Search

The present study deals with the French gerund and the Swedish syntactic correspondences in a parallel corpus. The analysis is based on 3,988 authentic instances of the gerund and their corresponding structures in Swedish texts. These are collected in a corpus consisting of 13 original contemporary French novels and 13 original contemporary Swedish novels, including their respective translations. The main purpose is to identify the Swedish corresponding structures and consider how, and to what extent, they transmit the integrative function and the adverbial interpretations of the French gerund. Nine Swedish reoccurring structures are discerned, including the most common: coordinated clauses and adverbial clauses. The study shows that the nine Swedish structures share the integrative capacity of the gerund to different degrees, as well as how they transmit the adverbial interpretations in various ways. Some Swedish syntactic structures correlate with particular adverbial interpretation of the gerund. Another aim is to contribute to the existing research on the French gerund: the semantic analysis of the corpus has led to question – with authentic examples – the alleged absolute inability of the gerund to denote an eventuality that is the consequence of the eventuality denoted by the superordinate clause. The study also reveals, in light of Swedish corresponding structures, the relationship between certain adverbial interpretations of the gerund and more independent syntax in French.

The aim of this study is to examine the use of subordinate clauses in the written production of second language French by ten Swedish-speaking learners at an upper secondary school/a senior high school. The learners’ general level of development has been evaluated by means of the automatic analyzer of texts Direkt Profil constructed by Granfeldt, J., Nugues, P et al at the University of Lund. In the first part, a transversal study of 30 texts written by ten learners during three months (August – October 2009), has resulted in the proposal of the following acquisitional sequence concerning the subordinate clauses : qui > quand > que-complétif > parce que > que-relatif > si/même si > comme > où. We propose that the relative clause introduced by qui is to be regarded as the first step and a great number of these clauses in our corpus are so called prefabricated chunks, learned in their entirety, as for example : qui s’appelle... or qui a ... ans. Concerning the nominal subordinate clause introduced by que, we suspect a certain influence from the Swedish language as the conjunction is omitted in several cases. Our proposed acquisitional sequence is compared with the acquisitional sequence concerning syntactic complexity proposed by Inge Bartning and Suzanne Schlyter, which is based on spoken French of adult Swedish-speaking learners. We notice an earlier and more frequent use of subordinations in our written material than has been proposed by Bartning and Schlyter for their spoken material. In the second part, the longitudinal study, the individual development of five of the ten learners, whose texts have been studied also in the first part, is examined. The material has been completed with three more texts from each learner and it covers eigth months of the first year at the upper secondary school/the senior high school (August 2009 – April 2010). We notice a clear increase of subordinate clauses in the texts of all the five learners, in spite of the fact that the evaluation of their general level of lingustic development (according to Direkt Profil) shows that three of five learners are at the same level of development in April 2010, as they were in August 2009. We also see that our proposed acquisitional sequence is valid for the learners at the lower level while the learners at an advanced level construct other types of subordinate clauses than those which occurred in the corpus of the transversal part of our study.