Interlanguage prepositions : an analysis of French learners’ productions in L2 English Abeer Naser Eddine To cite this version: Abeer Naser Eddine. Interlanguage prepositions : an analysis of French learners’ productions in L2 English. Linguistics. Université de Grenoble, 2012. English. NNT : 2012GRENL014. tel-01057881 HAL Id: tel-01057881 https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-01057881 Submitted on 25 Aug 2014 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. 27 janvier 2012 (Présidente du jury) 1 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, I would like to thank my research advisor, Professor John Osborne. It has been an honor and a pleasure to work under his mentorship. I appreciate his methodical instruction, inspiring ideas and consistent encouragement, which altogether made my Phd experience productive and stimulating. My sincere thanks go to the committee members, Professor Jean-Claude Bertin (Université du Havre) and Professor Nicole Décuré (Université de Toulouse 3), for their valuable contributions and practical suggestions. I would also like to thank Professor Natalie Kubler (Université Paris Diderot) who has accepted to review my thesis. My special thanks go to the PAROLE team (Université de Savoie) whose laborious coding of the oral corpus enabled me to pin down points of particular interest to my research as regards the conceptualisation of motion events. I would like to extend my thanks to Fabienne Chabert, the librarian, for her warm reception and helpful suggestions. I would also like to thank my colleagues at the Service des Langues (Université Joseph Fourier (UJF), Grenoble) for their support all through my teaching experience, hence gained a broader insight into L2 learning difficulties. I would like to dedicate a special acknowledgement to Elizabeth Anne and Virginia Gardner for assisting in coding the learner corpus, which gave more credibility to the findings of my thesis. I am equally grateful to all evaluation participants from UJF for contributing to my research goals. I am greatly thankful to my dearest Dany Besset for her invaluable support during the moments when it was most necessary. Needless to say, thanks a million for the cheerful advice and generous hospitality! My regards go also to all my friends in Grenoble with whom I spent unforgettable moments during the ups and downs of thesis writing. I am blessed with the most caring parents, Noha and Rafik, who are very special and dear to me. They have always helped me to channel my energy in a positive and productive way. I so much thank my siblings, Moodi, Hanan and Safaa, whose encouragement and motivation have nourished me, especially during times of stress. “All that I am or ever hope to be, I owe to my angel Mother.” Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) 2 RESUME DE LA THESE EN FRANCAIS Le principal objectif de cette thèse est d’étudier l’incidence des erreurs prépositionnelles sur l’intelligibilité de productions en L2 anglais par des apprenants francophones. Après un résumé des caractéristiques sémantiques et morpho-syntaxiques des prépositions en anglais et en français, nous abordons les questions liées à l’acquisition d’une langue seconde en général et à l'acquisition des prépositions en particulier, afin d’ identifier les facteurs qui peuvent rendre leur acquisition problématique en L2. Nous proposons également des solutions pédagogiques pour améliorer l’apprentissage des prépositions en anglais. Afin de mesurer l’intelligibilité, nous analysons un corpus de productions orales et écrites contenant des emplois erronés, répartis entre erreurs lexciales et erreurs lexico-grammaticales (additions, omissions ou substitutions). Les résultats de cette analyse permettent de voir dans quelle mesure les erreurs prépositionnelles affectent l’intelligibilité du message. Mots clés : prépositions anglaises, prépositions françaises, propriétés sémantiques, caractéristiques morpho-syntaxiques, acquisition d'une langue seconde, didactique des langues, analyse de corpus, annotation des erreurs 3 ABSTRACT Interlanguage prepositions: an analysis of French learners' productions in L2 English The main objective of our thesis paper is to examine the intelligibility of erroneous prepositional uses produced by French learners of English. We begin with an overview of the semantico-syntactic properties of English and French prepositions. Then we give an account of second language acquisition theories, and we highlight the acquisition of English prepositions by listing a number of reasons that are likely to make them problematic for L2 learners. We also propose certain effective pedagogical approaches to teaching English prepositions/particles. To measure intelligibility, we assess an oral and a written corpus containing L2 erroneous constructions. Our error tagset is divided into lexical and lexico-grammatical errors (addition, omission and substitution). The results of our corpus analysis allow us to observe the extent to which erroneous spatial prepositions may affect the intelligibility of the transferred message. Keywords: English prepositions, French prepositions, semantic properties, morpho-syntactic properties, second language acquisition, language pedagogy, corpus analysis, error annotation 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS ABBREVIATIONS......................................................................................... 8 INTRODUCTION........................................................................................... 10 Chapter I: ENGLISH PREPOSITIONS......................................................... 26 I.1. What is a preposition?............................................................................. 26 I.1.1. Semantic aspects of English prepositions............................................ 29 I.1.2. Formation and position of English prepositions.................................... 32 I.1.3. Syntactic characteristics of English prepositions.................................. 34 I.2. Prepositions: lexical or functional in nature............................................. 41 Chapter II: ENGLISH vs. FRENCH PREPOSITIONS.................................. 50 II.1. The usefulness of a contrastive approach to languages: preposition use................................................................................................................. 50 II.1.1. Basic similarities between English and French prepositions............... 54 II.1.2. Basic differences between English and French prepositions.............. 59 II.2. Are motion events conceptualised similarly in both English and French?.......................................................................................................... 71 Chapter III: LANGUAGE ACQUISITION AND PREPOSITIONS................. 82 III.1. Language acquisition............................................................................. 82 III.1.1. Language learning and communication strategies............................. 86 III.2. Acquiring prepositions............................................................................ 90 III.3. Spatial perception................................................. ................................. 92 III.4. Language specificity............................................................................... 103 III.5. Fossilization........................................................................................... 106 III.6. English as a linguafranca: What about prepositions?............................ 112 III.7. Basic difficulties impeding mastery of English prepositions................... 115 III.8. What type of preposition is most problematic to French learners of English?......................................................................................................... 120 5 Chapter IV: PREPOSITIONS FROM A PEDAGOGICAL PERSPECTIVE... 124 IV.1. English manuals and textbooks............................................................. 124 IV.2. Pedagogical approaches to teaching prepositions/particles.................. 133 IV.2.1. Use of collocational and concordance data........................................ 134 IV.2.2. Cognitive linguistics............................................................................ 153 IV.2.3. Task-based language teaching........................................................... 169 IV.2.4. Motion pictures and iconic gestures................................................... 176 Chapter V: LEARNER ERRORS AND CORPUS ANALYSIS...................... 181 V.1. Errors: their occurrence and significance............................................... 181 V.1.1. Error-annotated learner corpora.......................................................... 188 V.1.2. Error analysis: uses and applications.................................................. 190 V.2. An overview of our learner corpus: Task description and data collection........................................................................................................ 197 V.3. Oral corpus............................................................................................. 201 V.3.1. Basic