Research on how gender affects language have been long documented by several studies in the world. In many of these works, mostly done in variationist sociolinguistics, it has been claimed that women and men are different in their speech from one another. The paper investigates gender variation in Wolof-French codeswitching. More specifically it examines how male and female codeswitching are different in terms of frequency, types and other linguistic forms. The conversations of twelve Wolof-French bilingual students and office workers are analysed in this study. Results from this study show that women codeswitch more frequently than men. The study also indicates that intra-sentential codeswitching is the mostly used type in men's and women's speech. It has also been shown that the French discourse marker "quoi" is far more used in men speech and constitutes then a linguistic feature that differentiates men and women language. However, even if both genders prefer intra-sentential types of codeswitching, women tend to use it more 61,44% of their speech against 56,66% for men. Men, on the other hand, produce more inter-sentential codeswitching instances than women 13,02% against 12,53%.
This study identifies, classifies, and interprets the grammatical errors made by 30 second-year students at the English Department of Cheikh Anta Diop University of Dakar (Senegal) in their grammar translation tests. The said students took a course on Grammar during the academic year 2018-2019. The exercises consist of translating some French sentences into English. The errors made by these participants can be classified into seven categories. There are errors in the use of tenses, auxiliaries, articles, relative adverbs. In addition, morphological and structural error types and other errors related to the choice of verbs (i.e., tell/say) have also been listed. The results show that the participants made both inter-lingual errors (due to the influence of French language) and intra-lingual errors (over generalization of rules, addition or omission of items, etc.).
This paper describes and compares reflexive verbs in English and French. In collecting the data, a number of books and research works related to the subject have been analysed, using the contrastive method. Results of the analysis indicate that reflexives display a great difference between the two languages. The main observed similarity occurs with the emphatic form. Indeed, the English pronouns “myself”, “himself”, “ourselves” etc, and their French counterparts moi-même, lui-même, nous-mêmes are used in the same way. Points of differences are presented as follows: while French puts the pronominal clitics me, te, se, nous, vous before the verb, English places pronouns after e.g., se blesser “to hurt oneself”. One of most important differences that several verbs take reflexive pronouns in French while their English counterparts don’t e.g., se demander “to wonder”. It has also been noted that, in English, the same pronouns are used to express both emphatic and non-emphatic forms while French distinctively uses toi-même, elles- mêmes etc. to emphasize; and the pronominal clitics in simple forms. In the reciprocal voice, the English pronouns “each other” and “one another” are less ambiguous than their French corresponding ones. For instance, Nous nous aimons means both “we love ourselves” (reflexivity) and “we love each other / one another” (reciprocity). Finally, it is shown that some English verbs do not appear with reciprocal pronouns but their French equivalents do e.g., “to meet” se rencontrer.
The question of whether a learner in bilingual education can have the same performance in both languages is a vexed issue as it has long been investigated with controversial findings. This research was conducted in “Barrack Obama” bilingual private school of Dakar with a French-English program. The first and second semester marks of twenty-two learners in 8th grade have been used to measure the latter’s performance in the two languages during the academic year 2018-2019. It follows our analysis that fifteen of these students have a similar annual grade in both languages while three others show more performance in French; and the remaining four are better at English. However, the study also shows that the said balanced bilinguals have lack of proficiency in both languages. Only few of them (4) have good and equivalent proficiency in both languages while the remainder show weaker performance. This imbalance is surely due to the age at which he learner enters the bilingual system, their IQ and their ability to learn languages as well.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.