1979) and the other two have appeared in the
proceedings of the conferences at which they were presented (Be- \ iv
niak, Mougeon and Côté 1980; Beniak and Mougeon 1981a). In writ
ing these paperV"was ~le ta benefi t from the cri tical feed
back of Raymond Mougeon and Michael Canale, both academic rnem j. bers of the Franco-Ontariap Centre, and from the technical as
sistance of N:>rmand Côté, a fell0f' research officer, in collect 1
ing and organizing the data for one of the studies, the contri-
'- bution/of aIl of whom l saw fit ta recognize in the ~orm of co-
authorship. As principal author i t is l, nevertheless f. wh'o 'took
full responsibility for the contents of each paper.
What I have done is to revise these three papers for the pur-
pose of bringing them together as the main compon~n t of this the
sis. This would not have been possible had they not aIl borne
on the same topic. The conunon topic guarded this thesis from " being a 'rnere. colle.ction of manuscripts '. The revisions that l / have made are r,~ther substantial and represent what l hope are , 1 improvements over the original papers.
1 , j -- / v
'\ AcknCM ledgements (
l. \ o , \ l woul'd like to "take this opportunity to express my indebt- 1 edness to aIl those who through thei r 'teachings 1 wri tings or 1 \ >. discussions have imparted thei knawledg~ of lang1;lage to me. .1 ! Among these l am forever in th debt of Raymond Mougeon and Mi- i \ '1 chael can\e. l also wish ta e press my h~art-felt thanks to
Michel Para is " my thesis super~sor, for having been receptive
to the idea 0 my basing th.e main. part of this\ thesis, on re
search that l ha carried out in collaboration with others, <_for
the improvements t at his cri tical comments allowed me to make 1
and last but nat lea t 1 for his patient enéouragemènt.
'.1
, ~,
. ' ( vi
, \ ( ,~ " T able of contents \ \ Abstract ...... •..•...... • ...... l Preface .....•.•.•...... ii
J Acknow ledgements ...... " ...... , ...... v / O. Introducti"on ...... " ..... 1 ...... ,~" 0.1 The development of French immersion education .••....••.. 2
0.2 The plight of French in Ontario ..•.•....••.....••....••. 7 \
0.3 The situation of French in Quebec ...... ••...... ~ .10
0.4 Conclusion ...... " . .. 11
1. The corpora ...... • •...••. 13
1.1 The immersion 'corpus .••••...•.....••.•.••• · ... " . " . . 13
1.2 The Franco-Ontarian corpus .••.•...••.•..•• • .~ ...... 13
1.3 The Québécois corpus" .. " .... " ... " ...... 16
2 . Acquisition of th~ bare infinitive of motion verbs ..••• 19
2.1 Introduction .....•...... •...•.....•...... •...... •.• 19 a 2.2 Th e Blan dPI ...... • . . . . • . . • ...... • ...... 19
2.3 Moti on ve.rb s ..... " .... "...... ~ ..... " ...... " . ,:" .. , " .. " .. 23 (\ 2.4 Use of the PI instead of the BI .••• .24
2.5 Conclusion ...... " ...... • J ...... 33 ~, 3. Acquisi tion of "the reflexi ve pronoun .••.•••...•••..•••• 36
\ 3.1 Introduction ...... ____._ ...... ~ ...... 36 /" " \. 3.2 Verb by verb variati_on ..••.. : ...... ••.•-.-::-:. ~-~ . :' .: ....• 37
3.3 Causes of the verb by verb variation •....•.....•...... 39 / ) / 3.3.1 N:mpronominal coun/t(erparts .••...... •...... •...... 41
, ~ 3.3.2 Sem~r:!tic equi valence .. . ____...... _ ...... __ .42
3.3:/3 Fr~qllenéy of "the semantical1y equi valent nonpronominal \ ------coun terparts ...... 43 3.3.4 Function of the reflexi ve pronoun. • 44 3.3.5 Creation of .formal ambiguity •....• ...... 46
3.3.6. Frequency of the pronominal verbs. ••••••••••••• 0 •••• .47
' 3.3.7 Surrunary .••• ...... • • • • • • • • • • "t~ • ...... • 48 3.4 The effect dominance...... '., ...... 50 3.5 The effect of age ...... 57
3.6 Con c lus ion.} ...... " ...... 61
4. Acquisition of Frrnch past participles ...... 62 ~ 4.1 IntrGdud:ibn ..•...... 62
4.2 The morphology of French past par!=igjÙes. .63
4.3 Previous research ...... ~ ...... , .."" ...... 65
., 4.4 Res u,..)fts ...•....••.....•....•••....•. .68 j 4.4.1 Pre :Îüminary findings .••....•••...•... \ 4.4.2 Main ~±ndings ..••...••••...••••.••••••. .74 4.4.2.1 Verb by verb variation...... g. .76 4.4.2.2 Unde,r1ying sources of error. .78 4.4.2.3 Changes in error source over time...... 82 4.4.2. 4 The psychological reality of linguistic descriptions.84 r 4.5 Conchlsion ...... 89 5. General conclusion ...... 91 rbtes ...•...•...... 99 Bib liography ...... 105
( 1 viii
List of tables ( \ Table 1: Rate of omission of the reflexive pronoun by verb .. 38 \. ~ "-., Table 2 : , S urnmot.ry of the .causal factors i:-esponsible for the i r' verb by verb variation in the rate of omission of i "
the reflexive pronoun ...... 49 - Table 3: Reflexive pronoun, omission as a function of lan- c",
guage dominance ••' ••"." ~ ••.••.•••..••...•.•....••.•• 51 Table 4: Rate of omission of the reflexive pronoun by verb CI " and language dominance ...... -.---.- ... ~ ...1.52 Tab le '5: Rate of omission of the reflexi ve pronoun by verb
by the Québécois and French immersion studènts ...• :S4
~ ab J,e 6: Rate of omiss ion of the reflexi ve pronoun as a function of age and language dominance ...••....•... 57
Table 7: Ratee' of omission of the refle~ive pronoun as a function of the age of the Québécois and') French
immersion students ...... 60
T~le,8: Reflexes of the past participle inflection in .- . j
F ren ch . • . . • . • . ... • • • . • .. . • . . $lqe ...... fi •• 6 3 Table 9: Distribution of the plus-gue;"parfai.t for passé
composé substi tution~ ...... •..•....•.•..•...... ••.. 69
Table 10: Distribution of simple ver~ by grade and syntactic construction •..•.••••...••.•..•.....•••.. 7l Table Il: Percentages of erroneous non -er verb past par-
ticiple per ...... 75 '1 Table 12: Percentages st participle and per \
grade leve 1 ...... a _ •••••••• 76 ( '\ ix
Table 13: contribûtîon;'of error sources over time ••••••••••• 83 ( 1 \ Table 14: Analogieal past p'articip1e errors commi tted by
the inunersion students •.. ~ . ....•..•..•.••..•• : .•.•• 86
D
c
..
,-I~ 1 \ ( O. Introduction This thesis belongs to the areas of both first and second language acquisition. It compares the acquisition of several
aspects of the French verb system by three grou~ of young speakers differing in terms of whether they are monolingual or bilingual and, as concerns the latter group, in terms of whether their mo;her tongue is French, Eng1ish or both. One group 9f speakers is composed of monolingual Freriéh Quebeckers. Another is composed of bilingual Franco-Ontarians many of whom have learned French and English more or 1ess simultaneously ,(due to the tact that French is a minority language in Ontario and es- pecial1y in the localities from which the Franco-Ontarian stu- dents are drawn, as we shall see). The third group of speâkers i5 compo5ed of bilingual Anglo-Quebeckers who have learned\ French as a second language in an ear1y French immersion pro- • gram. The aspects of the French verb system whose acquisition is being compared across these three speaker groups are the syntax of the bare (i.e., prepositionless) infinitive of motion verbs, the morphology of pronominaL verbs (i.e., reflexive pronoun + verb) and the morphology of past participles (i.e., stem + in- flection). These aspects will be exarnined in separate sections (sections 2, 3 and 4) the aim of each one of which will he to
compare and explain the language/~acquisition errors committed ~y the three speaker groups on the one hand, and the language ac- quisition stages reache? by the three speaker groups on the other. preceding these three sections is a methodological sec-
- ~ 1 2
tion (~ection 1) in which the French immersion, Franco-Ontarian ( and Québécois corpora that have provided the data base for the
acquisition studies featured in this thesis are described. In
the conclusion (section 5) the main findings that wil~ have e-
merged from e9ch acquisition study are summarized and then sorne
of these findings are discussed as they suggest directions for
future research, bear on theoretical issues within the language
acquisition field, or allow conclusions to be drawn concerning
spoken French development in early French immersion programs
and in French language schools serving Francophones residing in
Onta~io's minority francophone localities.
The remainder of the introduction is intended to provide
useful background information to the acquisition studies pre-
sented later in the thesis. Specifically, l would +ike to pra-i' c~ vide a description of the development of French immersion educa-
tiqn in Cana~a, familiar~ze th~ reader with·the plight of the
French language in 0ntario and then contrast the latter situa-
tion with the 'healtpiness' of the French language in the prov-
ince of Quebec.
0.11 The develbpment of French inunersion e,ducation
As Swain (1980:3) has' pointed out, "It is probably the case
that most major changes in an educational systemderive from pres-
su~es external ta it. The development of French immersion pro-
grams in Canada is no exception." French immersion education
arose as an innovative approach ta the teaching of French as a
second langu~ge to Canadian anglophone students. 1 French immer- 1 3 n--
sion education began in the mid-sixties in St. Lambert, a sub-
urb on Montreal's south shore. The educational problem
behind the rise of French immersion education was parental dis-
content over the lack ofsuccess of the conventional French pro-
gram available in the suburb's English language schools. The
parents were conc~rned that the short' dai~y French periods
offered in the traditional program were not sufficient to guar-
antee the attainment of functional bilingualism by their chil-
dren. The parents rightly felt that such a level of pr?ficie~cy
in Canada' s othe r offi cial lax:guage c~uld c6nfer importânt pO,li
tical, economic, social and cult~ral advantages to th~ir chil
dren in.a province in the aftermath of its Quiet Revolution,
i.e., increasingly intent on preserving its French identity and
on prornoting French as the working language. The concerned
parents were able to exert sufficient pressure on the local
school board to have i t set up 1 on an experimental basis, a new ',", form of French language instruction of their own conception:
immersion. # French immersion education lS innovative in that .it involves
a home/school language switch. French is the sole medium of in-
struction during the early grades (i.e., Kindergarten to grade 2
'v' or 3). Thereafter an English language arts class is introduced
'into the curriculum and certain content subjects like math erna-
tics are also taught in Engl7sh, others continuing to be taught
in French. 8y grad~ 6 the ifrnersion students are receiving ap-
proxirnately equal instruction tirne in the two languages. French
/ • 4 c, '\
inunersion education thus differs in two important respects from~ 1 the traditional form of French language 'instruction. On the one hand immersion vastly increases the degree of exposure to and oppottunity of the students to use French. On the other it makes French the medium of instruction. The learning of French
in immersion is therefore a sine qua ~ exigency for the learn ing of the content subjects taught via that language. These important characteristics have prornpted certain investigators like Stern (1978) to view the acquisition of French in immersion as 'incidental' to i ts use .'in learning the content subjects or
Harley and Swain (197g:35) to state that '~he early French im- ,mersion classroom provides a setting for second language acqui-
, , 1 sltlon that resembles a nat~ral acquisition setting in sorne im- portant respects." This i5 not to say, however, that French i5 never the object of instruction (see Swain 19BO). During the early immersion grades emphasis is placed on deve10ping compre- hension skills through the learning of basic vocabulary. The immersion teachers are normally bilingual and sa there is no pressure on the students to produce French utt~ances straight from the outset. On the contrary the students are allowed to proceed at their own pace. Only when the students have inter- nalized enough vocabulary are they encouraged ta speak French. These early years are a very crucial part of the immersion ex- periment. In fact the success of(> French immersion hinges on , , the receptive skil1s deve10ped by the students as these are the . skills they must rely on to learn the content sujects that are
, 1 5
taught in French.
While there was probably never any doubt that French irruner-
sion would significantly, irnprove the students' command of
French, i t was far from obvious at the time of the 'original st.
Lambert experiment that i t would prove to be an acceptable al-
ternative to traditionalEnglish instruction. R.i.ght from the start i t was a caIcuIated risk. The St. Lambert parents wanted empirical proof that the second language benefits would not be
achie'ved at the expense of mother tongue development nor of
content subject mastery. Thus a whole evaluation program had to be implemen.ted to assess both the French and English language ski Ils of the students as weIl as their performance in the con- tent subjects. To this end a team of psycholinguists from Mc-
Gill University headed by Dr. W.E. Lambert were invited to con- ceive and carry out the program evaluation. As is well-known, the evaluation results dismissed any fears that the parents might have had and are reported in a book by Lamber~ and Tucker
(1972). Given the reported success of the St. Lambert endeavor,
French immersion programs have since spread to school boards in most of the other Canadian provinces. This spread was no doubt also aided in part by Prime Minister Trudeau's policy of nation- al bilingualism (see Bruck and Swain 1976). The main findings of weIl over two hundred and fifty studies on French immersion education in Canada are sununarized in a recent bibliography compiled by Massey and Potter (1979). Using a wide assortment of testing techniques these studies have invariably confirmed ( 6
the positive 'rindings that carne out of the St. Lambert evalua
tian. They aIl show that English-spe,aking studènts going
through French.immersion programs attain higher French language
skills than comparable students in regular French programs and
moreover that such benefits are not achieved to the detriment of l English language skills and content subject mastery. However,
the immersion students fa11 short of achieving nati~e proficien-
cy in French at -the end of the ear1y immersion program. By the
end of grade 6 their receptive ski11s (i.e., reading and listen-
ing) are native-like but theircproductive skills (i.e., writing
and speaking) are not (Spilka 1976; Swain 1978). This thesis 1 will provide more information on the immersion students' spoken
French development. Wbile increased teacher correction and
contact with native French-speaking peers would certainly help
improve the spoken French of the immersion students (Swain 1974) 1
Genesee (1978) reports findings which indicate that the early
French immersion students in Montreal are not more active in
seeking opportunities to speak French autside the school than
~ students attending regular French classes. Genesee attributes
these results among other factors to the immersion students'
instrumental rather than integrative motivation for learning to
speak French. That the early French immersion experience does
not seem to be conducive ta active use of French in the extra-
scholastic environment is probably aIl the more disheartening to
supporters of immersion education as, paradoxically, immersion
students have been found ta show an increased desire to use 7
" Fr~~ch outside the school (Genesee 1~78) and 'feel' closer to ( French-Canadians as a result of their immersion experience (Czi-
ko, Lambert and Gutter 1979) .
0.2 The plight of French in Ontario
The Franco-Ontarian population is composed to a very large
degree of people of Québécois origin. There has been a more or
less continuous emigration of French-Quebeckers to Ontario (see
Mougeon, Beniak and Côté 1981). Nevertheless French remains a
minority language in Ontario. 4ccor~ing to the 1976 national 2 census there were 462,190 people of French mother tongue in On~
tario compared to 6,457,645 of English mother tongue. 3 These
figures show that Francophones make up between 6 and 7% of the
provincial population only. On the local level, however, there
is a wide range of variation in the proportion of Francophones
to Anglophones. For exarnple, in HawkesDury (South Eastern On-
tario) 84% of the populatiqn is francophone. In Cochrane (NOrth-
ern Ontario) one finds an intermediary level of francophone con
centration ~43%). In Windsor (South Western Ontario) the level
of francophone conceni;;ration is only 6 % .' Because i t consti tutes
such a small minority and because it does not control Ontario's
economy, the Franco-Ontarian population is undergoing linguistic
assimilation into the Anglo-Ontarian majority language group.
But as Mougeon and Canale (1977:3) have argued, nit seems reason-
able to assume that in cornmunities where two language groups co-
ëxist, the overall level of exposure of one language group to . the other 's language will be a function of each group '5 demo- graphie strength~ In other words ~/ as the size of one group in- i 1 " 1 creases with respect to the s~ze lof the other, so does the level ! of exposure of that other group to the dominant group's lan- guage." Thus we expect linguistic assimilation to be more ad- vanced in localities, districts or regions where Ontario's'
Francophones are numerically inferior to Anglop~ones than in localities, districts or regions where the reverse relatioship holds. The following bears out these predictions. 4 If we go back to the 1971 national census it is possible to caIculate the rate of abandonment of French at home among
Ontarians of French origine In 1971 there were 737,360 Onta- rians of French extraction but only 352,465 among these report- ed still using French as the dominant language of communication at home. These figures translate into a 52% rate of replacement of French by English as the primary language of communication in
Franco-Ontar1an"h ornes. 5 However, Joy (1978) brokoe down the provincial rate by district and found that it varied considera bly depending on the le ve 1"'"" of francophone concentration in each district. For example, in the few districts where Francophones form a strong majority (i.e., more than 80% of ,the district pop- ulation), the rate of shift to English in the home was less than
20%. But in districts where Francophones account for less than
20% of the population, the rate o"f shift to English was more than 80%. Several sociolinguistic surveys carried out at the local level by the Franco-Ontarian Centre (Mougeon and H~brard
1975 and Mougeon et al. 1980, notably) have revealed the same 1 1 1
9
rel tionship between rate of shift to English in Franco-Ontarian ( homes and level of francophone concentration':
It follows from the above that man y Franco-Ontarian chil-
dren residing in localities where Francophones are outnumbered
by Anglophones are getting greater exposure to English than to
French at home. Since it has been repeatedly observed in mino- , rity language situations that the home is the last domain to be penet~ated by the majority language,6 one can infer from th~s '- that th~ Franco-Ontarian child who has not been handed down
French by his parents will not be able to acquire French ~utside
the home (i.e., in the community) in localities where Franco-
phones are in the minority. If the minority language has not
or has only incompletely been transmitted from the parents to
the child, the French language school represents ,a last resort.~ - ~
In this connectio~~the belief that 'Trench language maintenance
is the responsibi li ty of the French school" is not uncommon
among Franco-Ontarian parents who have failed to transmit the
French language to their children (Mougeon and Canale 1977:6).
This brings up the important question of the impact of French
- language schooling on French language maintenance in Ontario's,
minority francophone localities. Since the Franco-Ontarian stu-
dents whose spoken French is under exarnination in this thesis
hail from precisely such localities, this thesis will provide
evidence bearing on the above question.
In comparison, French language maintenance in Ontario's
majority francophone localities is much stronger. As reported r 10
earlier, in such localities French remains the dominant lan guage of communication i~ more lhan 80% of the Franco-Ontarian households. It is safe to assume that in such localities
French also remains the '-,~ominant language of cormnunication in
the community given the numerical p\eponderance of Francophones
over Anglophones. Thus in majority francophone localities the
French school caters to students who probably for the most part
have already had French passed on to them at home.
0.3 The situation of French in Quebec
According to the 1971 national census figures reported in
Gendron M76), 79% of, the population of Quebec was ,of French
ethnic 0;~~~(4,759,000), 80.7% had Frenchr--as their mother , ton gue (4,867,0&sl and 80.8% used French as the main language
of communication at home (4,870,000). These figures show that,
unlike Ontario, Quebec-is a province with a strong francophone
rnajarity whase allegiance ta French is extrernely high since the
proportion of Quebeckers who used French as the principal home
language was actually slightly greater than the proportion of
Quebeckers of French mother tongue, which in turn was slightly
greater than the proportion of Quebeckers of French ethnie ori-
gin. The level of nonallegiance ta French as the main language
~ of communication in the home among Quebeckers of French mother
tongue or French ethnie origin was at worst 2% in 1971. This
is the maximum percent age that obtains under the assumption that , ;.
the higher proport~on"of Queb~ckers whose main home language was
English (14.7% of the population or 888,000 people) than Quebec- ~
" Il
.. kers whose mother tongue was English (13.1% of the populatio~
or 789,000 people) was entirely due to the assimilation of Que-
beckers of French ethnie origin into the anglophone minority _ c. \ (because of the then and still considerable economic attraction -' power of the angl,.on'e mino~ity). In short, as of 1971 the
francophone populàtion of the province of Quebec was not under-
going any appreciab1e amount of linguistic assimilation. The important trans~mations that have since taken place in Québé~- ., \ cois politiG~, in particular in the area of Frepch ~~nguage , \ ' '~, , legiklation, make i t~aUSible to suppose that th~ '-rnaximi \lIn per- centage of nonallegian e to French" as the principal home lan- , guage among Quebeckers 0\ French mother tongue or 'French ethnie origin, as revealed by th~ 1981 national census results,'will
" ' have dropped below 2%~ According to Gendron (1976), 86% of
, ' Francophorles in Quebec live to aIl intents and purposes only in
French. Thus Quebec can be cornpared to a quasi-monolingual
\ speech communi ty. It is in th'e work do~ain :!='-hat recourse to
!ngliSh has been the most noticeable arnong French-Quebeckers
(Gendron 1976) but this situation is likely to change given the
cornpulsory francization programs irnplernented by the Quebec gov-
- .~ "-'." ernrnent.
0.4 Conclusion
There are obvious differences in the degree of exposure to
and opportuni ty to use Fren~ between the three speaker popula-
tions from which the students in this thesis are drawn. The
French immersion students' exposure to and use-Q{ French begins
o
J 12 f
------~- ----rnthe immersion school and is to aIl intents and purposes re-
stricted to the school domain since, as was reported, they have
litt le or no contact with French-speaking peers outside of the
school. It Was seen that the minority locality Franco-Ontarian
students' exposure to and use of French begins at ho~e, but very
often with simultaneous and even greater exposure to and use of
English, is at best weakly reinforced by the community given
the numerical preponderance of Anglophones over Fran'cophones,
and continues in the French language schools. It was mentioned
finally that the province of Quebec is analogous to a monolin-
1 ~ guaI spe~ch community, which rneans that the Québécois students'
exposure to and use of French begins at ~ome, with little or no
simultaneous exposure to and use Qf English, and is strongly
reinforced by both the community and the French school. In , view of these intergroup differences in degree of exposure to
and opportunity to use French, w~ should not be surprised if the
three aspects of the French verb sy~tern tJnder investigation are v .-' not acquired to the same extent by each student group •
• 13
" -, _.. - ( l . The corpora ~ l • l The immersion corpus
The French immersion corpus is compbsed of tape-recorded
interviews that>- I conducted with a total of 75 English-speaking
students enrolled in an early French inunersion program offered
by the Protestant School Board of Greater Montreal.7 The inter-
views took place in the spring of 1977. Each student was inter-
viewed individua11y for about 15 to 20 minutes in a room set
asidé for this purpose. The interview consisted of a series
!/ of questions on the 'students' holiday experiences, their. cur- ~
rent daily activities, their holiday plans for the future and / l' their family life. Tpe students were selected at random from
one class at each of the following grade levels: 2, 3, 4, 5:'Jand
6. An equal nurnber of s,tudents (i. e., 15) was chosen from each
class. The random selection yielded an approximately equal
representation of males and females at each grade level. Prac tically all 6f the students haïled from prof~ssional or middle c lass backgrounds. ALI of the studelfts came from the, sarne ...... school. Being a native speaker of French, l was able to tran- scribe, the tape-recorded interviews myse1f. 1.2 The Franco-Ontarian corpus
The Franco-Ontarian corpus is composed of tape-recorded
~!erviews that were conducted by members of the Franco-ontarian Cerytre with a total of 108 grades 2 and 5 students residing in , . ..,:) six locâlities where Anglophones outnumber Francophones: Corn-
wall (r~RfanCoPhOneS).1 Sudbury (29%), N>rth Bay (17%), We1- ( -- 14
land (17%), Pembroke (10%) and Windsor (6%). The interviews
were carried 0ut in the context of two separate sociolinguistic
surveys. The first survey dates back to 1974. It was under-
J / taken in Sudbury and Welland wi th francophone students at both
the e1ementary and high sChoJl levels. This initial survey was
undertaken in response to the recommendations of the Franco-
ontar)' Centre's Advisory Committee in 1973. The aim of the survey w s to gather linguistic data that would serve as the
basis r evaluating the Sudbury and Welland students' compe-
tence in spoken as weIl as written French. For the purposes
of the present thesis, l have drawn on the tape-recorded inter-
views that were carried out at the elementary level r i. e., in
grades 2 and 5. In both localities seven students were inter "" viewed in grade 2 and seven in grade 5 for a total 0 f 28 stu
dents. The students were nf chosen at random but rat4er in such a way as to yield an approximately equal representation of
males and females and of working, middle and professional class
backgrounds. Social class backgrounds~ere determined on the basis of parental occupations. The interviews consi sted of a t series of questions on such topics as the students' leisure
activities, school and home life, personal experiences, etc.
AlI interviews were then transcribed and checked for accuracy of transcription. In addition, the interviews included ques-
twns pn the students' frequency of use of French vs. English
. wi th their parents and siblings and on their parents' fre quency of use of'Fré"hch vs. English with them. The information 15
.J gathered via th~se language use questions was used to determine the students' dominant language of communication. The reader is referred to Mougeon (19Bl) for further details on the Sudbury and Welland sociolinguistic survey.
The s,econd survey was undertaken in 197B as part of a large research project funded by the Ontario Ministry of Eaücation, the purpose of which was to gather information on the language use patterns of Franco-Ontarian students residing in franco- phone minority localities and on these students' oral French proficiency. The survey was undertaken, among other minority francophone loca1i ties, in the four that make up the remainder of my Franco-Ontarian corpus, i. e., Cornwall, NJrth Bay, Pem- broke and Windsor. Again, students were surveyed at both the elementary and secondary school leve1s but l have made use only of the tape- recorded interviews that were conducted at the ele- mentary level, i. e., in grades 2 and S. In the four localities mentioned above 10 students were interviewed in grade 2 and 10- , L in grade 5 for a total of 80. These students were selected in numbers that were proportionately representative of the larger student population at each grade level as ~cerns social class and language dominance. Social class was arrived at~ " the basis of parental occupations. Language dominance was ~ arrived at in the same way as in the 197 .. sutvey. The .inter- view schedule was a slightly expanded version of the one ern-l ployed in the 1974 survey sC!) as ta cover a greater variety of topics of potential interest to the students. The reader may
/ . 16
wish to cQnsul t Mougeon et al. (1980) for more detailed infor-
mation on the 1978 survey.
1.3 The Québécois corpus
The Qùébécois corpus is actuallY.composed of two s~corpora.
One subcorpus is made up of tape-recorded interviews that l \ conducted -with 15 francophone students attending a private 8 French language school in Montreal. These interviews were
carried out du ring the same period (i. e., spring 1977) as the
onés wi th the French immersion students and consisted of the w same set of questions that were asked the immersion students , , (see earlier description of the questions). Three francophone
students were randomly selected from one class at each of the
grade levers/at which the immersion students were chosen (i.e. r
2", 3, 4, 5 and 6). Care was taken to ascertain that the stu
dents' sole or at least principal "source of exposure to English
was the school 1 S English language class. One, student who did not meet this requirement was replaced by another randomly
selected student who did. The francophone students can there-
fore" be said to be essentially monolingual. The great majori ty
were from middle or professional class backgrounds as was the
case for the immersion students. Social class was inferred on
the basis of the immersion and francophone students" answers to
the question on their family lives as this question elicited
information on the occupations of their parents. The rea'son , behind the constitution of this Québécois subcorpus was my con-
~ cern that l should have a realistic gauge for assessing the l l, 17
immersion students' acquisition of French.
The other Québécois subcorpus consists of tape-recorded
interviews with a total of 14 grade~ 2 and 5 francoph6ne stu-
dents attending a French language school in Quebec City. The
interviews were conducted by members of the Franco-Ontarian
Centre as part of yet another sociolinguistic survey of Onta~
rian French undertaken in 1976. The goal of the survey was to
complement' the linguistic data that had been gathered in the
1974 survey' that was carried out in the minori_ty francophone '- . localities of Welland and Sudbury with linguistic data obtained from Franco-Ontarian students residing in majority francophone
localities, in this case Rayside and Hawkesbury. Furthermore,
linguistic data were also obtained from monolingual francophone students residing in Quebec City for comparative purposes. In aIl 28'students were interviewed at the primary and high school levels, among them the seven grade 2 and seven grade 5 students
'J whose recorded speech l have relled on to form my other Québéc- ois subcorpus. The interview schedule was identical to the one that was used in the 1974 survey and the Quebec City sfudent/ sample was stratified in the sarne manner as the Welland and
Sudbury student sarnples (i.e., as a function of sex and social class wi th a view to ensuring an approximately even dïstribu- tion of males and females and of working, middle and prof.essional class backgrounâs). However, the language use questions were struck from the interview schedule as the Quebec City students
1 • were to aIl intents and purposes essentially monol~ngual, like 18 1
their--Mon-trea1 counterparts. More informa~jon on the 1976 80- ( ciolinguistic survey carried out by the Franoo-Ontarian Centre can be found in Mougeon et al. (1977) and in Mougeon (1981) ~
...~ ,
1
/ l', 1 ), 19
( 2. Acqulsition of the bare infinitive after motion verbs 2.1 Introduction
This first study bears on two infinitiva1 constructions that
can be used after motion verbs such as aller, venir, partir, etc.
in French. One construction is not introduced by a preposition
and thus I shall calI it the 'bare' infinitive or sirnply the BI
(la). The other is introduced by the preposition pour, and hence
l shall refer ta it as the l20ur infinitive or· simply the PI (l?).
(1) 0 a. Le plombier est venu réparer le robinet.
b. Le plombier est venu pour réparer le robinet.
The study is di vided into three parts. In the first part l
shall present arguments which do not support the tradi tional
clairn that the BI and the PI are both purpase constructions. The , arguments suggest that the BI is not purposive but rather fact-
ive, a term to be defined later. In thé second part of the stu-
dy l shall oroach the problern of the semantics of me motion
verbs. l will show that there are two types of motion verbs, general and specific ones, and reveal the existence of a "syntac- tic constraint on the use of the pi with general motion verbs.
In the third and main part of this study l will attempt ta ex- f plain a tendency on the part of the Franca-Ontarian students t0 use what would seem to he the PI at the expense af the Bt and see whether the Québêcpis and French immersion students do likewis.e.
2.2 The BI and PI / Ta the best of my knowledge, the B! and the Pt have simply r- been assumed rather than demonstrated to both signal purpose. \
20
The problem is not in connection with the PI as this construc-
( , ;' tion obviously is purposive given the presence of the purposive
preposi tion pour. The prob lem is in connection wi th the BI be
cause i t lacks an overt marker of purpose. Here are sorne cha-
racteristic statements that have been made by tradi tional gram-
marians concerning the BI:
... les verbes de mouvement peuvent être suivis d'un infilitif, construit directement. .. qui a c un sens final. (Chevalier et al. 1964:153)
L Le rapport de finalité ... peut être exprimé par un infini tif précédé de pour •.. ou par un infi ni tif pur après les verbes de mouvement. (Gre visse 1975:1173)
Après un verbe de mouvement, l' infinitif sans préposition marque le but. (Gaiffe et al. 1936:114)
,> There are severa1 reasons why l think the above statements
are in error.
Fo11owing Lakoff (1968) we will say that a verbal cons truc-
tion indicates purpose if it can be used in answer ta th~ ques
tion ward pourguoi. The examples below show that the PI, as ex- 10 ) pécted, has the desi red property but that the BI do~sn' t: Il (2 ) a. Pourquoi grand-mère est-elle montée? /
b. Pour se" coucher. c. * Se coucher.
(3) a. Pourquoi Jean est-i 1 part~ ~ la gare?
b. Pour y chercher des amis. 21
(3) c. *y chercher des amis.
According to Lakoff 1 s cri terion, then, the BI cannot be
said to signal purpose. I t remains therefore for us to deter-~ mine what in effect the BI does signal. If we continue to rea
son ~ la Lakoff, we see that the BI can be used in answer to
the interrogative expression qu 1 est-ce que .•. faire, whereas the PI cannot: 1 (4) a. Qu'est-ce que la bonne descend faire? b. Lav~r -du linge.
c. *Pour laver du linge.
(5) a. Qu'est-ce que Paul ira faire?
b. Voir un film.
c. *PQur voir un film.
(6) a. Qu'est-ce que le plombier est venu faire?
b. Réparer le robinet.
c. *Pour réparer le robinet.
What the above exarnples show is that the BI denotes a fact
(in the past) or an action whose realisation is presupposed (in
the future). Thus in (4) it is presupposed ,that the maid is
going te wash the laundry and in (5) i t is presuppesed that
Paul will see a rnovie. That the plurnber fixed the faucet is a
fact in (6). For convenience of exposition, l will coin the , ' terrn 'factive' to designate verbal constructions which can be
used in answer to the 'factive 1 question gu' est-ce que ... faire.
According to this criterion, then, the BI is a factive construc-
tion.
.. ·l
22
In support of the facti ve interpretation of the BI we can mention McArthur's (1971) study of French verbal constructions in which he analyses the BI a~ the equi valent of a fini te con j~ined sentence as illustrated below:
(7) a. Le plombier est venu réparer le robinet.
b. Le plombier est venu et a réparé le robinet.
(8) a. Elle alla frapper à la porte.
b,. Elle alla et ,frappa à la porte.
What paraphrases (7b) and (8b) render explicit is precise ly the realization of the action denoted by the BI. In con- trast to the BI, the PI is only amenable to paraphrases where the preposition pour is replaced by~ an eqUl0 valent purpose mark- er:
(9 ) a. Le plombier est venu pour réparer le robinet.
b. Le plombier est venu afin de/dans le but de / dans l'in-
tention de/etc. réparer le robinet.
Since the PI only indicates an action which ip intended as opposed to an action w~ch is a fact or presupposed, we have the following distinction: J (10) a. *Le plombier est venu réparer le robinet, 'mais il ne
l'a pas réparê.
b. Le plombier est venu pour réparer le robinet, mais il
ne l'a pas r~paré.
To conclude this section, l have provided arguments which l think cast sorne serious doubt on the putative synonyrny of the BI and PI. It would seem to be the case that the BI is not 23
a purpose construction but rather a factive one, that is, a
construction which presents an action as a fact of the past or
as a fact of the future. There is a not uninteresting conse-
quence of the facti ve analysis of the BI, which is that motion
verbs are really like any other verbs in French as they too
require the preposition pour befOre the infinitive in order to
signal purpose.
2.3 Motio~ verbsll
Verbs of motion in F~ench belong to, one of eitl1er two catègories: general or specifie. The general verbs of motion
are' those which simply con vey the idea of motion wi th no par-
ticular destination implied. Aller, its colloquial variant
avoir ,été and retourner (i.e., aller de nouvêau) are general verbs of motion. Speci fic verbs of motion indi cate more than
just motion. They also implicitly provide information on the
destination of the motio~. AlI the other verbs of motion are
speci fic. For example, sort'ir means aller dehors, monter means
aller en haut, descendre means aller en bas, entrer means aller
dedans, etc. In fact, as the meaning equivalents show, speci-
J fic motion verbs can be broken down semantically into a general
motion verb plus an adverbial of location. Because of their
semantic composition, specifie motion verbs need not be used wi th an overt locative complement in order to form a grammati-
cal sentence, but general motion verbs must in Standard French:
(11) a. Il est venu/parti/sorti/rentré/etc.
b. *Il est allé/a été/est retourné. 1 _24
J ~
(11) c. Il est alléja été/est retourné à la maison. . Another syntactic discrepancy between specifie and general
motion verbs is that the PI cannot be used immediately following
the latter. There must be an intervening locative complement
between the general motion verb and the PI: , (12) a. *11 est allé/a été/est retourné pour prendre le petit
déjeuner.
b. Il est allé/a été/est retourné au restaurant pour
prendre le petit déjeuner.
Specifie motion verbs may be used with the PI irrespective
of whether there is a locative complement or not:
(13) a. Il est venu/parti/etc. pour prendre le petit déjeuner.
b. Il est venu/parti/etc. au restaurant pour prendre le
petit déjeuner.
As to the BI, i ts use wi th both general and speci fic verbs
of motion does not 'depend on the presence or absence of a loca-
tive complement:
( 14) a. Je suis allé/retourné/ai été (à La Ronde) rencontrer
des amis.
b. Je suis venu/parti/etc. (à La Ronde) rencontrer'" . des
amis.
\ 2.4 Use of the PI instead of the BI
In performing an analysis of the use of the preposition , f pour in the spoken French of the 28 grades 2 and 5 Welland and
Sudbury Franco-Ontarian students, Beniak et al. (1977) discov-
ered.. that the PI was sometimes being used in contexts where it would have been more appropriate .to use the BI, i.e. 1 in fact- ( ive con texts : •
(15) a. Interviewer: Raconte-moi ce que vous avez fait au
camp?
b. Student: On a décidé d'aller IPour se baigner. (more
appropriate wou1d have been: On a décidé d'aller se
baigner) " (16) a. Interviewer: Qu'est-ce qu'elle a fait ta mêre? . b. Student: Elle a été pour voir ma cousine. (more
appropriate wou1d have been: Elle a été voir ma cou-
sine)
Beniak et al. were puzzled by this apparent ~xpression of purpose where purpose is not required. Out 'ol -the total of 33
occurrences of the PI in the speech of the students, 24 were • j udged to ha~e been used in factive contexts, the other nine in appropriate ~~rposive conte:~, ;longside these 24 factive PI" ( the authors noted 161 appropriate uses of the BI. Thus the stu-
dents' rate of use of the PI instead of the BI was 24/185 or
13%. My intent in the remainder of this section is to try and_,
provide an -explanation for this phenomenon.
The above resu1 ts have tb be interpreted as evidence that
the Franco-Ontarian students are using the PI in two ways: on
the one hand they are using i t as a purpose construction, in
keeping with standard usage, and, on the other, as a semantical-
1y equivalent variant of the BI (nenstandard usage). In ether .. words, it would appear that the Franco-Ontarian studentp are
• 26
generalizing the structure but not the function of the PI by
using a semantically empty pour to introduce the BI. It re
mains to be explained, however 1 why and how the Franco-Ontarian
students are carrying out this structural generalizatiQ,Q.
The BI is rather unconunon in French. It is found only after
a restri cted set of verbs 1 among them motion verbs, verbs of
pe rception and the serniauxi liaries (Grevisse 1975: 748). The
great majority of verbs which can occur with a following infini-
ti ve require that the infinitivebe introduced by a preposition
(li or de). It is therefore possible that th~ student"s' use of
pour before the BI in facti ve contexts represents a tendency to
reguralize the exceptional structure of the BI. This is aIl the more plausible, as the infinitive after verbs of perception also r
tends to be introduced by d. preposition in the spoken French of the same students, e. g. 1 il pense de venir jouer dans le sable.
That the students are using pour rather than de or à ta intro duce the BI might seern surprising in view of the fa ct that (i) de and .-à are the prepositions which normally introduce infini- tives and (H) de and ~ are semanticaI1y empty when they perform that function. The students' use of pour is nonetheless relata- ble to several factors.
First, in the spoken French of the students the~e are in- stances of the use of pour to introduce the infinitive express ing the notion 'to be about to' after the two verbs of motion aller and venir:
(17) a. l' racule pas quand i' vient pour se battre. 1
27
( (17) b. Les deux madames traversent, i' vont pour traverser la
1 The preposition pour is sern9ntically empty in the above ex- 1 .... amples.' This is a first indication that pour has a procli vi ty 1 c. '- ta shed i ts main sense of purpose. ') ~ u , "second, Beniak et al. (1977) report several examples in the
spoken French of the students where ~ and de introducing an in-
fini ti ve are replaced by pour: " (lB) a. J'les invite pour v'nir se baigner.
b. Elle lui a demandé pour aller au magasin.
As in the previous pair of examples, pour is semantically
empty here. In this connection, Aub-Buscher (1976) presents
data that suggest a sl.milar extension of the scape of,.- pour in ""~ the French-based creoles spoken in the Caribbean. She points
out in parti cular that pour may be used es a semanti cally empty
preposition, especially before an infinitive, while at the sarne
time fully preserving i ts purpose meaning in other pontexts.
In sum, the Franco-Ontarian students' use of pour as a se-
mantically empty préposition ta introduce the BI of motion verbs
is quite in keeping with parallel developments in the use of
gour in othe:t: areas ,of their verb system and in" the verb system
of other varieties of French. The insertion of pour before the.
BI of motion verbs would seem to be the reflection of a latent /" tendency in FrenCL~ for the l'nfinitive of aIl verbs to be intro-
duced by a preposition.
1 "This is not ta say, however, that this nonstandard use of 28
pour is solely the result of the internaI properties of French described above. Interference from English,r the students 1 other language, could be another contributing factor. In English the preposition to serves as a sandhi form to introduce the infini tive of practically aIl verbs that can take one. But in addi- , tion to this use, in which it is semantically empty, the prepo- sition to also seI'>ves to mark purpose before the infinit'ive. It follows, then, that both the factive and purpose infinitives are introduced by to in English:
(19) a. l went there to study, not to have fun. (purpose)
b. l went to eat at a Mexican restaurant yesterday. (fact)
Since aIl of the Welland and Sudbury students have a good command of English (superior, for sorne, to their command of
French) 1 their insertion of ~ before the BI could also be the
l result of the influence of the English marking pattern. More specifically, one may plausibly suppose that the Franco-Ontarian students establish a crosslinguistic association between to and pour under their purpose readings and that this association serves as the basis for the use of a semantically empty pour .l:>e fore the BI of motion verb~ on the analogy of the nonpurposive to in English. In other words, i t is possib le to hypothesize that the int~rnal propertie~ of the Frencl1 verb system described, above and English interference are operating conjointly to pro- duce the in~ertion of pour before the BI of motion verbs.
One may still wish to inquire, however, whether each one of the two causal factors, on its own, is sufficient ta bring about 29~
( the insertion af pour before the BI of motion verbs. l wauld like to try and tack1e this qu~stion here.
If the internaI properties of French described above were
sufficiently pawerful, one would expect to find evidence of the , " insertion of pour before the BI of motion verbs in the speech
of monolingual Francophones. l 100ked for such evidence in the
speech of the 14 monolingual francophone- students from Quebec
City (i.e., the seven grade 2 and seven grade 5 students) and
in the spoken French of six of the 15 monolingual francophone
students from MOJatrea1 (i. e., t.I1e three grade 2 and three grade
5 students). The search showed that the Quebec City students
used t.he BI a total of 135 times and the PI on1y twice ,>while the Montreal students used the BI 36 times and t.he PI not even once.
The two linguistic contexts in which the Quebec City students
used the PI were judged to calI for a purpose reading. There-
fore there is no evidence that the Québécois students are using
pour as a semantically empty preposition to introduce the BI of
motion verbs. However, this absence cannot be taken as conclu-
sive proof that the properties of the French verb system men-
tianed above are insufficiently powerful, on t.heir awn, ta trig-
gei the insertion of pour before the BI. There remains the pos
sibility that this use of pour is a feature of the spoken French
of younger monolingual Francophones but that such use is already
overcome by the time they reach grade 2. In other words, pour
insertion before the BI of motion verbs may correspond to a de-
velopmenta1 stage in the acquisition of this infinitival con-
, \ 30
struction, such that to find traces of this stage pne would
have to consult the spee~ of monolingual natives between the
ages of, say, 2 and 5. Since my sample of Québécois speakers, .. - does not include such younger 1earners, l turned to the ?cquisi- ... tion literature in the hope of finding information on the French
child's acquisition of the BI of motion verbs. Unfortunate1y,
the sources that l was able to consult (Grégoire 1968, Bronckart
1976 and several others) did not include the BI as part of their
scope of investigation. Thus while l have presented evidence
that the insertion of pour be?dfe the BI of motion verbs is i~
ternéUly motivated in French, at the present time ther is un-
fortunately no hard data showing that such insertion or is ~ not a feature of the French child's deve10ping grarnrn
Let us now turn 'to the question of whether Eng1ish inter-
ference, on its own, cou1d be at the root of the insertion of
pour before the BI of motion verbs in the speech of the bilin-
guaI Franco-Ontarian students. This question would seem to be
insoluble at this juncture given that..- the answer to it depends
directly on tne answer to the first question. If future re-
search on the acquisition of French as a first language were to revea1.. that the French chi1d goes through a stage where he in- serts pour in front of the BI of motion verbs, then it would -~ have to be concluded that English interference is at best a sec-
ondary cause. Were it to show that no suCh insertion takes
place, then it would have to be concluded that English inter
ferenee is the principal if not the sole underlying e~e: But 31
until such ~esearch is forthcoming, we are cornpelled to rernain ! in a position of uncertainty as ta whether the insertion of pour befor~ the BI of motion verbs by the bilingual Franco-Ontarian
students is the sole outcome of intralinguistic pressures, t~~ J sole outcorne of interlinguistic pressures, or the outcome of the j cambinatio~ of these two types 'of pressures. 12
~1atever the underlying cause(s) of the insertion of pour before the BI of motion verbs might be, however, or 1 more pre-
cisely, since we have shown this insertion to be motivated, in' • ~ - theory, bath intra- and inter}inguistically, one can make the
prediction that pour insertion should also turn up in the speech of Anglophone students learning French as a second language. l tested out this prediction by examining the spoken French of 30 of the 75 early French immersion students (i.e., the 15 grade 2 and 15 grade 5 students). These students used the BI a total of
69 times and the PI a total of 36 times. But of these 36 PI, more than half were judged to have 'been used in factive contexts.
As reported earlier, the Franco-Ontarian stuàents used the PI 24 tirnes in factive contexts but otherwise appropriately used the
BI a total of 161 times. In short, the French immersion stu- dents not only commit the same insertion of pour but they do so at an even higher rate than,' the Franco-Ontarian/ students. This 1 latter finding makes sense when considered in Ihe light of our discussion (section 0.4) of the problems of degree of exposure to
French and apportunity ta use French. We saw that the French immersion students' exposure to and use of French is essential1y } , J ( , i 1 1 32
restricted to the scheol domain while the minority Franco-Onta-
rian students at least begin to learn French at home and get sorne additional exposure to the language and opportunity to use it in the community and follow this up by going te French lan-
guage schools. Given these language input and output differ- ences, it is only normal that the French immersion students are less advanced in their acquisition of the BI of motion verbs than the Franco-Ontarian s tudents. By the sarne token 1 i t is only natural that the Franco-Ontarian students are Iess advanced in their acquisition of the BI of motion verbs than the
Québécois students, assuming pour insertion is a feature of na- tive child speech. The finding also makes sense when considered ip the light of the students 1 knowledge of English. Ass'uming
English inte,rference plays a part in the insertion of pour in front of the BI of motion verbs, it is only normal once again, given the obvious differences in knowledge of English between the three student groups, that the French immersion students are the ones who are the leasb' advanced in their acquisition and that the Québécois students are the most advanced.
ln a different connection, when describing the two o , diffe~efit types oi motion verbs, l played up the existence of a syntactic constraint on the use of the PI after general verbs of motion
,1 like aller. It was shown that standard usage requires that a , locative complement accompany the gen~ral motion verb (see ex- amples 12a and b) . Out of the nine PI that were appropriately used in purposive contexts by the Franco-Ontarian students, ,/ ,,~
33
/ seven occurred wi th a gene_raI motion verb. Two of these seven ( j purposive PI vi~ted the syntactic constraint: l' (20) a. Y'était allé ~ pour tuer sa femme.
b. C'est une fille qui allait ~ pour donner duegâteau.
Despi te these two violations 'of the constraint, the stùdents
Observed it significantly more often (71%) than they broke it
(29%). When describing the two types of motion verbs we also saw that this syntactic constraint, does not bear on the use of the BI with general motion verbs. In view, on the one hand, of
~ structural identity of the purposiv~ and factive PI, but, on
,1 the other, of the semantic identi ty of the factive PI and the 1 BI. it can be asked whether the Franco-Ontarian students trans-
ferred the syntactic constraint to the use of the factive PI.
That is, ta what extent did they use the factive PI inunediately
after a general motion verb? An examination of the 24 factive
PI produced oy the Franco-Ontarian students revealed that 20 of
them occurred wi th a general motion verb and that in 10 of these
20 cases there was no locative complement between the general '. motion verb and the facti ve PI (see 15b and 16b). That there
was no locative complement in 50 % of the uses of the facti ve PI
with a general motion verb suggests to me that the factive PI is
taking on the syntactic properties of the BI.
2.5 Conclusion
We have not made much of the fact that the coalescence of
the purposive and factive meanings of pour before the infinitive
of motion verbs results in formaI ambigui ty. To the extent that
J 34
- .• this formaI ambiguity could impede communication, one might
look for the verb system to allow a therapeutic intervention.
This intervention could take the form of a compensatory con-
struction such as the fini te conjoined sentence pointed out by
\ McArthur (1971). That such a therapeutic inte~'vehtion is not
farfetched is suggested by the fact that the English language
has alreadY,deveIoped the finite alternative:
(21) a. What did you do last night?
) b. l went to see a movie.
c. l went and saw a movie.
It would therefore be interesting to reexamine the Franco-
Ontarian students' speech in order to check for the possible
presence of the finite equivalent of the BI.
The extension of the scope of pour via the aGjNnction of
semantically empty uses after motion verbs and other types of
verbs (see examples 18a and b) may seem at firs(- sight"somewhat
paradoxical in the sense that ~,our is first and fotemost a se ---- 7- mantically strong prepositio? Yet it wou1d seem to me that the " weakening of pour is consonant with what has happened to many a
preposition in the course of the evolution of the French lan-
guage. To gi ve but one example taken from Brunot anq Bruneau' .'
(1969) 1 the scope of the preposition! underwent a similar ex- 13 tension which culminated toward the end of the 16th century.
It is also interesting to note that motion verbs could take
a BI in Latin and that French is the' only Romance language that has preserved this constructfon. For example,. Spanish, Portu- 35
_ ,1.. 1 guese and Italian 'aIl introduce the factive infinitive by the
preposition~. As to the purpose infinitive, it is introduced
by the prepositions para or per, cognates of French pour. Nbw
up until the 18th century verbs of motion in French could be
used with an infinitive introduced by the preposition! which
signalled purpose, but this ~ infinitive gave way to the PI (Bru
not 1966). In contrast, it would seem that in the other lan-
guages of Latin origin mentioned above the a infinitive survived
by winning out over the BI. The reasqns why French evolved dif- /' ferently from the other Romance l~Uages are not known.
Finally, in this study l did not investigate the Franco-
Ontarian students' acquisition of the BI of motion verbs as a
function of their dominant language of communication and grade
level. N::lr did l examine the Québécois and French immersion stu-
dents' acquis i tian of the BI of motion verbs as a function of
their grade level. If the correlation tbat was argued to exist
'between the degr~e of mastery of the BI of motion verbs and the
degree of exposure te and opportunity to use Fr~nch is valid, it
is ~o be expected that language dominance and grade level would
also have been found to be correlated wi th the degree of mastery
of the BI of motion verbs. l have taken these two factors into
consideration rn the following study on the acquisition 9f the
reflexi ve pronoUfl' of French pronominal verbs. 36
3. Acquisition of the refle~ive pionoun
3.1 Introduction
There have been severaI studies of the acquisition of French as a first or second language which among other things have ~ looked at the acquisition Qf the morpho1ogy of pronominal verbs
(Grégoire 1968; Canale, Mougeon and Beniak 1978; Mougeon et al.
1980: Spi1ka 197~; Harley and Swain 1978). AlI of these studies have shown that learners of French, whether native or not, omit the reflexive pronoun that is part of the morphology of pronomi- nal verbs. None of these studies, however, considered the acquisition of the ref1exive pronoun from the point of view of the different pronominal verbs. Yet there is evidence, a1beit indirect, th~t such a verb by verb approach could reveal inter esting differences in the acquisition of the reflexive pronoun.
Thus Canale, Mougeon and Bélanger (1978) found that the ana1ogi- cal 1eveling of the auxiliary être by Franco-Ontarian students varied in strength as a function of the different verbs under investigation and furthermore that this verb by verb variation' was not random but structured (i.e., accountable in terms of certain 1inguistic properties of the verbs). In light of this, it seemed pertinent to me to undertake a more in-depth study of the acquisition of the reflexive pronoun with the verb by verb approach in mind. Such is the main purpose of the present study. In accordance with what was said at the end of the pre- ceding study, another purpose of the present study is to examine the acquisition of the reflexive pronoun as a function of the
! • ! 1 · i 37
age and language dominance of the speakers. Since only the
Franco-Ontarian students are variably dominant in one language or the other, it is their acquisition of the reflexive pronoun
that l will be mainly concerned with in the present study, as opposed to that of the Qu~b~cois or French immersion students.
3. '2 Verb by verb variation
The 108 grades 2 and 5 Franco-Ontarian students used 63 different p~onominal verbs with a cornbined total of 670 tokens.
Of these 670 tokens, 154 did not contain a reflexive pronoun.
The Franco-Ontarian students thus omitted the reflexive pro noun in 23% of aIl pronominal verb tokens. In order to deter mine whether there was verb by verb variation in the rate of omission of the reflexive pronoun, l calculated a percentage of omission of the reflexive pronoun for each pronominal verb with at least 10 tokens. The results of this calculation appear in the table on the next page.
Table 1 shows a very considerable amount of variation in the rate of omission of the reflexive pronoun depending on the pronominal verbe Three verbs were never or practically never used without the reflexive pronoun: s'appeler (0%), s'en venir
(0%) and s'en aller (1%). In stark contrast to these three verbs, se laver + D.O. (7,,3%) and se brosser + D.O. (75%) were much more often than not used without the reflexive pronoun.
The remaining pronominal verbs display intermediary percent ages of omission of the reflexive pronoun ranging from 14% for se souvenir and se rappeler to 41% for se cacher. Before \ 38
~ Table 1: Rate of omission of the ref1exive pronoun by verb ' \
1 -- V'erbs Omissions Verb tokens % of omission
s'appeler 0 24 0% 1 1 s'en venir 0 17 0% i
s'en aller l 103 1% .. ~ se souvenir 3 22 14%
se rappeler 8 57 14%
s 'habilJ.er 7 35 20%
se réveiller 5 22 23%
\ se baigner 16 66 24% ,
Îi s'asseoir 8 30 27% \ ,1' se laver - D .0 • 6 17 35%
se lever 14 37 38%
se coucher 26 69 38%
se cacher 7 17 41%
se laver t D .0 • Il 15 73%
se brosser + D.O. lB 24 75%
others 26 115 23%
Totals 154 670 23%
Nbte: The notations ~D.O. and -D~. respective1y indicate the
presence and absence of a direct object following the verb, the
direct object referring to a body part Ce.g., mains, dents, vi-
sage, etc.). (, 39
1 attempting to account for this tremendous variation in the
rate of omission of the reflexive pronoun, l would like to
point out that l also noticed a few instances where the Franco-
Ontarian students supplied the improper form of the reflexive
pronoun. In each case the improper reflexive pronoun was the
third person singular se or s' (e. g. l 'J'ai s'en allé à l'école;
Je se lève). In this connection, Grégoire (1968: 136) observed 0
s±milar uses of se or s'in the speech of his two young native
learners of French. The existence of such uses suggests that
there is a stage in the acquisition of French pronominal verbs
where the reflexive pronoun se or s' tends to be used as an in-
variable prefix. According to Yves-Charles Morin (personal
communication) 1 the generalization of se or s' to other persons
is a feature of popular French and of certain dialects in
France. In a somewhat different vein, to the extent that chil-
dren acquiring French as a first language tend to place opject
pronouns in postverbal instead of preverbal position (see Gré-
goire 1968:104-107) 1 one"~ight aiso have expected signs of the
) sarne tendencycJ"to show up in the speech of the Franco-Ontarian
students. However, l found no evidence of such misplacements
as Je réveille me/moi or Il lave se/lui in their speech. This may be an indication that the tendency to use object pronouns
in postverba1 position is overcorne early in the course of ac- quisi tion, at least as far as ref'lexive prono,uns are concerned.
3.3 Causes of the verb by verb variation
The morphology of French pronominal verbs is irregular
r 40
among other ways in that, with the exception of impersonal
verbs Ce.g., Il se peut que je vienne) and passive pronominal
verbs (e. g., Ce vin se boi t bien), no other verbs in French
require an object personal pronoun. The study of Grégoire
provides ample evidence that the acquisition of nonpronominal
verbs precedes that of pronominal verbs. Thus we can hypothe-
size that the tendency of Grégoire's subjects and of the
Franco-Ontarian students to omit the reflexive pronoun repre- \ sents an attempt to level the morphological distinction be-
tween pronominal verbs and simple active verbs. It is interest-
ing to note that the pronominal voice, formerly widespread in
Old French, has been considerably reduced in ~oâern French
(Brunot and Bruneau 1969:2J5). Thus it would seem that learn- . ers of French tend to operate the same morphological simplifi-
cation that has characterized the evolution of the French lan-' v- guage (Grégoire 1968:136).
However, the above account does not explain why the simpli-
fication process affects the pronominal verbs listed in Table 1
in varying proportions~ Below l would like to present and dis
cuss several linguistic factors which l think may be responsi-
• ble for a large part of the observed variation. These factors are tpe following:
(1) the existence of nonpronominal counterparts of the pronomi-
nal verbs i (2) whether these counterparts are semantically equivalent with Î their corresponding·pronominal forms
i !! 41
(-3) the frequency of the semantically equivalent nonpronominal ( counterparts
(4) the function of the reflexive pronoun
(5) the creation of formaI ambiguity
(6) the frequency of the pronominal verbs
3 .3. l 1bnpronomihal counterparts
It seems reasonable to assume that the existence of a non-
pronominal count~rpart of a given pronominal verb may reinforce
the Franco-Ontarian students' tendency to omit the reflexive
pr@noun. The reasoning is that they may be led to do so on the
" analogy of the reflexiveless morphology of the previously ac-
quired nonpronominal homophone. Returning to the pronominal
verbs lis"t;ed in Table l', se souvenir does not have a nonprono J]
minaI counterpart, i.e., souvehir is not a verb. While s'en
venir and s'en aller do have nonpronominal counterparts (e.g. l ,,, 11 en venir aux coups; en aller de même pour), these verbs are so, 1 rare that we can safely assume that they are-not part of the )
• ------..~-- .------'--"> -- linguistic competence of the Franco-Ontarian students. AlI of
the other pronominal verbs appearing in Table l have nonprono-
mi~l counterparts with which ~e can assume the students to
have sorne measure of familiarity, more or 1ess great depending
on the nonpronominal counterpart (S'ee factor C3) further). One
may thus make the claim that the tendency to omit the reflexive
pronoun should be weake~ with se souvenir, s'en venir and s'en
aller than with the other pronominal verbs. An examination of " Table 1 reveals nil or virtu~lly nil rates of omission of the ( 1 1
" l 42
reflexive pronoun for s'en venir and s'en aller but a rate of
omission of 14% for se souvenir. Henée one might wonder why
se souvenir, s'en venir and s'en aller do not display the sarne 1, ~ ratas of OIJlissj.QJ1~_I_ ~uggest that the higher than expected - ... - - -'; rate of omission of the reflexive pronoun with se souvenir may
~ 1 be due to the influence of the simplification process as it .;:;. applies to se rappeler. Indeed, se souvenir has the same mean-
ing as se rappeler and i t can be noticad furthermore that both
verbs have the same rate of omission of the reflexive pronoun.
This is perhaps n~t a coincidence.
On its own, however, factor (1) is not sufficient to ac-
1 count for the absence of reflexive pronoun omission with s'ap-
peler nor the variation in the rate of reflexive pronoun omis-
sion with the other verbs that have nonpronominal counterparts. \, 3.3.2 Seman tic equi valence '\ It seems logical to suppose that ~e analogical si~plifica-
tion of the mO\PhoI09Y of a pronominal verb hypothesi zed above
in 3-:3.1 will.bè~~eater if the nonpronominal counterpart has
the same meaning. Se rappeler is the only pronominal verb in
Table l which does not possess a semantically equivalent non-
pronominal counterpart (exéluding, of course, the 'true' prono-
minaIs s'en venir, s'en aller and se souvenir), i.e., se rap-,
peler 'remember' but rappeler 'remind, calI again'. Assuming'
the above supposition correct, the reflexi ve pronoun should be
omi tted less often wi th se rappeler than wi th those verbs in J~ Table l that have a semantically equivalent nonpronominal coun- '. J ( ~ l { !
/' 43
terpart. Table l shows that this is the case, wi th the excep- tion once again of s'appeler. In addition to failing to ac count for the lower rate of omission of the reflexive'pronoun wi th Si appeler than wi th se rappeler, factor (2) does not allow us to explain the variation in the rate of omission of the re- flexive pronoun displayed by the other verbs in Table 1 that possess a semantically equivalent nonpronominal counterpart, i.e., s'habiller (20%) to se brosser + D.O. (75%).
3.3.3 Freguency of the semantically equi valent nonpronominal
counterparts ,.~v It seems reasonable ta argue that th,E! more familiar the
Franco-Ontarian studeI'\.ts are wi th a gi ven semantically equiva lent nonpronorninal counterpart, the more likely the latter is to act as a reinforcing agent in the simplification of the mor- phology of the pronominal verb. In order to get sorne objective idea of the students' degree of familiarity with the different semantically equivalent nonpronominal counterparts, l examined their frequency of occurrence in the speech of a subsample of the students for which the Franco-Ontarian Centre has a cornpu- ter concordance (i. e., the grades 2 and 5 Sudbury and Welland students). This examination yielded the following frequencies: appeler (0), habiller (0), baigner (0), asseoir (0), laver - o .0. CO), réveiller (2), lever (2), brosser + D.O. (2), cacher
(3), laver + D.O. (9) and coucher (12). If we resort to a simple dichotomous classification, opposing those semantically equivalent nonpronomin~ counterparts which did not appear in / 44
the concordance to those that did, the pronominal verbs\ th,at correspond to the first five verbs in the frequency lis~, should
have lower rates of omission of the reflexive pronoun than the
pronominal verbs that correspond to the remaining six verbs in
the frequency Iist. Table l reveals that two pronomina:t. verbs
do noL,conform to this prediction, namely se rtiveille and se
laver - D .0.. The rate of omission of the reflexive
with se réveiller, 23%, is significantly lower than
of omission of the reflexive pronoun with the other pronominal
verbs whose semantically equivalent nonpronorninal ounterparts
are attested in the concordance. As to se laver - .6., i ts
higher rate of omission of the reflexive pronoun in comparison
to the other pronominal verbs which have nonoccurring sernanti- , cally equivalent nonpronominal counterparts could be due to the
analogical effect of the rather frequent laver + D.O. construc-
tion. In any case, we have yet to explain why s'appeler has a
nil rate of omission of the reflexive l"ronoup, and' why se laver
+ D.O. and se brosser + D.O. have very high ra tes.
3.3.4 Function of the reflexive pronoun J , The pronominal verbs listed in Table l fall into one of
three categories. On the one hand there are Ythe 'subjective'
pronominals s'en venir, s'en alle[ and se souvenir, whose re- l fle.xive pronoun has no syntactic function. It is as if i t were \ an agglutinated part of the verb (see Grevisse 1975: 597) . In
fact this may be another reasori why the Franco-Ontarian stu-
\ dents do not have much difficulty using the reflexive pronoun (
"', ~\ 1 ) , 45
wi th these verbs. On the other hand there are the 'reflexi ve'
pronominals. AlI of the other verbs in Table l except se laver
/ + D.O. and se brosser + D.O. belong to this category. The re-
flexive pronoun of such verbs functions as a direct object (or
as an indirect object in pronominal verbs like se ~uire for , , example). Finally th~re are what l have chosen to calI the
1. 'possessive' pronominal verbs, of which se laver + D.O. and se
brosser + D.O. are two representatives. The reflexive pronoun
of the latter type of pronominal verbs does not function as a
direct or indir}ct object but rather, as Spilka (1976) has ob-
served, as a possessive marker. In other words, pronominal
verbs which can take a direct objeat. refe~ring to a part of the
subject'~ body would seem to be peculiar transforms of the re-
gular possessive construction verb + possessive adjective +
noun. Thus, for example, je ml brosse les dents or il se lave les mains are transforms of je brosse mes dents and il lave ses
mains. It so happens, however, that the regular possessive
constructions je brosse mes dents and il lave ses mains are
nonstandard. In sum, learners of French also have to contend
with the analogical influence of the regular ppssessive con
J struction verb + possessive ~adjective + noun in the course of 1 acquisition of pronominal verbs such as se laver + D.O. and se
brosser r 0.0 .. l submit that this is the reason why, the
Franco-Ontarian students are less advanced in their acquisition
of these two pronominal verbs. NOte that speakeJs could pb
viate the 10S5 of reflexiveness resulting from the omission of
1 (t
46
the reflexive pronoun with the reflexive pronominal verbs by
using the toniq forro of the reflexive pronoun in postverbal
position (e.g." je lave moi). However, we had occasion ,to see
earlier that while such postposing of objeet pronouns is a fea-
ture of child language acquisition, it is overcome early and
th us does not constitute a serious retarding influence in the
acquisition of the reflexive pronominal verbs.
3.3.5 Creation of formaI arnbiguity
In the specifie cases of s'appeler an~ se laver - 0.0., the omission of the reflexive prono~Ult~On1Y in the 1055 of reflexiveness but in polysemous verb forms. For example, if
the reflexive pronoun is om!tted from ~ m'a elle Marie, the
resultant sentence, j'appelle Marie, is ambigu us. It could
ei ther mean '1 am calling .Hary' or 'my name i8 Similar-
ly, if the reflexive pronoun is omitted in!J~ me lave, the re-
suIt, je lave, is ambiguous, meaning either '1 am washing my-
self' or 1 l am washing (something) '. Concerning such arnbiguity,
i t has been dlaimed by historieal linguists (e ;:q., Anttila 1972)
that one of the major principles of language change is that of
'one meaning, one form', i.e., language~ (or language learners)
strive to avoid the creation of polysemous linguistic forms.
According ta this principle, then, s'appeler and se laver - 0.0.
should perhaps always be used yith the reflexive pronoun. Ta
ble 1 shows that thisi is in fact the ~ase for s'appeler (O%) but not for s,e laver L D.O. (38%). One possible explanation of this discrepancy arises if onJ considers the respective fre- 47
quencies of the conf licting nonpronominal counterparts of s' ap-
peler and se laver - D.O.. The u,e of appeler in the sense of
'caU someone' is very frequent in 'French. l counted 16 cases
of this use of appeler in the computer concordance described ear lier. In contras t, the use of laver - D.O. is not and, not surprisi.11g1y, no occurrences of laver - D.O. were found in the
concordance as reported previous ly in section 3.3.3. In view of this, it would seem reasonable to hypothesize that the
Franco-Ontarian students do not percei ve any ambigui ty in the expression (e.g., je lave) which results from the omission of the reflexive pronoun wi th se laver - D.O. but that they per- ceive the ambiguity of the expression (e.g., j'appelle Marie) which ensues from the omissioh of the reflexive pronoun with slappeler. If Anttila's' printiple is really at work here, it would certainly seem to act as a strong deterrent of reflexive' pronoun omission.
3.3.6 Frequency of the pronominal verbs
It has often been observed that analogical leveling tends to affect infrequent items before frequent ones, other things
q being equal (see, among others, Hooper 1976 and Martinet 1969:
115ff). Thus one may hypothezise that the reflexive pronoun will tend to he omi tted more often wi th infrequent pronominal verbs. If we take the frequencies of the pronominal verbs that a~pear in Table 1 as a reflection of these verbs' frequencies in the language, one would predict s'en aller should have the lowest rate .of omission of the reflexive pronoun given that it 48
is far and away the most frequent pronominal verb in Table 1.
Whi1e its 1% rate of omission is certai,nly consonant with i ts
high frequency, the fact that s'appeler and s'en venir disp1ay
a ni1 rate of omission of the ref1exive pronoun despi te theiJ
rnuch lower frequencies shows that the frequency hypothesis, like
~ . . each one of the hypotheses or factors previous 1y examined, is
not, on its own, enough to expl,fin the verb by verb variation
in the rate of omission of the ref1exive pronoun. Only when taken together 't:Ab the six causal factors reviewed above a110w us to 'capture most of the variation. This is the point that l
wou1d like to stress in the sununary discussion irnmediately be-
low.
3. 3. 7 Sununary / The tabl~ 'on the following page summarizes the six factors
which have been hypothesized to lie at the root of the verb by
verb variation iI1;" the rate of orniss ion 0 f the reflexi ve pronoun.
The plus sign (+) indicates that a given pronominal verb is af-
1 fected by the causal factor in question, a minus sign (-) that
it is not and NA that the causal factor in question does not ap-
ply. The causal factors numbered across the top of the table
are explained in the legend below:
'( 1) the pronominal verb has a nonpronorninal counterpart
(2) the nonpronominal counterpart is semantica1ly equivalent
(3) the sema'ntically equivalent !l0npronominal counterpart is frequent
(4) the reflexive pronoun functions as a possessive marker ~
, 1
J ----.. -
~ ~ v; , ~- . Table 2: Summary of the causal factors responsible for the verb by verb variation in the raté of omission of the reflexive pronoun
Verbs Omission Causal factors
rate {l} L2) ( 3) ( 4) (5) tG)
s'appeler 0% t t- + s'en venir Q% N\ N\ m + + s'en aller 1% m m N\ + se souvenir 14%' N\ N\ m + + se rappeler 14% , ~ N\ + + , s t'habiller. 20% ot- + + + se réveiller 23% + +- T + +
~ se baigner 24% 0t- t- + + s'asseoir 27% T~ + + + --se lever 37% r - + + + + +" se coucher 38% + + + + + se laver - D.O. 38% + + + + Q se cacher 41% + t- + + + se laver + D .0'. 73% + + + + + + se brosser -;0 75% T + + + + + 1 1 + D.o. .e.. ID """"
.., ~~~, -~ ...... _----.. ~_ ...... - ...... '~ .. 1,"-*'~~~.1" ------50
(5) reflexi ve pronoun omission does not create formaI ambigu- 1 • ity
(6) the pronominal verb is not of high frequency
NJte that l have worded the causal factors in such a way that a plus sign favors the omission of the reflexive pronoun and a minus sign doesn 1 t. Thus the more plus signs a verb has, the more often its reflexive pronoun should be omitted. AIso, verbs wi th the sarne plus and minus entries should display ap- l '1 proximately the same rates of omission of the reflexive pronoun. i Table 2 shows that such is the case, with the exception of the j three discrepant verbs pointed out e arlier: se souvenir, se, ré- veiller 1 se laver -D.O.. These are relati vely minor exceptions as the rates of omission of the reflexive pronoun wi th these three verbs don't differ markedly from the rates of omission of the reflexi ve pronoun wi th the ather verbs that share the sarne plus and minus con figura tions .
3.4 The affect of language dominance
On the basis of the language use questions asked the Franco
Ontarian students during th~ interviews (see section 1. 2), the
Franco-Ontarian Centre was able to establish each student 1 S do- minant language of communication, i. e. 0' French, English or roughly egual u~,e of French and English. It has been shown in a nurnber of stùdies that in a si tuatian of language contact, bilingual learners who are dominant in the majori ty language have a greater. procli vi ty to eliminate morphological irregula- ri ties characteristic of the minori ty language than those , 51
1earners who are dominant in the minority language (among
others, see Dorian 1978, Harley 1979 and Canale, Mougeon and
1 Beniak 1978). Since the reflexive pronoun is an irre'gular fea-
ture of the morphology of the French verb system, i t is to be
expected that the rate of omission of the reflexive pronoun is
. correlated wi th the students' language dominance. As a first
attempt to test this prediction, l calculated a general rate of
L omission of the reflexi vé pronoun by each one of the three lan-
guage dominance groups.
. Table 3: Reflexive pronoun omission as a function of language
dominance
Dominance Omissions Verb tokens % of omission
French 54 427 13%
French = English 33 95 35% English 67 148 45%
Totals 154 670 23%o
i'"
Table 3 indeed reveals that the more the students use En-
glish, the more they omit the reflexive pronoun. l then broke dOS:: the gener~l rates of onussion of the reflexi ve pronoun on a verb by verb basis. For this purpose, I,grouped together the English-dominant students and the students wi th roughly equal 1 use or French and Eng1ish. This was done because of the pauci ty r J, 1 \ l i 52
of data for the latter group. This regrouping is furthermore justified on the grounds that the two groups of students show sirni1ar rates of omission of the reflexive pronoun. For the sake of simplici ty of exposition, l shall refer to the students in the two confl~d groups as English-dominant.
Table 4: Rates of omission of the reflexive pronoun by verb and . 14 l anguage donunance
.l ~ Ve,rbs French-dominant English-dorninant. ~ i ;;0 - 1 s'appeler 0% 0% " s'en veni.r 0% 0% ;, ,1 s'en aller 0% 2% s.e souvenir 0% 43% se rappeler 10% 19% s' habiller 14% 31% se r~veiller 0% 38% se baigner 7% 54% s'asseoir 7% 44% se lever 13% 79% se coucher 32% 43% se cacher 33% 50% se laver - D.o • 22% 50% se laver t D.o • 67% 7-5% se brosser + D'.O : 64% 83% \ Jo
Fo11owing the example of Brown (1973), if we arbi trarily consider omission percentages less than or equal to 10% to be i indicative of mastery of the reflexive prono~ Table 4 revea1s 1 ,t that while the French-dominant students have ma~ered the use 1
, .
..-- 53
of the reflexi ve pronoun wi th eight of the 15 pronominal verbs,
the English-dominant students have mastered the use of the re-
flexive pronoun with only three of the 15 pronolIlinal verbs.
Like Table l, Table 4 shows that it is with se laver + D.p. and
se brosser + D .0 • that use of the reflexive pronoun is the hard-
est to master, and withJs'appeler, s'en venir and s'en aller
that it is the easiest.
Let US now compare the Franco-Ontarian students wi th the
grades 2 and 5 Québécois and French immersion students. The rates of omission of the reflexive pronoun by these two groups of stu-
dents appea~ in Table 5. T he rates for the Québécois students
represent the grouped rates of the Quebec City and Montreal 1 Francophones. Because, as pointed out in secti~n 0.4, use of and
exposure to French is 'I.. leakest for the French immersion students,
intermediary for the Franco-Ontarian students and maximum for
the Québécois students, i t is expected that the rate of omission
'of the reflexive pronoun should be highest for the French immer
\ sion students 1 intermediary for the Franco-Ontarian students and
lowest for the Québécois students. It can be seen by checking
Table 5 against Table 4 that this expectation is confirmed. In
particular, it can be seep that the Québécois students have nil
rates of omission of the reflexive pronoun with aIl of the pro-
1 ~ nominal verbs under investigation. Thus, the Québécois students
have lower rates of omission of the reflexive pronoun than the
French-dominant Franco-ontarians. In contrast f the immersion
rates are consistently higher than those of the English-dominant ( 54
Table 5: Rates' of omission ot the reflexi ve pronoun by yerb by the Qu€bécois and French immersion students
Verbs Qu~bêêois French immersion
Si appeler 0% 0% 1 s'en venir 0% s'en aller 0% se souvenir 0% se rappeler 0% s'habiller 0% 45% se réveiller 0% 61% se baigner 0% 50% Si asseoir Q% 100% se lever 0% 90% se coucher 0% 55% se cacher 0% se laver - D .0 • 0% 70% se laver + D .0. 0% "92%
se brosser + D.O • 0% J '96%
Franco-Ontarian students (se baigner excepted) ., •It can also be seen from Table 5 that the immersion students did not -use cer-
tain pronominal verbs. Concerning th~s, Harley and Swain (1978) have argued that the inunersion students may be avoiding the use of certain pronominal verbs that have 'morphologically simplex
equi valents. For instance, the immersion students can resort
to partir instead of s' en aller or te venir or arriver ihstead
of s' en venir.
Since the ratio of French- 'Vs. English-dominant bilingual ( / --
1!
55
Franco-Ontarians varies from one· locality ~another according ( /// ta the dernographic strength of the fta ~phone population in comparison to the anglophone-populat' n (see section 0.2), one 1 can expect to find interlocality differences in the rate of omission of the reflexive pronoun given that the Franco-Ontarian sample was not weighted in terms of language dominance. In this connection, l calculated a general percentage of omission of the reflexi ve prÇlnoun as a function of the locali ty of residence of
the studen~s'l The percentages were: Cornwall (5%), Sudbury \ 1 (16%) ,Well~R (24%), Windsor (29%), Pembroke (41%) and NOrth
1 Bay (42%). It can be seen that the strong minority localities, \, Cornwall (39% Francophones) and Sudbury (29% Francophones) , have the lowest omission percentages, while the rernaining localities
(weak minorities with a francophone population of less than 20%) have the highest percentages of omission. Finally, i t is interesting to note that none of the English translation equivalents of the 15 pronominal verbs that we have
been examining is pronominal, although the equivalent of ~ laver - D .0. may optionally be used wi th a reflexive pronoun
(e. g., l am washing (myself». Since a~l of the Franco-Ontarian students are active users of English, it seems rJasonable to
hypothesize that their higher rates of ~mission of the reflexive - pronoun relative to the Qu~b~cois students is also in part due to English interference. One mi9ht also hypothesize toat inter ferenc~ from English ii likely ta be more of a factor in the 1 1 case of the English-dorninant Franco-Ontarian students than in ~ ( 1 1 f 1 56
the case of the ~rench-dominant ones. Along the sarne lines,
English interference should be even/more pronounced in the case ! 1 of the French immersion students. I~he reason that l did not ", invoke English interference earlier (i.e., during my discussion
of the factors responsible for the verb by verb variation in
the rate of omission of the reflexive pronoun) is that, as just
mentioned, none of the English equivalents of the .French prono .~ 1 minal verns under investigation is pronominal. Consequently,
1 whil~ one may wish to attribute aSfausal r~le t~ English inter- , ( ference, English interferenoe must then be hypothesized to af-
fect each French pronominal verb to the same degree. In other
words, English interference rnay indeed be one of the reasons ,
why the Franco-Ontarian and French immersion students omit the
reflexi ve pronoun wi th French pronominal verbs, but i t cannot
he~p to explain why there is verb by verb variation in the rate
of omission of the reflexive pronoun. Still in eonnection with
English interferenee, one must not lose sight o~ the fact that
~it is not a necessary condition for reflexive pronoun omission
to take place sinee, as reported earlier, Grégoire (19G8) ob-/
served reflexive pronoun omission in the speech of his two very
young mono lingual learners of French, and since, as l·have not
yet had occasion to me~tion, there were a few omissions of the
reflexive pronoun in the speech of the monolingual Québécois
students. These omissions occurred with verbs other than the
ones that have been the foc~ of attention here (e.g., Sa bouche
(se) ferme et Cs') ouvre}" In short, English interference, if .1
... 57
any, is at best a secondary cause of ref1exive pronoun omission ( as concerns bi1ingua1 1earners of French. 3.5 The effect of age Rather than examine the effect of age on its own, it is more revea1ing to look at how age interacts with language dominance.' Table 6: Rate of omission of the reflexive pronoun as a function of age and language dominance
Verbs French-dominance English-dominance
Grade 2 Grade 5 Grade 2 Grade 5
s'appeler ? 0% 0% 0%
,~ s'en venir "0% 0% 0% s'en aller 0% 0% 0% 11%
se souvenir 0% 0% ? 33% se rappeler 18% 5% 25% 15% s'habiller 19% 0% 57% 0%_ .
se réveiller ? 0% 67% (".JA.% se baigner 13% 4% 64% 36% s'asseoir 0 14% 0%4 42% 50% se lever 36% 0% 100% 63% / se coucher 58% 0% 60% 30% se cacher 25% 40% 100% 20% ~
/ se laver - D.O. 50% 0% 33% 60%
se laver + D.O. ? ? 75% 75% r.. se brosser + D.O. 86% 25% 100% 80%
(
1 '\ 1 / i
- ~~"----~-'"'-'---- ( 58 1 Table 6 sho~ that the rrench-dominant rranco~Ontarian stu
dents make significant progress in acquiring the use of ~y re
flexive pronoun between grades 2 and S, se cacher, se brosser + ~ .0. and~ost probably also se laver +' D .0 . inl~ the on1y pro- ---- ,/ Il ',>- nominal verbs in the sample with which they ha e'y~t to master ," , fIP'" Il the use of the reflexive pronoun (our acquisitjion threshold be-
ing once again a rytte, of omission of the ref1exive pronoun equal
to or 1ess than 10%). 15, In contrast, one cari see that the English-
dominant Franco-Ontarian students show an overall ,rlow level of
progress in masterin~ the use of e reflexi ve pronoun between
grades 2 and 5. Inâeed, the grad" 5 students/'have mastered only (7 - one more pronominal verb than the rade 2.~ents. Of course,
this difference in mastery over e is to a large extent the 1'- result of the fact that the the Frencp/dominant students entered
·r~ school with lower rates of omissi0;t0f the ref1exive pronoun to
begin with. Thus if we measure th~ents 1 progress not in
terrns of the nurnber of prono~inal verbs mastered but in terms of
the difference in the ratesèof omission o~ the reflexive pronoun between grades 2 and 5, Table e makes i t possible to see that
by a wider rnargin than have the French-dominant students. In any case, the persistence of rather substantial rates of 6mis- sion of the reflexive pronoun for the majority of the verbs in the sample in the spoken French of the Englis~-dominant students , j makes one wonder what the chances are that these students, as
l , JI1 -t
ç - 59
they pursue their schooling in :French, will be able to reach
the stage of complete rnastery ot the reflexive pronoun. The
study of Mougeon et al. (19 SO} provides preliminary, evidence
that this stage may not be reached. They found that English-
dominant students at the high school level continued to omit
the reflexive pronoun in more than 10% of aIl obligatory con-
texts in Pernbroke, a weak minority locality (10% Fra~cophones). , , This in turn i5 evidence that the French ianguage school, the
chief source of exposure ta' and opportunity to use French for
English-dominant Franco-Ontarian students residing in minority
localities (see sect~on 0.2), isn't able to ensure that the lat
ter will eventually come ta rnaster the ~se of the reflexive
prohoun. It is possible ta conjecture therefore that sorne En-
glish-daminant students will carry the tendency ta omit the re
flexive pronoun with them into adulthood. In this respect,
Conwe11 and Juilland (1963) observed adult speakers of Louisiana
French (like Ontarian French, a variety of :French spoken in a minarity setting) to omit the reflexive pronoun with sorne of the verbs that have been examined in the present study.
Let rqe now turn to tl:le evalution of the acquisition of the reflexive pronoun over time as concerns the Qu~b~cois and im- mersian students. If we compare the results in the table on the next page wi th those already presenteg in Table 6, one can see that the French-dominant Franco-Ontarian students lag be- hind the Qu@b~cois students (Quebec City and Montreal students " having bee1n grouped together "once again) in speed a f acquisi tian ~'" ......
60
Table 7: Rate of omtssion of the reflexive pronoun as a function
of the age of the Qu€h~cois and immersion students .. . ( Verbs Qu€b€cois Immersion 1 Grade 2 Grade 5 Grade 2 Grade SU
s'appeler
, c of the reflexive pronoun. The immersion students, on the other , hand, have consistently higher rates of omission of the reflex- ive pronoun than the English-dominant Franco-Ontarian students in grade 2 and in grade 5. Again, these differences in speed of acquisition of the ref1exive pronoun are exactly those that one'expects on the hasis of the differences in degree of expo-
, sure to and occasion to use French that exist between the Qu€-
b~cois students, the French- and English-dominant franco-Ontari- ( 61
( an students and the French immersion students. 3.6 Conclusion
The main intent of this study has been to play up and , attempt to provide explanations for the fact that the reflexive , , 1, pronoun is not acquired with equal ease or difficulty depending ! On the pronominal verb)with W~iCh it is used. As mentioned in i i the introduction to th~~~udY, it was the findings of Canale,
Mougeon and)élanger (1978) concerning the leveling of the aux iliary être n Ontarian French which incited me to apply their
verb by ver_~approach to the investigation of the acquisition
of the reflexive pronoun. Those familiar with sociolinguistics
will have noticed the similarity between the methodology that
Canale, Mougeon and Bélanger (1978) have followed and that l
have adopted, and the variationist approach to language use that
has been developed by Labov and others and which seems to be
gaining wider application in the field of language learning re
search. In fact contemporary sociolinguistic methodolOgy is not
only equipped to tackla the problem of linguistic variability
but that of interindividual variability as weIl (via the use of
implicational scales for instance). Two recent studies in the
language learning literature go, a long way toward extending 50-
ciolinguistic rnethodology to the solution of the latter type of J
variability (Hyltenstarn 1977 and Andersen 1978). The fOllowing
study of the acquisition of French past participles represents,
among other things, another atternpt on rny part to illustrate the
relevance of the adoption of the variationist approach. 1 (
1 1 62
4. Acquisition of French past Earticiples
4.1 Introduction ,
Harley and,Swain (1978) were able to analyze an impressively broad spectrum of verb :(unctions in their study of the verlr- sys- tem of early French immersion students in Toronto. The reason they were able to consider such a wide range of verb functions was due to the srnall size of their subject sample, i.e., five fifth-graders. By the sarne token, however, they were not in a position to perforrn a detailed analysis of the verb forros which the students used ta realize the many different verb functions under investigation. One such aspect of the early immersion students' verb systefu which was not dealt with in depth by Har- ley and Swain are the verb forms which the students used as past participles. What Harley and Swain did, essentiaH1S' was to identify several different types of erroneous past)participles cl and briefly consider their possible pnderlying causes. The pur-, pose of the present study is to further the investigation of the v early French immersion students' acquisition of French past par- ticiples. l propose to do so by focussing on just this aspect of the speedh produc-trion of a larger sample of similar early
French immeJsion students, namely the 75 grades 2 to 6 students that make up my immersion sampie. The 15 grades 2 to 6 Montreal
Francophones will serve as a comparison group. The speech of the Franco-Ontarian students, which has been the major focus of 1 ,j the first t~o acquisition studies, will only be exarnined in cur- t ~ sory fashi09 in the present study. ,J f ,11 1
1 1 1 1
1 .\ \ 63
." 4.2 The morphology. of French past participles From the point of view of morphology, past participles in
French are of the form stem + inflection (Martinet 1969:91-120). Martinet distinguishes three reflexes of the past particip1e in-
f1ection: -~ le/, -~ (zero) and -u Iy/. These are illustrated in the table below.
Table 8: Reflexes of the past participle inflection in French -,1
-ê -~ -u
mang-é Imaz-el dit-~ Idi-~I ven-u !V'iim-y/ Î ,\ trouv-é Itruv-e/ fai t-~ Ife-Ç/! cour-u !kur-y(/
all-é laI-el pris-fi Ipri-~I v-u !v-yl
ét-é let-el eu-f) Iy-f)! l-u /l-yl ,
It should be noted that the past particip1e of sorne of the
-f) inflection verbs is subject t~ gender agreement with a pre- posed D.O. (e.g. , dit vs. dite /di-t/)., Like Martinet, how- ever, l decided to disregard the problem of gender agreement on the grounds that such agreement i5 only }.rariab1y/ observed in na- ti ve speech. T hus l shall adopt the simple trichotomous class-i- fication presented in Table 8. As is weIl known, the vast majority of French verbs (more than 90% according to Guiraud 1973:107] belong to the so-called \ -er group. Their infinitiva1 and past participle forma are ho- 64
oophonous and end in the inflection -€. This makes -€ by far the most generalized reflex of the past participle inflection.
The remaining 10% or 50 of ~ench verbs form their past partici- pIe wi th -J1 or - u. Another distinguishing feature o;f the verbs . 1 belonging to the -er 9 that they have only one stern, the stem being homophonous ~i lst, 2nd, 3rd sg. and 3rd pl. forms of the present (e.g., je parle jparlj vs. j,lai parlé jparl-ej) . 'In contrast, most of the non -er verbs have multiple , stems (e. g., il meurt lm oerl vs. nous mourons Imur-oj vs. mourir jmuri-rj vs. elle est morte jmor-t/) . In summary, from a morphological point of view, past parti ciple' acquisi tion invo :bYes three steps: (1) the learning of the reflexes of the past participle inflection, (2) the learning of the stem(s) of the verb and (3) the suffixation of the correct inflectional reflex to the proper verb stem. As such, accurate p~st participle formation would seem to constitute a problem of sorne intricacy and on this basis one can expect learners to corn- mit errors in past participle formation. It is possible to pre- dict, however, that learners should have less· difficulty acquir- ing the past participles of the -er verbs than those of the non -er verbs given what was said above about the great numerical superiority of the -er verbs, their single stem and the fact that their past participles aIl end in -é. ;
o the immersion and !rancophone students are up a~ainst, l do not
want to leave the impressi~n that l take it for granted that
they analyze the French past participles in the same fashion as
the linguist. It is a matter of ernpirical investigation whether
~ they do so or not and to what extent~ l will take this point up
again in the final section of this study.
4.3 previous research
In his longitudinal study of the acquisition of French by
two native children between the ages of Q and 4, Grégoire (1968:
l~O, 356) found a tendency on their part ta assimilate the rnor-
phology or non -er verbs ta that of the -er verbs. As concerns
the past participle, Grégoire reported his subjects using forms
such as metté and répondé instead of the appropriate forrns mis,
and répondu. He attributed these erroneous past participles to
the powerful analogical influence of the morph?logy of the pre
viously acquired past participles of the dominant -er verbs. In
their ~nalysis of the verb system of their five Toronto French
immersion students, Harley and 5wain (1978:56, 57) reported si
milar analogical past participles (e.g., vené instead of venu).
However, they also reported three other types of past participle
errors that were not attested by Grégoire in the speech of has
i two subjects. Examples of these other error types were /pra/ 4 j for pris, courir/mettre instead of couru/mis and ouvri for ou- i,. 16 1. vert. That such errors were not attested by Grégoire does not , 1 1 . ' ~ necessarily mean that they are peculiar to the French immersion j 1 students. Indeed, their absence could be due to the very limi ( l 66
\ ted size of Gr~goire's subject sample. ~A larger sample of ( l~arners rnight have revealed the existence of these other errors
given that learners have been found to resort to different per-
sonal strategies in their acquisition of a given target language
item (Hatch 1974). On the other hand, however, the immersion
students' acquisition of French at a 1ater age than native
speakers rnay resul t in unique errors due to heightened hypoth,e-
sis testing ability (Dulay and Burt 1974; Taylor 1975). A study
of the acquisi tion of past participles by a larger sampl'e of
young native speakers of French is needed to resoive the issue.
l would like to consider now the explanations proposed by
Gr~goire and by Har1ey and Swain concerning the past partiei-
pIe error types mentioned above.
Their common ascription of errors such as rnetté, vené and
répond~ to the ana10gical influence of the past participles of
the mueh more widespread -er verbs is probably the only possible
explanation. Indeed, it is very difficult to imagine on what
other oasis learners of French could corne to produce non -er
verb past participles ending in -~. Yet, as l hope to show in
the final section of this study, that the above errors are ob-
viously ahalogical does not mean that the actual analogical pro- g cess is obvious. l will show that there seern to be at least l two different ways in which analogy could be working to yield f ! the same res,ult, namely a non -er 'verb past pa'rticiple ending ,l i in -é.
Haxley and Swain's -interpretation of the J~~J for pris er- 1 ( i 1
1 67
( ror is not convincing. The errbr occurred in the third person singular (e.g., elle a /pra/ le poule). They suggest that it
may be the outcome of the influence of /aprâ/, the present tense
singular form of the verb apprendre. N:Jtice, however, that
/pra/ corresponds to the present and imperative singular forro
of the verb prendre. AS l report in a subsequent section of
this study, numerous similar past participle errors turned up
in the speech of my immersion subjects (e.g., tu as /rn~/i tu es
/vjt/i etc.). Since ~pe latter errors cannot be explained along
the lines of Harley and Swain's account of the )pra/ for iris
error, it would appear to be more appropriate to interpret aIl
of the above errors as cases ot overgeneralization 'ct the pre-
sent or imperative singular forms of the verbs in question.
It was mentioned earlier that the infinitive and past parti-
ciple of -er verbs are homophonous. According to Harley and Il Swain, it may be on the analogy of this homophony that the im-
mersion students in their study substituted the infinitives cou-
rir and mettre for the corresponding past participles couru and
mis. Al ternatively, however, i t is possible to interpret these
errors as the result not of analogy, but simply of the students 1
unfarniliarity with the appropriate past participles. Such un
familiarity would also be the factor lying at the root of the
other overgeneralization error exarnined in the preceding para-
graphe This is not to say, however, that the explanation that
Harley and Swain have proposed and the alternative one that l
ft" am advancing, are mutually exclusive. l don't see why it could 1 68 l 1
not be the case that learners can resort to one or the other or
even both types of strategies during their acquisition of French
past participles. As will be seen later, it rnay be precisely \ because it seéms to be the result of two plausible underlying
causes that the overgeneralization, of the infinitive was more
prevalent in the speech of rny immersion subjects than the over
~ generalization of the present or irnperative singular, this lat-
ter overgeneralization error having a single origin.
Finally, as mentioned in a footnote, Harley and Swain did
not in actual fa ct report the error type ouvri for ouvert in
their article and consequently there is no discussion in their
~ pape~ of the possible cause(s) of this sort of past participle
error. This type of error, as wil~ be seen, also occurred in
my immersion corpus. l will take up the problem of its under-
lying source(s) in a further section.
4.4 Results
Before beginning the presentation of the results, l would,
like to mention and discuss several findings which are indirect- ~
ly related to the problem of past participle acquisition.
4.4.1 Preliminary findings
Practically aIl of the contexts in which the immersion and francophone students were called up~n~o use compound verb forms \ V (i.e., forms requiring the past participle) were passé composé contexts. There were only three exceptions in the speech of the
( immersion students and seven in the speech of the francophone students. While the passé composé is the compound tense with \ ',--
69
( ,~/ which the immersion students are best acguainted, they were ,...nevertheless unable to supply it systematically in the obliga-
tory contexts, in contra,st. to the native speakers, who always
provided it where required. The immersion students sornet.imes • , supplied verb, forms without an auxiliary and at other times
they supplied what at first sight would seem to be plus-que l-1 parfait forms, the latter result being rather su~~izing in l view of their unfamiliari ty wi th this compound tense. l will / consider each of these two findings in more detai~ One of Harley and Swain' s five inunersion scuQent:s also used
the plus-qu'e-parfai t as a substi tute for the passé composé. -- ~rObablY due to their small sarnple size once again, the authors
~ ~ere l~d to\be~iftve that this use of the plus-gue-parfait was idiosyncratic. On the basis of my larger sarnple, however, l can
show that it is net idiesyncratic. The table below plays uP, the
amplitude of the phenomenon in my immersion corpus. / Table 9: Distribution of the plus-gue-parfait for passé composé
substi tutions l' .. ) . • G~ides Substi tutions l':umber of students
" 2 l , l 3 64 1'2 1
4 15 .... --~ 6 L1 5 9 4 6 10 3
. Totals 99 26
.' l' 70 ~:: •
The fact that there was anly one plus-que-parfait substi tu-
tion at the grade 2 level could be an indication that the irnrner-
• sion students had ~o be introduced,to or at least had yet to ~. : (~- y:~, acquire the imparfa' t tha t stag~ in their schooling in French . , This.. would in effect make i,t impossible for them to produce the , t plus-que-parfai t since the a uxiliary takes the forrn 0 f the im-
parfait (e. g. 1 j'avais mangé). But given knowledge of the im
parfait (which the students obviously seem to have by the' grade
3 level) 1 what could lead them to want ta çubstitute the plus
que-parfai t f'?,r the~assé composé? The only plausib le explana
tian that l have been able ta pdduce is that of interference ,.. from English tense us age. The English equi valent of the passé
composé is in most cases the simple past te.g., j'ai mangé une li tarte '1 ate a pie '). The pastness of the verb in English may
be a source of i'nterference which leads the immersion students
to also overt'ly mark pastness in French by using the imparfait
as opposed to the present farrn of the auxiliary. The plau'sibi- " lit y of this interference-based explanatian is perhaps enhançed
by the fact that neither Grégoire' s nor rny native speakers were
observed to substi tute the plus-gue-parfai t for the passé compo-
sé, an indication that natives just don't make this sort of sub-
stitution. That it is still ~eing made by the grade 6 immersion
students underscores the lingering effects that interference can
have, assurning that such is indeed the error source at work here.
In the final analysis, then, the osubsti tuting verb forms should
probably not be' regarded as plus-que-parfait forrns bût rather as 71
) ( hybrid compound forms representing a cross between the passê , composé and the Engli~h simple pasto What is interesting is
that the immersion students have otherwise preserved the com
pot$dness of the passé composé. There are sorne whom this point
might 1ead to obj ect tha t if English interference were really \ at work here, a simple v~rb farro should have been substi-tuted
for the passé composé. As already mentioned (see page 69), the
immelsion students did use auxiliaryless verb forms instead of J the passé composé, which we will examine shortly. But l fai1 ,.--~ to see' why interference from English Shoul~ have to be syntactic (Le., substitution of a simple verb forrn À>r a compound one)
rather than morph0J-0gical (i. e. J substitution of the imparfai t D 1 1 j • form of the auxîliary for. the present one). 1
The simple or auxiliaryless verb forms used in lieu of passé
composé forms by the immersion students occurred in two types of \ syntactic constructions, i. e. , . in lone verb phrases and in con-
joined or juxt~posed.verb phrases.
Table 10: of simple verb forms by grade and syntac- Dis~ribution \ tic cons truct'ian . .-1 l Grades .ln lone VPs In conjoined VPs Totais 1 • 1 2 27 25 52 c 1 3 27 14 41 l 4 14 10 24 f 5 6 8 14 6 1 5. 6
1
Totals 75 ~. 62 137 1 ! The simple verb forros in lone verb pt1fases were very much di versified in nature as were the simple verb forms used in' con joined or juxtaposed verb phrases. Sorne were clearly infini tives (e.g., on avoir une dictée; on a mangé et revenir à la bateau). Sorne were clearly present tenses (e. g., ça nous prend trois jours; j'ai brossé mes dents, met mon chandail). Sorne were clearly imparfai t 1 S (e. g., on avai t beaucoup de pr~sents .! l\oël) . Sorne had' the appearance of bare past participles (e. g. , \ je revenu à la maison; on a allé en haut et mis les vêtements).
Sorne could be interpreted as ei ther imparfait' s or bare past participles (e,. g., j' ~tê à Floride). Final1y, sorne .cou1d be in terpreted as ei ther imparfait 1 s, bare past particip1es or infi- ni tives (e. g. 1 le bateau tombé dans 11 eau; j 1 ai lavé mon figure et brossé mes dents). One can view the substitutions of simple verb forms for the passé compos€ as cases of syntactic interfe rence from th~~"fngiish simple past, hs argued above. This seems especially likely in the examples where the simple verb form was in the imparfait or resemb led a bare past participle and?1is _, used in a Ione verb phrase. T he latter, al ternati vely, {can be explained as overgeneralizations of simple verb forms due to the l complexi ty of the compound structure of the passé compos€. Har- J -j Iey and Swain propose this e.)(:planation for a case of substitu- <, 1 tion of the present for the pas9~ composé which occurred in the J 4" spok~n ;French of one of their ilIUTl€rsion students. Harley and ,~, ~ Swain also ob,perved suhsti tutions of simple verb forms fOl the passé compos€ in conjoined or j uxtaposed verb phrases. I~\ their 1 ,1 :; j t!I', 73
( opinion such examples roost probably represent cases o~ bare past participles resulting from the deletion of the auxiliary. l am in agreement with their interpretation because, in roy im- mersion corpus at least, there were no conj0ined or juxtaposed verb phrases in which a simple verb form was substituted for the passé composé in the first verb phrase (i.e., the left-most one) but not in the following one(s). Such sequencE}fi would be ex- , 1 '~~ 1 1 :p~~ under the assurnption that the substitution of a simple verb forro for the passé composé in the second (and third, etc.)
verb phrase in a conjoined or jux~aposed series is not the re
suIt of auxiliary deletion but rather of the overgeneralization~ of a genuine simple verb forme However, since auxiliary êÎele- tion is possible in French (e.g., il a débarrassé la table et fait la vaisselle; on a mangé et bu autant qu'on voulait), l find myself in disagreement with Harley and Swain who claim that i t ois due to English interference. Another and perhaps equally important reason for disagreeing wi th Harley and Swain is that, as mentioned previously, the English equivalent of the passé composé is in most cases the simple past, an auxiliaryless tense. In my view auxiliary deletion should perhaps be better seen as
h the reflection of a natural tendency to .....eliminate surface struc-
. , 1 ture redundancy, in the present case not only the auxiliary but the subject pronoun of the conjoined or juxtaposed verb as weIl.
As a consequence o~ the interpretatio~ of the simple verb ~orms used in conjoined or juxtaposed verb phrases aS bare past parti ! ciples arising from the phenomenon, of auxiliary deletion, these 1 ( \ f \ .?o 1, / \ '\ .~ ' 1, 1 / 74
are included as part o:e the ,data on the acquisition of the past
particiP1e/ that we turn to ne.J;Ct. 4.4.2 Mai~ fi~dings Beginning with the most genera1 findings, my errer ana1ysis revealed no past participle errors in the speech o:t;'the 15 Mon- treal Francophones. Thus the native speakers a1ready seemed to have completed their acquisition of the past participle by the second grade. The immersion students performed to sorne extent 1ike the natives since as early as grade 2 l found on1y an in- significant proportion of errors in their formation of the past particip1e of the -er verbs, i.e., in grade 2 only 5 or not even 2% of the 286 -er verb past participles that the students used were incorrect1y formed. The errors aIl seemed to be cases of substi tut ion of a form which can be interpreted ei ther as a pre- sent tense ls't, 2nd, 3rd sg. or 3rd pl. or as an imperative 2nd sg. (e. g. , j'ai trouve; j'ai va) . Both interpretations are pos- sible because there is evidence from my immersion corpus and \ from the study of Grégoire (1968) that both the present tense 1 and imperative forms are acquired before the past participle forms. Like Grêgoire's two young native speakers, then, the im- mersion students proceeded to acquire first the past particip1es of the dominant -er'verb group, thereby confirming the predic tion made earlier in section 4.2. They were undoubtedly aided by the felicitous homophony of the infinitive and past parti ci- '\ ,\ pIe of -er verbs', the infinitive of such verbs being acquired,
again according to Grêgoire and rny own corpus, at an ear1y stage. ~ " 1· (
" r 1 i
c' 75 r
In contrast to the comparison students,- however; the inuner- \ sion students were found to commit, as late as grade 6, a signi
ficant proportion of errors 'affecting the past participle of non -er verbs, as ill ustrated in Table Il. This finding is conso
nant wi th the fact that these verbs are in the minori ty in the 1 French language, that their past participles are morphologically i \ mu ch less predictable than those of the -er verbs and that there j is no hOI'OClphony between their past participial and infiniti val
forms.
Table Il: Percentages of erroneous non -er verb past participles
per immersion grade
Grades Errors Past participles % of error
2 29 107 27%
3 22 165 13%
4 22 215 10%
5 8 168 5%
6 12 183 7%
Totals 93 838 11%
'\ J Since Table Il presents general percentages of errors, we l
suspect, in the 1ight, once again, of the findings of the pre-
1 ceding study and of that of Canale, Mougeon and B~langer (1978), : , 1 that these genera1 percent ages of error hide sys tematic differ-"
ences in the percentages of error of individupl past participles. ( '\ 76
4.4.2.1' Verb b verb vari ation
l investigated the acquisition of eac}l reflex of the past
1 1 participle ilnflection and l did sa as a function of the verb.
The results 1of this ~nvestigation are displayed in Table 12. Tne
dashes (-) indicate that there were no occurrences of the past
participle ajnd gues tian marks (?) that there~re only' one or two occurrenlces.
Table 12: pe/rcentages of error per past participle and per grade
level
Past Inflec- Grade participle tion 2 3 4 5 6
dit -fi 0% 0% 0% 0% 0% eu -fi 0% 0% 0% 0% 0% r fait -ri 4% 6% 2% 0% 0%
parti -ri ? 0% 0% 0% pris -fi 50% 27% 5% 0% 0% f.!ni -fi 17% ? 0% 20% 0% mis -fi 40% 24% 15% 11% 25%
dormi -fi . ) 75% 50% 0% ? ? 1 1 j vu -u 0% 3% 5% 0% 0% 1 venu -u 37% 14% 25% 8% 0% 1 • revenu -u 60% 11% 50% 17% 0% j ., bu -u 0%
lu -u 75% ? ? 40% 43%
~tê -ê ? 0% ? 0% 77
As can be observed from Table 12, there is considerab le va-
riation in the rate of acquisîtion of the different non -er
verb past participles listed in the table. An interesting find-
ing is that ~the past participles of dire, faire, avoir and voir ( are acquired as early as grade 2, just as were the past parti-
ciples of the -er verbs (10% or less of errors ~eing the acgui
si tion threshold once again). In cC?ntrast, the past participles
of mettre and lire are still not acquired in grade 6. N:>t hav- \
ing set out to investigate the Franco-Ontarian students' ac-
quisition of the past participle but nevertheless wanting sorne
idea as to whether they were conunitting past participle errors,
l reasoned that the most likely candidates for erroneous forma- l, tion were the pas\jparticiples of lire and mettre as we have
j ust seen these to seem to be gui te di fficul t for the inunersion
students. l looked for errors concerning the past participles
of these two verbs. in the co?6ordance of the speech of the
grades 2 and 5 Sudbury and Welland students and found sorne., Li
instead of lu and metté instead of mis were the errors that l
found. In grade 2 metté accounted for 16% ott-' the past partici
pIe forms of mettre while in ,grade 5 i t only accounted for 5%.
As for li, it consti tuted the only two occurrences of the past
participle of lire in grade 2 but it 1 was nonexisteIit in grade 5,
al though there were only two occurrehces of lu at that grade
level. Judging from these preliminary findings, the Franco
Ontarian students 'aJ;"e slower than the Québécois students in
t..their acquisition of the past participles of non -er verbs. l, ( j" 78
l will not try in this study to account for the variation in the rates of acquisition of the past participles displayed in Table 12. Let me simply mention that verb frequency and whether the past participle is homophonous or not with a pre- viously learned verb form would appeqr to be two factors that have a bearing on rate of acquisition. For example, the fact that dire and faire are verbs whose past participles are homo- phonous wi th the present tense Ist, 2nd and 3rd sg. forms and are high frequency verbs may explain why the past participles dit and fait were the object' of nil or very low proportions of errors at aIl grade levels. Howe"ver, past participles such cas eu and vu, which were also the object of insigni,ficant propor tions of errors in spi te of the fact that they lacJ,c previously learned homophonous counterparts and are probably less frequent than fait and dit, are countercases which suggest that it is necessary to look for other exp1anatory factors.
4.4.2.2 Underlying sources of error
Aàjemi an (1976) and others have argued that second language learning errors ean be attributed to the learner 1 s' re1ianee on or recourse to previous 1"; learned forms to express a meaning or function for which he or she has yet to develop the proper tar-' get language forme l thus expected sorne proportion of the past particip1e errors committed by the immersion students to reflect this strategy. Specifically, l expected substitutions of pre sent tense lst, 2nd, 3rd 5g. and 3rd pl., imperative 2nd sg. and infinitiva1 forros for the past participle sinee, as stated ear- 79
lier, these forms are acquired before the compound past forros
by native as weIl as second language Iearners of French. These \ \, expectations were borne out. Out of the total number of errors
(93) co'mmi tted by the grades 2 tg 6 immersion students 'wi th res-
pect to the formation of the past participles of non -er verbs, 17 48 or 52% reflected the above-mentioned strategy. In fact,
reliance o~ the infinitive (e.g., j'ai préndre; il a avoir; on
a dormir; etc.) was the single most productive strategy, account-
ing alone for 36% of the 93 past participle errors. Re1iance on
the above-mentioned present tense or imperative forms (e.g.; tu
as /mt../: tu es /vjë:/; j'ai /ata/: etc.), was the least productive
strategy, accounting arone for 16% of the 93 past participle er- 1 rors. A possible reason for the immersion students' heavier re-
liance on the infinitive than on the present t~se or imperative
may be the homophony which characterizes the infinitiv~ and past
participle of the dominant -er verbs. To quote Harley and Swain
(1978:58): "The learoer might well ask: If in -er verbe it i5
not possible to distinguish between past participle ••. and infi nitive, then why do it with other ~erbs? ,,18
Given the great predominance ?r -er verbs in French, l also
expected that the data would evidence atternpts on the part of 1"'1' the immersion students to form the past particip1e of non -er , verbs as they would that of -er verbs, that is, use an -é en ding • l 1, Errors of the type il a vené, j'ai metté, etc., which represent 1
28% of the 9~-past particip1e errors, are a confirmation of this
(l expectat~~n. Unlike the first type of error examined above, l , , ' .'
\ î 80
would think that such analogical errors canstitute evidence of
~ the learner's coming ta grips with the rnorpholagy of the past
participle.
There is one other type of past participle error which the,
1 immersion students cornmitted. - Phese were errars such as il a
ouvri, j'ai reven~, j'ai prenu, il a moru, etc., which accounted
\ for 15% or 14 of the 93 non -er verb past p~iticiple errors.
, This error type is interesting because it evidences the fact
that the past participle of non -er verbs can aiso serve as the
basis for the creation of analogical past participles within
that class of verbs (but not outside of it, because the inflec- H tions of the past particfples of non -er verbs were never uSffd
ta farm the past participle of -er verb~ i.e., there were no
examples such as j'ai chantu or il a trouvi, etc. in my data).
That the past parti6iples of non -er verbs cannat serve as the
basis for the creation of ,~ogical past participles outside J
their own class is probably due ta the weak minority status of
the non -er verbs and to the regularity of the rnorphology of the 19 past participle of the -er verbs.
To this point in the discussion of the underlying sources of
the past participle errors'committed by the immersion students,
r have yet ta consider the possible raIe of mo~her ton gue inter
ferenpe. Since Dumas, Selinker and Swai~ (1973) have made the
general observation that English interference is one of the ma-
jor sources of error in the speech of French immersion students,
l wanted to 'see whether this observation was applicable to the ( 81
particular case of past participle formation.
It has been observed that inflectional morphology doesn 1 t , lend itself readily to borrowing (Weinreich 1953). Consonant l wi th this observation, there were no inflectional bor:èbwings in \ the speech of the immersion students, that is, l found no examples where they had coupled one of the English allomorphs of the past participle inflection to a French verb stem (e.g., sauted v~. sauté, vend vs. venu or frappe'd vs. frappé). One possible explanation for this lack of transferability is the relationship of dependence which inflections hold vis-à-vis stems. In other words, inflections are probably not perceived by bi lingual learners or speakers as items' whieh are free and therefore transferable. Cases of language swi tch sueh as j'ai
• opened' la porte for j' ai ouvert la porte, of whieh' there were a few occurrences in my immersion corpus, are not counter- examples. On the contrary, they provide further supporting evi- dence that inflections are dependent on stems and are rarely in- 20 tegrated into the morphology of another language.
The fact that the past participle of a good number of En- glish verbs is, homophonous with the simple past form (e. g., he stopped and he has stopped; l stood and l have stood; etc.) is another potential source of interference since i t could lead the immersion students to produce past participle errors like il a finissait, j'ai avais, etc. Such errors, however, were not to be found in their speech.
If anything, the immersion students 1 native knowledge of 82
English would seern to be a source of positive transfer as ,far ( as the acq~isition of French past participles·is concerned.
~ J;.ike French, English has past participles which can be broken
down ,morphologically into a stern plus a suff ix, i. e., one of the
allbrnorphs of the past participle inflection. This crosslin-
guistic similarity could mean that the immersion students do
not have to discover the morphology of past participles in
French nor the syntax of the compound pasto In this sense the
immersion ,students might have a headstart on the native learner
of French as weIl as on second language learners of French
whose rnother tongue lacks past participles, the latter hypothe-
sis being empirical1y testable.
4.4.2.3 Changes in error source over time
In two studies of the acquisi tion of Eng 1ish as a second
(Taylor 1975) or third (Lococo 1976) language, it was shown that
the proportion'S of errors attributable to interference and over-
generali zation varied over time in a nonrandom fashion. More
specifically, the proportion of intersysternic errors decreased
and that of intrasystemic errors increased as the 1earners pro-
gressed from early trlltermediate stages; of acquisition. Given
the cross-sectional/ nature of the present study, 1 thought i t ) would be of interest to investigate whether the two intra1ingua'1 sources of past participle errors that./Îlave been .identified in the present study (i. e.; analogy and reliance on previous ly
'~( learned verb forms) could be predicted to change in importance
over Ume and, if sa, whether there was indeed a change. ( ..
, 83 \
( l indicated in the precedinq section that the overgenerali zation of the infinitive, present tènse or imperative probably
reflects an ignorance of the' morpholo9Y of the past pa,rt~ciple.
As such, it is reasonable to assu~e that this s-trategy' should
~e more characteristic of the interlanguage of the yôunger im mersion student!? than of the older ones. On the other hand, the " . analogical errors evidencing the students 1 ooming te grips with
the morphology of t~ast participle shou~d be more character istic of the appro6d.mative system of the older immersion st.u-
dents than of the youngér ones. " Table 13: Contributi<7,m of error sources over timl1. , Grades Analogical errors · "'rgen~ralization error~ .1 î t N %
lj 2 11 42% 15 58% •, •l 3 6 28% 15 72% Î 4 12 55% /145%... 5 5 62% ' 3 ,/ 38%
6 6 54% ,_~_ .~t '46%
, Totals 40 45% - 48 55%
A look at Table 13 indicates that' these predlctions are • 1 born.e ..put •. lt can .~een that in. graae$ 2 and!' 3 the percent-
ages of errors due to overgen...eralization of previo~s ly learned (
1 .' / ,/ r 1 84 / verb forms account for a greater of errors than do , ( 1
the two anatogical sources of error co From grade 4 on 1
" however 1 the analogicaf. errors showing that the students àre
copin9 wi th @e morphology of ~he past participle are propor- , " tionàtely mor~ fre9u~nt than those :r::esul ting ,from the overgene- . , ralization of, nonparticipial verb forms. Together wit~those of Taylor and Lococo" the present findings suggest that in in- .' ~ stances where' there are several competing sources of second la - r guagé learning érrors, the search for changes in, the contrib - \,
tit:>n of each error source over time i~ -revealing, whether 1 t is d~ne . for one cla~ of items (e. 9 ., past participles, as in' t'he present study) or for the whole target language (as in Taylor , ' and Lococo' s studies). Yet, from'a methodological standpoin t l feel that such a, search is best undertaken separately for each
C!lass of target language items (e.g., prepositions, auxi~iaries, , etc.}' under investigation. On the 0fe hand, this discrete ra- ther than general approach renders possible the identification ~ and exc'lusion of classes of target language items wh:i:ch give ,.' rise to errors which are attributable to only one underlyirf'g cause. On the other h and, onlz.!he discrete approach can reveal "1 . whether the contribution of a given error source 'necessarily 1 shows the same evolution over time acros's different classes.... of target language, items, an assumption wQich 8eems to be irnplicit in the general approach. \ 4.4.2.4 The ,psyChOlogical reality of li!lguistic des~riptions . One of the airns of psycholinguistics has been the experimen-
, •
, " - -~--"-~-~~------. , " '') \ 1, 85 • L , ---
.t\i1 'veri~cation of some of the 'abstract constructs posited by ( " linguis~s (e.g., ,transformational rules, word derivation proces~ ses, phonemes, etc,.) in their analyses of vadous languages. In the particular area of morphology, Den;ing"Oand Baker (1977) _de
signed an experiment' to test which one 1 if any, of the several .. alternative analyses which have been proposed for plural forma tüm in Eng1ish, h"âd in their words "an empirically defensible 1 • tfJ .. • claim t-o\PSYchaligiCal reali ty ". Similarly" in this section l'
would "like to ~ttempt to test the psychologica.l reali ty of the ,
morphologica1 analysie that MS:{tinet (1969) l'roposed ,for past
1 parti ciple~ in French and that l presented at the beginning of
this study. The t~sting ground.~ill be the ana10gi6a1 past par . 'i ticipl,e errors committèd by the immersion students (see Table ,. ~ 14) . The errors involving the overgeneralization of nonpartici- 1 pi al verb forms are excluded, as are the correct past particip1e " forros, because nei ther can enlighten us on the issue at hand. j 1 As concerns first o'f aU the ana1ogica1 past participles 1 i ending in -é, let us consider how the process of analoqy w.lftiich
underlies them Iftight be working. On the one hand, one may s up
pose. that the stU"dents who coromi tted these errors were able to iso1ate, on the basis of the past participles of -er verbs, the
ending -€, that they were a1so able ta isolate sorne stems of non -er verbs on the basis of certain f,orms wi th which they were fa- .. miliar (e.g., nous ven-ons, vous Ven-ez, Ven-ez!), and that they affixed the ending -€ to such stems on the analogy of the past participles of the majority -er verbs (e.g., il a ven-~).n
(
(
H " • 86
" '" - ( T,able 14: Ana10gicai past particip1e errora ,comrnitted by the' " ' inunersion students
Verb -ê -u -i
, venir ven,~ 1 revenir revené reveni /, A 1 attendre attend~ 1 * i prendre prenê .. pren~ • " ... mettre mettê dormir dornu lire lis€ li mourir mor€ moru
"- ouvrir ouvré ouvrl
• ù rire ri€ asseoir assoyé partir parté mordre mordé devoir devré , ',{JI f On the ",other hand" with the exception of m_oré; tire ana1ogi- • ( • 1 cal past participles ending in -, can ~lBo be interpreted as . .. ' ) overgeneralizations of previously learned verb forms ending in
, '. .~ the ,sound /e/' (e.g. 1 present tense or imperative 2nd pl. forms , . or even impàrfait lst, 2nd, 3rd sg. or 3rd pl. torms for thoae 1 1 • 1 speakers who pronounce them with a final/el instead of with the 1 . " . 23 prescri~ed final/el). This type of analogy would ~eem to 1,e
~ 1 1
~ .. ~,...' . l .. -
87
,. based on rhyme, i.e., the forro ven/el, for example, rhymes with' ( the pa~t participle of any -er verb and is possibly theref~re a prime candidate for overgeneralization as a past participle of , -- o~ venir in the absence of knowledge of~. It should be noted
th'~"t although this sort of analogy 9perates at a '-:lord, level, it r~, . . nonetheless involves the perception of a particular word ending. ft : Turning to the analog{cal past participles'not ending in -~, .. li is the only one among them which -could be the res,ult of rhym ing analogy.. as it is the only qne which possesses homophonous coun~rparts (e.g., je lis /li/). There does not seern to be any other way to interprèt the anal~gical past participlié's prenu and \ moru except as evidence of isolation of an ending -u and affi~a- tion of this ending to a stem. To take the example of prenu, one can surmise that the student who commL~~t:his error isola- ted an -u ending on the basis of his or her familiarity with non -er verb past participles ending in -u and a stem pren- on the
" basis of his or her familiarity with forros such as the impera- "ti ve 2nd pl. Pren-ez! or the present tense 2nd ,pl. vous pren-ez. , Moru is in every réspect similar to ~ except for its analogi-
cal, source (.i.e., non -er vs. -er verb past participles). As
for dornu, this error would seem to suggest ~~ affïxation not , ij
of -u 1 but of -nu, 'to the stem ~. This explanation is not
implausib~e when one considers that the past participles of sorne 1 frequent non -eJ; verbs like ven,ir and revenir end in the 8ylla-' 1 24 hIe nu. Explanations resting on analogy operating at a rnor-' phemic level are aIs? possible for the analogical participles 1
'1 , '1 t ...
'ss
ending in -i. Using reveni as an,illustratio , one can suppose that the students who committed this error Iso ated an -i, endlng on the basis of their familiarity with non -er erb pastt parti- .
d.ples ending in -i, and that they i~olated the tem• reven- on
the basis of their famiiiarity with present vous reven-ez,' 1 1. or Imperative Reven-ez!, for instance. Recall, h ever, that>-l 1 i5 not a past participle inflection according to Ma tinet. He
If. analyzes -i as part of the verb stem, \which leads him, as we
saw, to postulate a -Ç1 inflection instead' (e.g., par i-fl; sorti l', etc.). The question, the~, . is' whether reveni is a~o compa tible with Martinet' s -$1 inflection~ analysis. I~ woul~ ap~ear' " to be for there seems to be no on whidh the- n~t b~sis s~udents\ could isolate the stem reveni- sinee such a stem is not \nvolved
\ < in the formation of any of the forros of the verb revenir.' In contrast, stems such as parti-, sorti- and fini- are involved in
\ 1 the formation of the infinitive (e.g., parti-r)', future (e.g.,
je sort>-rai) and even the p~esent (e.g., je finis-~).' Intefest ingly enough, whi le reveni does not seern to be analyzab le as \. 1, \ reveni-p', ouvri-p< i5 possiblé"because euvri. is a stem of the' r-I future (e. g .. , il ouvri-ra). Likewise, the erroneous past parti-
eiple li can be analyzed as li-ft as li- is net only a stern of - - - , ( , the future (e.9., je l~-rai) but of the present ?lB *el1 (e. g .. 1 \ je lis-fi). Alternatively 1 the anal~gical past partieiples end-' ing in -i are ,compatible with an, explanation iesting on 'analogy , operating at a word level. It is possible that the students who \ produced the past participles reveni, li and ouvri' did 50 as a
\ '\ , . \ \ - 1 ...... ~"''''_'''II~...... ~~~.. ,~~ __H;.~~_ .... -, _ ~_ " , ~", '1 \ p9
·result of what ia kn.own as proportional analogy (see' de Saussure ( 1972:222,226,228). In'. th~s case the\ propo~tional analogy0 w<;>uld be based on tPe infinitive, i.e., partir:earti, finir: - ~ fini, sortir:sorti, dire:cÜt, etc., therefore revenir:reveni, , . lire: li, ouvrir :ouvri.
The discussion above has shawn' that the immersion stuç'ients
evidence the capacity to pr.,.9duce past participles by relyihg on
mQrpliological analogy (i:e:, by isolating and ,combining ste.ms
and endings), on rhyming analogy or on proportional ana+ogy. lt 'has sho~na further that wh~n m?rphologica'l anaiogy- ~s (possibly) being resorted tOi the endings selected by the learners need' not corresponq to those posi ted.. by M~rtinet (i. e.,. -i inste~d of -~ as in reven-i and -nu instead of -u, âs in dor-nu). In conclu'" 0> • sion, the analogicall"past parti.ciple err?rs comrn~tfèd Dy the im':
mersion students unfortunately do not ~provide cornpelling evi-
~ dence either in favor of or against Martinet 's morphological .' , description of French past paJ:',ticiples.' lfol:lowing the example
of Derwing and Baker (1977) 1 one could perhap's design an inge7'
nious experiIne~t that would stand a better chance' of settling i • the issue at stàke here. 4 .5 Conclusion
That the inunersion students are still maki:ng past parti~iplefl errors in grade 6 rneans that after• close to seven years of 1 s chooling in French they have not yet reacped a levei of grarn- f 1 J / . rnatical. proficiency comparable to ~that of grade 2 native learn:" l 1 ers of French. Spilka (1976) arrived at si.m.~lar· findings as re- 1
1 .... ! ' .. -, , 5 "- . ~ . - ..... > ------>- .- - -~-- ,--- - - ~
.p " / 90 " ~ .) " II • ,If ... Il ( .: 9ar~~~ dthe,r aspects of the grammatical proficien'cy of èarly FrenCh i'mmersion students. One e~piana~i~n for this, of course" is that the immersion schQoi~' proviJe lower levelS" of e;xposu:e to French and fewex opportunities fo!, use of French than the
p natural aêq~isitiOli. setting in which~\the native speakers Iearn • l their laJ;1guage from infancy. l would, like to point out, how- . ever, th~t while these findings are Jl indication tha~ imrnersiop "
programs fail to foster native-like g~arrunatical proficiency, a
recently completed study by Lepicq (1980) repor~, that the ~en
tences in which she inse"rted errors committe4by early ,French - ) . .../ r inunersion students (e~pecially morphologica1)' were rated rather high by native judges on a scale of acceptability and intel1igi
hi lity. Lepicq 1 s findings therefore suggest that the immersion ~ students 1 interlanguage, albei t deviant wi th respect to the tar-
get language, may nonethe1ess..À'e qui te appropriate for the im
portant purpose of cornmunica'Üng with native speakers of French. The communicative sui~ability of immersion French is perhaps a question which should be addressed more fully in future i!llll1er
sion research. Genesee (1979: 28) also believes that fuis re- mains Ë\n important unanswered question concerning the productive French langua,ge skills of the imrnersion stu9,ents.·
\ ,1 . 1 Q -- . -~-" )--~.-----~----.
91
( 5.' General conclusion' ) A semantio distinction Was established between the bare (BI)
and the pqur (PI) infinitives of m0t:ion verbs where tradi tional ly they had been considered equivalent. This rendered it possi
ble to argue that the bilingual speakers (i. e. 1 th'e Franoo-Onta-
~ian and the French inunersion students) were inserting a sernan
~ tically empty pour before the BI of motion verbs. A semantic , distinction was also estab1ished between genel;al and specifie verbs of motidn' and i t was shown that the use of the PI wi th the former is condi tiona1 upon the presence of an intervening loca l ti ve complement in Standard French. It was seen that the inser- tion of pour before the BI of motion verbs is predictable on the basis oE a structu"'ral contrast between French and English but
that at the sarne tirne it i6 explainable ,as a case of purely in- r trasystemic syntactic regularization. Proof of the validi ty of the intrasysternic explanation was shown to require further re- search on child language acquisition of French. Proof of the va1idi ty of the intersystemic explanation wa6 shown to necessi tate further research on the acquisition of French as a seco9d language by learners whose mother ton gue does not require an
equivalent of pour in BI ~onstructi.ons. It was noted that this
research might·,end up supporting bo~ intrasystemic regulariza
tion and English interference (i. e., a dual origin error). 'l'he French immersion students were seen to have a higher rate, of p'our insertion than the Franco-Ontarian students, who had a high
er rate than the monoli~gua1 Outibêcois students (the latter 1 ( ...... "" .. - .. "...... ,,_-...
92
·in 'facif, never in~erted pour before the BI of motion verbs) • ( Differences in ~ea~uàent . group' s degree of eKposure to and use of French were claj.rned to be responsible for thé differences
_ f tn rates of pour ins~rtibn~ 1
Tu~ni~g to the reflexive pronoun study, it ~as hypothesized and confirmed that the rate of omission of the reflexive pronoun would,Ir vary as a functioD of th~ pronominal verb. Reflexive pro- n01àIl ornissiop 1 i t was argued, is interpretable a a case' of purely
i,ntrasystemi.c. ,~or;phological regularization but also as a case of .
English interference.., This again raised the possibili ty that re- flexi ve pronoun omission is a 'dual origin error. The attestation of a developrnen,tal stage of reflexi ve pronoun omission in the
literature on child language acquisition of French was provid~d as proof that English inter,ference is not ,a necessary underlying
cause. In 'any case, invoking English interference was not help-
fuI in a~counting, for the verb by verb va+iation in the rate of
1 omission of the reflexi ve pronoun. Explanations of this varia-
tion weré sought 1.n terms of certain linguistic propertiés of the ~
pronominal verbs 1 such as whether they have nonpronominal count- i 1 '1 erparts, wh-ethex; reflexi ve pt:'0noun omission results in forma!'
ambigui ty, etc. The Québ~cois ~tudents hardly ever omi tted the
.. reflexive ,pronoun but the Franco-Ontarian students did SQ fre
quently an~ .the French immersion studen~s even m
/
) (, in acqUiri~e ~eflexi\e pr~no~etween g~a~e. i, and' 5, al: '\ though their acquisition was still far from complete. The Qu~- ..
, 1 • bécois studerl'ts, on the othe~hand, had~lreadY aH but mastere( the use of the reflexi ve pronour'! by grade 2. Wben the Franco"
Ont.arian students' dominant language of communication was taken
T into consideration in add,i.tion to their grade' levei or a~e, it
was' found that the French-dominant speakers were not far from having achieved 'Complete mastery of the reflexi ve pronoun in - \ , grade 5 whereas the Englisn-dominant speakers lagged cOl)s±dera- • J bly behind.
Finally 1 in the past participle study a .description (bot"row
ed from Martinet 1969) highligllting tlle cornplex morphology of J ' past participles in French served as .. the basi~ for rnaking the
! • prediction- that the learners would experience difficulties forrn- , ....
ing correct past participles 1 especially those' of the non -er • verbs. A detailed analysis of the oral French production of the
French immersion students confirrned these predictions. On the
~ , - basis of the errors 'conunitted by these students, an atternpt was
made to test the 'psycho.10.gica1 reality' of Martinet 's descrip" , ,•
( 1 ',~ y tion of the rnorpho1ogy of past participles in French 1 but this atternpt proved inconclusive. Unlike pour insertion and ref,lex- , r- 1 ive pronoun omission, past participle ~rrnation was only corn-
~e wi th exp1anatiorfs of an intrasystemic nature 1 so'me errors 1 having been produced on the an"alogy of th~ rnorphology of other
past participles (especially thosloI the' -er verbs), others re- i 1 ! presenting overgeneralizati~ns of previously learned verb forros ( ~. ' , 94 ( . (especially the infini ti ve) . The younger students relied more ( , ~ on. overgene:ralization" whereas the older students relied~ more on
anaiogy, a finding which wa's explained in terms of the- aIder
/ students' greater ,linguistic maturity. ' In the light of the find
ing that the rate of a~quisition of the reflexi ~pronoun is de
termined by the prQllominal ve~b 1 tt ~as hypothesized ~'1at the r 1 rate of acquisition 0,[ the past participle might aiso vary a.. s a i (-; i function of the verb. This hyp.othesis was con fi rmed on the basis
of an examination of the non -er verb past participle forms pro
duced by the French inunersioJ;l stu<;ients. 'l'wo linguist;ic proper
ties of the past participles we-r--e suggested as possible deterrni
nants of sorne of the observed variation, b'ut it was concluded
that there were certainly other pertinent properties yet to be
\" discovered. 1 In contrast ta the Québécois.. students 1 who had al- ready completed their acquisition of _he past participles by
grade 2, the immersion students still· experienced difficulties
wi th the... past participles of non -er verbs in grade 6. A cursory examinatioh of the Franco-Ontaria~ students' acquisition of the
past participles suggested that these students lagged behind the
Québécois students but were ahead of the French dents. oifferen'ces in .degree of exposure to and use of French were once again invoked as the factor responsible for the inte"r group differences in speed of-acquisition of the past participles. The existence of verb by verb variation as concerns bath the acquisition of the reflexive pranoun and the past participle sug gests that the acquisition of the BI of motion verbs might also ( 95 ,1 t- ' .. proceed at a different pace depending on certain linguistic pro- ( . , , perties of tpe indi vtdual motion verbs. For example, because, the general motion vert> aller ois by far the' most frequent of the motion verbs (and in~act one of the most frequent verbs of the French language), one rnight suspect that tYi~ BI is a~lQired fast ~ er wi th a11er than with the less fliequent motion ver s (other façtors being equal), This is a ques tion which could be addres- ged in future researoh. Stil:l on the topic of 1in....guistic varia- tion, as Wode et ~l. (1978)~have indica:ted, among' the different aspects of the process of second language acquisition. which have been examined in the lit,erature, two stand as it were in cornpl'e- , J mentary distribution, On the one hand, researchers have looked A " a):'''tfie acquisition of several morphemes wi th a ~view to determine // . the order in which they are acquired. On the other, researchers :t'lave looked for odeveloprnental stages in the acquisition of one morpheme, as "as done in each one of the a#i~!:ti~n st~dies featured in this thesis. Several cri ticisms have been leveled at \ the morpheme order studies (see Wode et al. 1978 and Fathnlan 1979 for a review). This thesis wou1d seem to provide a new type of criticism seemi'ngly vitiating the very idea of ordering rnorphernes., Central to the cri ticism is the existence of linguistic variation 1, in the acquisition of a given morpheme such as the reflexive pro noun or one of the reflexes..,...' o:f the past participle inflection • As a consequence of linguistic variation, a ~n rnorpherne can '. " \ be acquire? earlier .~ 1ater than another depending pn the 1in- guistic contexts in which they appear. Tq g:iJve) an \il1ustration \ li: ( 1 1 -_. -...... --- - . \ ~- , 1 96 / of this l we saw that the -u reflex of the past particîple in': flec 10n is still not 'acquired in grade 6 by the French immer on studen'bs wi th the verb" lire ~whi le the ref1exi ve pronoun of // s'appeler is- alrE!ildy acquired in grade 2 by the sarne students. Conversely, we saw that the -u reflex of-the past participle in- ri, ., ! l flection is already acquired in grade 2 by the French immersion ! ; , students wi th the verb voir whereas the reflexi ve pronoun of the / rnajority of the pronominal verns examined is still not acquired , . in grade 6 by the sarne students. 1 would therefore suggest that researchers concentrate on discovering the internaI variation o that rnay exist in the acquisi tion of one and the sarne rnorpheme as a pf'erequisi te to the rneaningful comparison of the order of acquisitïon of different morphemes. o Pour insertion and reflexive pronoun omission are what l have .," ~ called 'dual origin' errors in that they are attr~~utable in the f ory to both intra- and intersysternic factors. Researchers inves tigating second language acquisition or bilingualisrn more gene- ~ rally have been divided as to what to rnake of su~h errors. The vast majority ,~ould seem to adhere to the" perspective -that such errors hav~ a single origin, intrasystemic or intersystemi c, and that it ïs probably impossible ,te estab1ish with certainty which one of the two is at the root of a gi ven 'dual origin' error. On the other hand, a small but growing mi.~~~~f researchers have ;1 'taken dual origin errors as evidence t majority position is perhaps too simplistic. _ have speculated that d,ua! or·igin errors could be the resul t of intra- and int~- ( ù ... <. , < 97 systemic factors 0;rerating conjoint1y. Politzer and RaIDirez (1973) were perhaps t~~ firstt to suggest this new perspective and other researchers have. since fo1lowed suit {amor)9' these, Swatn 1976, Schachter and Celce-Murcia 1977, Canale, Mougeon and Bélanger 1979. An empirical way of deciding ~e issue must be sought. A first suggestion a10ng these lines was made by Schachter and Murcia (1977). Th~y' advanced the hypothesis that if dual origin errors rea11y ref1ect intra- and intersysternic factors operating conjointly, these errors should "be more per sistent and difficult to overcome" ti'lan single origin errors (for o preliminary evidence in support of this hypothesis, see Beniak' and Mougeon 1981b). A sugg~stion of a different type was made in 1 this thesis, according to which the participation of intrasys- ternic factors i5 5upported if, i t can be shown that monolingua1 natives commit the same error, and the participation of inter- systemic factors if second language learners with another rnother tongue are shown to commit a simi1ar error that cannot however be explained intrasystemically (see BI study). In clos~ng, from the finding that the Franco-Ontarian and French immersion students have yet to complete their acquisiti~n of the three aspects of the French verb system that were under study at or near the end of their e1ementary schooling, one may conc1ude that e1ementary French language schools in Ontario's 1 i francophone minority 10calities and the early French immersion programs are not capable of guaranteeing suçcessful mastery of 1- the French language by the students' to which they cater. This ) ( 1 f ,98 ! finding should perhaps serve as a forewarni~g ta those Franco ( Ontarian parents residing in minority francophone localities who would 'leave it to the French language school to transmit the, French language te their children (see introduction). It should perhaps aiso serve as an indication te these anglophone parents who wish their children to develop native-like productive skills in French that sending their children to a French language school weuld probably constitute a better altetnative than sending them y to an English language school offering a French immersion pro ~# t,.r." ~J; ~'\.. gram (where,wef course, such an alternative is availablè to them, as in Montreal for instance) . \ ( \ .. 99 , ,7 ,1 Notes 1'" 1 Very recently, howe~er, there has appeared at least one study whose findings are partly at ~riance with these'positive re sults. Mclnnis and'Oonohue (1980) found that general achiev~- ment score9 measured by tests' administered in English were si~ 'nificant1y lower.· for early French immersion students than for intensive French stuqents acting as controls. They concluded that '~he immersion program results in an improvem~nt.iu skills o in French but does so at the expen~e of ~ome loss of .ski11s in .. 'English." (p. 327) 2 In this census as weIl as in the other to be referred to lat- er, mother tongue was defined as the first language learned and 1 sti.!l underst~od. ~ 3 The cens us information pr~sented here is taken from Mougeon -cJ et al. (1980). 4 The 1971 census/figures to, be cited are drawn "from D'Costa (1975) . 5 It is a1so possible' to ca1cu1ate the rate of abandonment of Ffench at home ?ong Ontarians C?f French mO,ther tongue l who num-: beref 482,345 in 197t o S~ calcu1ate~ the rate stands at 37%. 1 1 6 See, among others, the studies of Dorian (1978) on E~st Suth- r~ erland Gae1ic, a dying Scottish Gae1ic d'ialect, of Gal'.(l979) on lapguage spift in a bilingual-Hungarian-German Austrian town, and of Mougeon et al. (1980) on Ontarian French. { 7 l wouièl .. 1ike' to express, my thanks 'to Fred Genesee, forme~ly J ! 1 J 100 1 " with the PSBGM and now Assistant Professor of psych.ol~gy at Mc-' Gill University, for obtainin~ fqr me the permission to carry \\ ~ ,,",- {)8~" '~would like to express my thanfs to the directors of the Pe- tit Collêge and the Moyen Coll~ge for allowing me to conduct these tape-recorded interviews. 9 8 The reader is advised that none of the upcoming acquisi eion \ studies is based on the totality of the threè corpora nor d~s, any of the acquipition studies tak~ into consideration ~e stu- . ! j.------,''-'•• 1 , 1 dents' sex or social class·. 1 10 ' l It should be pointed out thatdcausal constructions are also used in:~nswer to the question eourguoi, as is illustrated by \ ~ the fOljOwing e~amp:e.s:, (i) a. Pourquoi Marie s'est-elle mariêe? b. Pour avoir des enfants. (purpose) " c. Parce qu'elle veut des enfants. (cause) Il The capacity to take a following BI would seem ta be a dis~ 1 tinguishing characteristié of 'true' motion verbs in French. 1 t Thus there are other verbs in French which" poasess~the semantic feature of motion (e. g., ramper, marcher, nager, vsJ,er, Si avan- .. J ~, S t ~lahcer, s' appro'cher, etc.) but whose use wi t;h a follow ! ) ing BI i8 at best of dubious .acceptability: (ii) a. ?Le b~bli rampe chercher .son jouet. b. 1I1"s' avança leur serrer la main. c. ?'Lè voltigeur s 'est ~Hanc~ attraper la chandelle. / " - 101 ' %," i:.~ .. ,,~~ oJ:'~" 4.~,"'J>"-:tII ~;r: "- ( 12, Another tack woulêl ~e to check whether learners of French whose mother tongue is not ~glish but a language that does not require an equivalent of pour i,n B~nstructions a.J.so over generalize' the use of pour. One COUld~OOk, for example, at the spoken French of youn<;1 Spanish learnefs.. As we shall see", in the conclusion to this study, in Spanish the equivalent of, the BI is introduced by the preposition! and the equivalent \ of the PI is introduced by the preposition para. If the Spanish .... 1' learners were to overgeneralize pour, they could only be doing so on the basis of the internaI properties of French adduced 'earlier (barring the pos~~bility that they commit the equivalent oyergeneralization in their mother tongue, i.e., substitution of para for !.). If on "the other hand the Spanish learners were ~ - . to overgeneralize 'a v this would be evidence in' s,upport of inter- • 7-" . ference from th~ir mother tongue, which would .suggest, by impli- cation, that English interference is involved in othe Franco Ont~rian students' overgeneral~zation of pour. ~onceivably, the young Spaniàrds could overgeneralize"both ! and pour, which would . me an that their learning of French is affec\ed by both , " mother,tôngue interference and intralinguistic facbors proper to French. Again, by implication, this would suggest that the Franco-Ontarian students' overgeneralization of pour could be a dual origin errGr, i.e., the outcome of the combination of English interference and factors internal to French. The prOb lem posed by errors which can be attribut'ed to both LI and L2 factors will be taken up again in the conclUSion to the thesis. ( ~ .. '..,., 1:). --~ - - ~---- - ( 13 Sorne of the uses of ~ were. branded by the prescriptive gram marians of the'l7th century,'e •.g., possessivé,!as in la fête ~ ma mère, (Brunot and Bruneau 1969:379} but are still used today' in spoken Canadian French (B~langer et· al. 1978; La Follette 1969) as weIl as in popular European French (Frei 1971; Guirqud 1973) • 14 In this table as in the others to come, percen~.; of omis- . sioh of the reflexive pronoun were ca1culated 'when ~e at least three occurrences of the pronominal, verb. Dashes (-) ., appearing in a table indicate that the pronominal verb was not used at aIl. Question marks (?) indicate that it was used once or twice. , 15 The reason for my believing that se laver + D.O • is most '4 probably not acquired by the French-dominant Frilnco-Ontarian 1 students is that the reflexive .-pronoun wa,s missing in the only f two occurrence& 'oTt~ pro1'OOiina'1- vero in grade 5. .'J \ ' ". ""-... / 16 While ~n actual fact H~rley and Swain did not report errors of the type ouvri for ouvert in 'their article, this error type nonethe1ess did occur in their immersion corpus' (H'arley, per- sonal communication) . j 17 On occasion the immersi'on students were able to self-correct " 1 as evidenced by the follo~ing four examples that l uncovered in ! their speech, e.g., on a boit~ bu; j'ai met, mis'; j'ai met,' j1 ai mis; ils ont mettent, ils ont mis. ~ ( ! , 103-- . l ( lS"It is true that the past participle of some very frequent non -er verbs (e. g., faire, dire) is homopho,ncius wi th some pre sent tense and imperati ve forrns. However, this homophony is characteristic of only a few verbs in French, and. therefore i t may not be ~ufficient ta induce learners, to rely as heavily on the overgeneralization' of the present tense or imperative as on the overgeneralization of the infinitive in forming the past participles of non -er verbs. 19 - The errors presented thus far add up to a total of 88 only. There were five other errors consisting in the use of li ins~ead of lu. These five errors account for the remaining 5% of the 93 non -er verb past participle errors. The li errors are ambigu- Ç)US in the sense that they may ei ther be interpreted as over ~ generalizations of the imperative sg. or present tense lst, 2nd and 3rd 5g. forro of lire or as creations on the analogy of non -er verb past participles ending in ~i. This is why l have had to treat them as a separate category èven though tpey are not underlain by a different source of error. 20 Verb stems can be borrdwed, however, as evidenc~d by my cCSr- pus as weIl as that of Harley ant~ Swain (e.g., j'ai bak€ un q8- teau). Unlike inflections, which are bound morphemes, verb stems are free morphemes and therefore transferab1e. 21 The five li for lu errors are excluded here because of the ~.-.~- -ambiguity concerning their underlying cause (see footnotè r19Y. ,/ r ------e ,~\ 22 . , Under the assumption of ana10gyJ mor~ constitutes af interest- ( \ 104 ing particùlar case in wpich the endihg -~ has been affixed to C the stem Irnor-/. ~ Since ~this stem is only involved ;in the for- , . mation of the. past participle of InQurir', the error morê, para- doxi cally, implies know~edge of the past participle of mourir, 0 i . e., mort /rnor-f) / . The é\dj unction of -ê could be due to the , ..... -~~___ ..le~a..,:nler's taking cognizance of the fact that nearly aIl past , participles in French tWld in a vowel, especi,al1y in -ê. \ " 1.;. "1 i 23 Devr~ is different from the other erroneous past participles r ènding in -ê in that the previously acquired verb forro of which it could be an overgeneral'lzation i5 the future tense lst sg. or 2nd pl. forme /' 24 If it were not for the fact that the error dornu was commit- ted by more than one student 1 one could also have entertained the hypothesis that domu is the result of the affixation of -u to an erroneous stem dorn- formed on the basis of 'a con- fusion of thé nasals !!!. and n. >, 1 ( .1 105 0,. Bibl'iography Adjemian, C. -1976. On the nature of iritèr1angu~ge systems. Language {e'arnin9 26, 2. 0 ( Andersen, R. W. 197e.~ An~~mplicational rnodèl fO~ sec~ lan- guage research. Language Learning 28, 2 . . Anttila, R. 1972. 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