La construction linguistique de la durée en anglais et en français par Agnès Leroux

Abstract

Reviewed by: La construction linguistique de la durée en anglais et en français par Agnès Leroux Jeff Tennant Leroux, Agnès. La construction linguistique de la durée en anglais et en français. Peter Lang, 2018. ISBN 978-2-8076-0700-2. Pp. 274. Writing primarily for an audience of specialists in enunciation theory and English language teaching, the author presents a fine-grained analysis of expressions of duration in French (pendant, pour) and English (for). The discussion is situated within the framework of Antoine Culioli's Theory of Predicative and Enunciative Operations (TOPE, in French). Working with the two languages in parallel, the study is situated within a contrastive linguistics perspective. The data are drawn from written-language corpora: the Corpus of Contemporary American (COCA) and British National Corpus (BNC) for English; Lextutor and Frantext for French, as well as the Corpus de littérature contemporaine (CODEXT). The primary goal is to contribute to the teaching of these expressions by addressing the specific challenges they pose to French L1 learners of English L2. The introduction gives a general overview. Chapter 1 presents the [End Page 284] theoretical perspective, the concepts of markers and structures within the TOPE framework, and the notions of language pedagogy that motivate the study, as well as the methodology. Chapters 2 to 5 delve into the details of the analysis: typology of referential expressions in English and French: constructions or markers? (chapter 2); operational schemata of for, pendant and depuis (chapter 3); target, scope and construction of durational meaning, from the temporal to the subjective (chapter 4); construction of durational meaning and intersubjectivity: diversification of relational expressions in French (chapter 5). Categories of duration expressions in English and French are presented in several tables, with table 5 in the concluding chapter summing up the core classification. The classification distinguishes different types of processes viewed from the angle of their duration (discrete, dense, or compact), showing correspondences between the two languages for various combinations of verb tenses with the prepositions pendant and depuis in French, and for in English. Chapter 6 focuses on language instruction. Following a discussion of the competing priorities of action-based versus reflection-based approaches, of learning based on usage or explicit study of language forms, the treatment of duration expressions in three published grammars of English for Francophones is analyzed critically, their key shortcoming being the presentation of correspondences in forms between the two languages without the interface of an analysis of the expression of duration in English. Findings are presented from an exploratory teaching experiment based on written productions of quatrième (eighth grade) students who were provided, following an exercise serving as a pre-test, instruction focusing their attention on the expression of duration with for. Results of the post-test show a lower error rate than in the pre-test, thus illustrating the promise for successful application of the findings to teaching. The concluding chapter sums up key findings and offers liminary reflections on teaching applications through guided reflection and an interface appropriate to learners' level. The presentation is highly technical and thus a reader lacking a solid background in Culioli's theory will struggle to follow the detailed, rigorous presentation and discussion of examples. However, curriculum designers for English language instruction can glean core findings from the introduction, chapter 6 and the concluding chapter. Jeff Tennant University of Western Ontario Copyright © 2020 American Association of Teachers of French