Counterfactual Conceptualizations in L2 French: From Cognitive Principles to Semantic and Lexical Realizations

Abstract

This preliminary survey examines how 30 native speakers and 30 Spanish learners of French evoke counterfactual scenarios from a semantic and a lexical perspective. Counterfactual thinking is a universal cognitive process in which reality is confronted with an imagined view of what might have been (Kahneman & Tversky 1982). The world as we know it is based on a set of enabling conditions that can be mutated, i.e., modified in order to evoke counterfactual worlds. This can be done by modifying various elements in a sentence. For example, speakers might produce counterfactual scenarios by replacing an accusative (1) or by changing some attribute of the subject (2).(1) I should have had coffee at breakfast rather than tea.(2) If I were a man, my life would have been quite different.In each case, a specific language property is changed. Example (1) results from a modification operated on transitivity, and example (2) on affectedness. While counterfactual thinking is universal, its concrete form is only shaped in childhood together with the acquisition of the first language. Is this concrete form preserved or changed in second language acquisition? Earlier research has shown that speakers of different languages have different preferences to do that (Repiso 2013). This survey compares whether non-native speakers of French adopt the same preferences which native speakers have at the level of Verb-Argument Constructions (VACs).