La variation synchronique et diachronique de la syntaxe de la négation du français chez des adultes en milieu guidé

Our main hypothesis is that negation and finitness are linked in the developpment of Foreign Language Aquisition in some comparable ways as they are for First Language Acquisition. By contrasting syncronic intrapersonal variability data with change occuring in the diacronic data about negation, we show how adult learners of French in a classroom environment switch from a Nominal Utterance Organization governed by semantic-pragmatic strategies to a Finite Utterance Organization constrained by syntactic rules (Klein & Perdue, 1993, 1997). Specific to our context of investigation, this phenomenom can be observed through the increasing rate of overt and covert-repairs in spontaneous oral production (Levelt, 1989), which are signs of metalinguistic consciousness emerging parallel to the process of grammaticalization.