NOUN PHRASE AS GRAMMATICAL COMPETENCE ELEMENT OF THE FRENCH LANGUAGE FINAL WRITTEN EXAMINATION

Abstract

The individual words frequency lists provide little information about learners’ lexical and grammatical competence, because words are not used isolated in speech. In order to investigate the learner’s ability to combine them, it is more meaningful to analyse several word groups. A noun phrase as one of the key elements of the sentence was selected for the study; its analysis enables us to explain certain peculiarities of the learner’s language. Based on empirical learner corpus data, which consists of the French as foreign language final written exam papers, it is attempted to determine the prevailing structural types of noun phrases and their characteristics and assess their effect on the grammatical competence acquisition. The analysis of data, as mentioned, is directed essentially to the noun phrase as linguistic competence acquisition, but the corpus provides an opportunity to investigate all linguistic facts (lexical, morphosyntactic). Research into the interlanguage of Lithuanian learners learning French is rather scarce. The initial corpus analysis showed that learners use a lot of similar word groups. Their repetition is determined by not high level of learners’ language skills. In order to write as correctly as possible, students often begin their sentences with identical, well-learned structures. However, even using some of the phrases often learners make certain usage errors. Standard deviations are explained as the native language and the English language influence. Indistinct grammatical certainty of noun phrases in the Lithuanian language affects the certainty of noun phrases in French; they are often confused, specific indicators are omitted. The study of noun phrases reveals the mainstream trends of lexical and grammatical constructions usage in the learner corpus; on the whole the study of noun phrases provides valuable insights for further research. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7220/2335-2027.6.7