Languages, Literatures, & Cultures
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Item Apologies in French: An Analysis of Remedial Discourse Strategies Used by L1 Speakers(2009) Bodapati, Sandhya; Yotsukura, Lindsay; Modern French Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Speech act research has contributed much to our understanding of contextual L1 and L2 use in various languages. French, however remains largely ignored. The handful of studies that do exist are confined to a rather small set of speech acts. Although common in everyday discourse, French apologies have been underrepresented in the literature. This exploratory study attempts to observe and quantify apology strategies utilized by the French. Data were collected from L1 speakers in three phases. In Phase 1, 11 respondents provided conflict situations--used to construct a Discourse Completion Task (DCT)--that would require an apology in France. Twenty-two separate speakers completed a rating scale in Phase 2, stating their perceptions regarding sociolinguistic factors underlying the conflict situations. Finally in Phase 3, 85 respondents completed the DCT, which sought their reactions to the apology situations. Five main findings are discussed. First, L1 speakers most commonly used an explicit expression of apology or provided explanations as remedial strategies. This finding differs from previous studies on French L1 apologies in which accepting responsibility for the offense was the second most-used strategy after explicit apologies. Second, it was found that not all apology utterances performed a remedial function in all situations; certain linguistic formulae typically used to offer redress were also used as mitigators to potentially face-threatening acts such as complaining. Third, of several sociolinguistic factors operative within a situation, severity of the offense and the speaker's obligation to apologize seemed to have the most influence on apology strategy selection. Fourth, a survey of L1 speakers revealed that a majority felt it more important for an L2 speaker to be sociopragmatically competent in the target language than to demonstrate grammatical accuracy alone. Finally, the results suggest that the DCT continues to be a highly effective data elicitation instrument. In the present study, it not only facilitated quick access to a large data set, but it also allowed participants to make ancillary comments. Such insights might not have been revealed as readily through data collected in naturalistic settings through participant observation or role-plays--methods that have been deemed more reliable than the DCT.Item Grammatical Gender Representation and Processing in Advanced Second Language Learners of French(2009) Vatz, Karen L.; DeKeyser, Robert; Michael, Erica B; Second Language Acquisition and Application; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)One of the most difficult challenges of learning French as a foreign language is mastering the gender system. Although there are theories that account for how French native speakers (NSs) master their gender system, it is not fully understood why second language (L2) learners are unable to do the same. The goal of the present study was to investigate this difference in ability between French NSs and non-native speakers (NNSs), specifically, how L2 learners of French store grammatical gender knowledge, and how their storage system relates to processing of grammatical gender in terms of the ability to realize accurate gender agreement throughout a sentence. First, a gender priming task investigated whether advanced L2 learners have developed a gender-nodal system in which gender information is stored as an inherent property of a noun. Second, an online grammaticality judgment task addressed L2 learners' gender agreement ability during processing, while taking into account (a) the role of gender cues available to the participant, and (b) non-linguistic processing constraints such as working memory (WM) through manipulating the distance of an adjective from the noun with which it must agree. In order to investigate the role of a learner's native language (L1) in gender representation and processing, participants included learners of French from three L1 groups: Spanish, whose gender system is congruent to that of French; Dutch, whose gender system is incongruent to that of French; and English, whose gender system is minimal, relative to French. A group of NS controls also participated. Results from the gender priming task indicate that the NNSs in the current study have not developed a native-like gender-nodal system, regardless of L1-L2 gender-system similarity. At-chance accuracy on the grammaticality judgment task indicates L2 gender agreement is far from native-like, even for advanced learners. Whereas the presence of gender cues was beneficial, neither WM nor L1-L2 similarity facilitated performance. The results from this study confirm previous findings on the difficulty of L2 gender agreement, and shed light on the nature of L2 gender representation as a possible explanation for this processing difficulty.Item In the Margins: Representations of Otherness in Subtitled French Films(2008-05-05) Turek, Sheila; Eades, Caroline; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Translation involves integration of a multitude of disciplines and perspectives from which to compare two or more cultures. When translation is extended to film dialogue, in subtitling, the target language viewer unfamiliar with the source language must rely upon the subtitles to access the film's dialogue provided within the space of the verbal exchange, and often the subtitles offer an altered version of the dialogue, particularly given the time and space constraints of the medium. Subtitling, a unique form of translation, not only involves interlingual transfer but also intersemiotic transfer from a spoken dialogue to a written text. This work examines the linguistic treatment of three marginalized groups--homosexuals, women, and foreigners--as expressed in subtitles. In many instances, translation of certain elements in the films, such as forms of address and general referential language, change the meaning for the TL viewer. Cultural references present in the oral dialogue often get omitted or modified in the subtitles, altering the TL viewer's perception of the narrative and characters. These differently rendered translations have connotative qualities that are often differ significantly from the oral dialogue. In many cases, epithets and grammatically gendered language in the SL dialogue get diluted or omitted in the TL subtitles; likewise, power relationships expressed through use of forms of address, such as titles or tutoiement and vouvoiement, cannot be adequately conveyed, and the TL viewer is excluded from this nuanced form of discourse. Cultural references providing supplemental information, including non-dialogic text, are not always rendered in the subtitles, depriving the TL viewer of additional layers of meaning. In dual-language films featuring foreigners, nuances expressed by code switching and code mixing cannot be completely represented in the subtitles. Close analysis of subtitles within the framework of the sociolinguistic and cultural interpretations of the resultant TL dialogue reveals a great deal about the transmission and reception of cultural ideas and has not been addressed to this extent from this perspective. It is to be hoped that this study will inspire interest in further explorations of this nature and contribute to the ever-growing corpus of research in subtitling studies.