Chapter 9
Variation in choice of prepositions with place names on the French L1–L2 continuum in Ontario, Canada
This study examines the use of prepositions à (‘in/to’), au (‘in the/to the’),
and en (‘in/to’) with place names across the French first-language – second-language continuum in Ontario,
Canada. The study draws on speech corpora collected among seven groups of students who use French and English to varying
extents in daily life. Choice of expected prepositions in French is determined by complex rules reflecting a place name’s
category and morphological and phonological properties, while in English it reflects the ‘+/– motion’ feature of the verb. The
findings reveal that rates of expected preposition use are influenced to varying extents by the relative difficulty of the
prepositions, the students’ position on the continuum, their individual use of French, and their susceptibility to the
influence of inter-systemic transfer.
Article outline
- Introduction
- Complexity and inter-systemic transfer
- Context and continuum
- Prior research
- Ontario French immersion students vs. Franco-Ontarian students
- Variation in preposition choice by Franco-Ontarian students
- Variation in preposition choice by FL2 speakers
- Methods
- Corpora
- Quebec city student corpus (Group 1)
- Franco-Ontarian student corpus (Groups 2, 3, 4, 5)
- FL2 university student corpus (Group 6)
- FL2 high school student corpus (Group 7)
- Summary of corpora
- Data analysis
- Place names requiring à
- Expected use
- Unexpected use
- Place names requiring au
- Expected use
- Unexpected use
- Place names requiring en
- Expected use
- Unexpected use
- Research issues and hypotheses
- Inter-group differences for à, au, and en
- Individual use of French
- Inter-systemic transfer: ‘+/– motion’ verbs
- Results
- Inter-group differences for à, au, and en
- Influence of individual use of French
- Inter-systemic influence of the ‘+/– motion’ verb distinction
- Discussion
-
Notes
-
References
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