La production des scenarios contrefactuels par des apprenants adultes hispanophones

Abstract

The production of alternatives to factual events implies a counterfactual thinking in which reality is compared to an imagined view of what might have been. Previous studies in linguistics have analyzed counterfactuality in the context of conditional constructionsif P (then) Q(Bates 1976; Bloom 1981; Reilly 1982; Au 1983; Liu 1985; Bernini 1994; Chini 1995; Schouten 2000; Yeh & Gentner 2005). This article aims to describe the use of simple conditional sentences in a mutation task by 30 Spanish-speaking learners of French. In quantitative terms, the frequency of use of the conditional tense in the learner group is similar to that of the French control group for the same task. In qualitative terms, however, the way in which learners use the conditional differs from the native pattern in several ways: the use of the conjunction-queat the head of the mutation core (i.e.,Qu’elle aurait pu choisir son repas ‘That she could have chosen her meal’); the omission of a modal in the mutation core (i.e.,Son supérieur aurait choisi les moules‘Her superior would have chosen the mussels’) or the use of a modal verb elsewhere than in the past participle position (i.e.,Elle pourrait avoir commandé elle-même‘She could have ordered herself’). Our results show that in the production of counterfactual scenarios, the learners combine flexional features that match the native pattern with syntactic and lexical elements dominant in the organizational principles of information in the L1

The Impact of the Source Language in Spanish Translations: A Survey on English Counterfactuals ‘Should have’

“…Crosslinguistic studies have shown that different languages might have different salient categories to express time, space, movement or irreality (Carroll et al 2008;Van linden and Verstraete 2008). In general, these differences lead L2 learners to explicitly replicate the salient categories of their L1 in their oral productions (Slobin 1996;Carroll et al 2012;Hung 2012;Repiso 2014). As avowed connoisseurs of metalinguistic issues, translators avoid overt transfers.…”

“…These authors have shown that there is no one single dedicated marker to encode counterfactuality across languages but rather a combination of elements that have other functions in other contexts (i.e., past-tense markers, aspectual markers, modal markers). In Spanish, the use of the perfect subjunctive is significantly higher compared to the combination of the past conditional and a modal marker (Repiso 2014). If the grammatical categories to express counterfactuality change from one language to another, the question arises whether translators replicate the source construction or use prominent constructions of the target language.…”