The acquisition of French

The morphologization of an Arabic creole

“…It is precisely the differences which present the classical challenge of accounting for creole genesis economically and within a general framework of development. It has, however, been argued here (and indeed elsewhere; Owens 1980Owens , 1989Owens , 1991aOwens , 2001) that Nubi defies easy categorization within existing theories of creole genesis. The substratal debate, one of the most interesting and widespread in creole studies, is of little direct relevance; prior pidginization, as argued above in 4.1, has no explanatory value in the development of Nubi morphology; a feature pool perspective says little of interest for Nubi genesis; whatever its inherent value, the features of the Bioprogram fail to match Nubi structure.…”

“…As is well known, Bickerton argued that creoles, or a 'radical' sub-class thereof had such an impoverished learning input that speakers of the emergent creoles needed to resort to their innate language learning capacities, their bioprogram. In Owens (1980Owens ( , 1985Owens ( , 1990Owens ( , 1991a I argued that although the social and historical conditions for the emergence of Nubi matched those of the radical creoles (see summary in 2.1 above), Nubi lacked too many of the expected bioprogrammatic traits to make this explanation for Nubi-genesis plausible.…”

The influence of lexical aspect and input frequency in the L2 French of adult beginners

“…Based on earlier studies on the influence of lexical aspect in L2 French (Noyau et al 1995;Andersen 2002), a first hypothesis, Hypothesis 1, was made. According to this hypothesis, learners at beginner stages would mainly use the short form with state verbs and the long form with dynamic verbs, regardless of the context, present tense or infinitive.…”

“…The study of temporality within the European Science Foundation project, based on data from L2 learners in naturalistic contexts with different source and target languages (see e.g. Klein & Perdue 1997), suggested that beginners rely on lexical aspect (Aktionsart) to express temporal distinctions (Noyau et al 1995;Perdue et al 2002:860). The learners of French used mainly two basic forms, a V-Ø form and a V-[e] form (Noyau et al 1995:167, her transcription), which correspond to what I refer to as short and long forms, respectively (see above).…”

Typologie et dynamiques des langues : les études acquisitionnelles sur les processus de morphologisation temporelle

“…Chez des apprenants arabophones de français dans le milieu social, on observe une longue période de profusion allomorphique des verbes (cf. Noyau 1998), avant que la place pré-verbale (Noyau 1991(Noyau , 1995(Noyau , 1997 montre que le prétérit se stabilise comme temps de base de la narration d'événements révolus du monde réel bien avant de marquer les verbes de la trame des récits de fiction, ce qui met bien en lumière la prépondérance de la fonction sémantique (temporelle) du prétérit : passé / non-passé, sur la fonction discursive : marquer les événements de la trame narrative. La fonction référentielle précède la fonction conventionnelle tenant à un type textuel.…”