The expression of intensification in the interlanguage of French-speaking CLIL and non-CLIL learners of English

Hendrikx, Isa [UCL] Van Goethem, Kristel [UCL] Meunier, Fanny [UCL]

The expression of intensification in the interlanguages of French-speaking CLIL and non-CLIL learners of English Our contribution will present the first results of a research project on the acquisition of Dutch and English intensifying constructions by Belgian French-speaking secondary school pupils. This study forms part of a broader interdisciplinary project on Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) in French-speaking Belgium. CLIL classrooms provide greater input frequency of the foreign language than traditional education. The present study will describe the ‘interlanguage’ (in terms of overuse, underuse and misuse) of French-speaking CLIL and non-CLIL learners of English, in order to measure the impact of foreign language input on L2 acquisition in general, and on intensifying constructions specifically. Emotion is a driving force behind the formation and the development of intensifiers: the constant need for emotional expressivity induces rapid renewal in the domain (Van der Wouden & Foolen forth.; Foolen, Wottrich en Zwets 2012). The resulting variety of intensifiers and the continuous change in this field, together with the fact that intensifiers are mostly not the subject of explicit language education, may thoroughly complicate the acquisition of intensifiers in a foreign language. Another complicating factor is the difference in language-specific tendencies to use syntactic or morphological types of intensifying constructions. In accordance with studies on the idiosyncratic preferences for either morphological or syntactic constructions in Germanic and Romance languages (Van der Wouden & Foolen forth.; Van Haeringen 1956; Lamiroy 20011), we hypothesize that French-speaking learners of English will i) underuse typical Germanic means of intensification such as ‘elative’ compounds (e.g. ice-cold) (Hoeksema, 2012) and ii) overuse syntactic constructions frequently used in French (Riegel, Pellat & Rioul 1994: 620, 622). As CLIL programs can be considered closer to L1 acquisition because of their inherently usage-based approach, we can expect a more native-like acquisition of intensifying constructions by CLIL pupils. Crosslinguistic influence is widely acknowledged in the domains of phonology and lexis, however morphological and syntactic transfer have been approached with skepticism, due to their interaction with variables such as simplification and overgeneralization (Jarvis & Pavlenko 2008: 92; Jarvis & Odlin 2000). In the present study Gilquin’s (2008) DEE model (serving the purposes of detecting, explaining or evaluating transfer) will be applied in a partial way (because of the lack of data of learners with L1’s other than French). We will thus conduct a comprehensive comparison of ‘native English’, ‘learner English by French-speaking CLIL- and non-CLIL-learners’ and ‘native French’ in order to detangle transfer effects from simplification and overgeneralization of intensifiers (and intensifier types) in the interlanguages of CLIL and non-CLIL learners of English. Our corpus consists of the written productions (email on a topic prompting the use of intensifiers) of 473 5th graders (16-17 years old) in French-speaking Belgium among whom: 104 CLIL learners of English, and 114 learners of English in non-CLIL education, and a control group of about 100 native English speakers of the same age (data collection in progress). In our talk, we present the detailed outcomes of the quantitative and qualitative analyses of this study. Besides the analysis of over-, under- and misuse of intensifiers, we will examine the extent of lexical variation and productivity of the intensifiers in the different language groups (type/token ratio, hapax legomena ratio), compare the most frequent intensifiers, and observe possible difficulties related to collocational specialization. References Foolen, A., V. Wottrich & M. Zwets (2012). Gruwelijk interessant. Emotieve intensiveerders in het Nederlands. Manuscript. Gilquin, Gaëtanelle. Combining contrastive and interlanguage analysis to apprehend transfer: detection, explanation, evaluation. In: Gilquin Gaëtanelle Papp Szilvia Díez-Bedmar María Belén, Linking up Contrastive and Learner Corpus Research, Rodopi: Amsterdam, Atlanta, 2008, 3-33. 978-90-420-2446-5. Hoeksema, J. (2012). Elative compounds in Dutch: Properties and developments. In Oebel, G. (Eds.), Intensivierungskonzepte bei Adjektiven und Adverben im Sprachvergleich, (pp. 97-142). Hamburg: Verlag Dr. Kovac. Jarvis, Scott, & Pavlenko, Aneta (2008). Crosslinguistic influence in language and cognition. New York: Routledge. Jarvis, Scott, & Odlin, Terence (2000). Morphological type, spatial reference, and language transfer. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 22, 535-556. Lamiroy, B. (2011). Degrés de grammaticalisation à travers les langues de même famille. Mémoires de la Société de linguistique de Paris. Nouvelle Série, 19, 167-192. Riegel, M., Pellat, J.-C., Rioul, R. (1994). Grammaire méthodique du français. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Van der Wouden & Foolen, forth. A most serious and extraordinary problem. Intensification of adjectives in Dutch, German, and English. Paper delivered at A Germanic Sandwich 2013. Dutch between English and German, a Comparative Linguistic Conference. Leuven (Belgium), January 11-12, 2013.To appear in Leuvense bijdragen/Leuven Contributions in Linguistics and Philology Van Haeringen, C.B. (1956). Nederlands tussen Duits en Engels. Den Haag: Servire.