Subjunctive Forms Research Articles

Un roman grec by Lucie Ledoux

que le classique par lequel il dit avoir été inspiré. Blériot et Nora sont à des annéeslumi ère des attachants Manon Lescaut et Chevalier Des Grieux. Eastern Connecticut State University Michèle Bacholle-Boškovic LEDOUX, LUCIE. Un roman grec. Montréal: Triptyque, 2010. ISBN 978-2-89031-696-6. Pp. 106. $17 Can. The title itself undergoes the most obvious of several major transformations that take place in Lucie Ledoux’s compelling first novel. The story begins in the Montreal neighborhood of Parc-Extension, where young Lucie Labonté lives with her four sisters and their parents. She goes to school, walks to the dépanneur and to the neighborhood’s ethnic bakeries, sleeps over at friends’ houses and explores Montreal with her taxi-driving dad. Parc-Extension is still immigrant-rich, the adult narrator reminds us, although it is now heavily Pakistani, Indian, Sri Lankan, and Bangladeshi. However, in the 1960s and 1970s, the neighborhood is predominantly Greek: Lucie enjoys baklava as thoroughly as her own mother’s homemade fruit pies and appears at home using basic Greek expressions outside her house. But she also understands that she is different. “Naître à ParcExtension dans les années soixante oblige une petite Québécoise à un drôle d’apprentissage ,” she writes, “elle doit faire la surprenante expérience d’être étrangère dans son propre pays”(14). Following a fairly standard roman d’apprentissage format, the novel soon begins hinting at, then careens directly into tragedy. Little Lucie accidently gives her Greek playmate Mary a concussion when playing on the sidewalk, then avoids her thereafter, even though both girls continue to live in the neighborhood. The narrator wraps up the incident darkly, noting that “[j]’allais vivre là un traumatisme si grand que je le porterais en moi pendant trente ans” (18). We learn that Lucie’s father “entrait parfois dans des colères aussi brusques que foudroyantes” (26–27) and that the girls and their mother must often, inexplicably, spend the night at their unpleasant grandmother ’s house; Lucie loves school but is picked on and not particularly gifted in her studies; as a child she has almost died of meningitis and, feeling much closer to her dad, blames her mother for the near-fatal event: “Je pensais confusément que c’était ma mère qui m’avait transmis le virus mortel quand j’étais dans son ventre et qu’elle m’avait nourrie avec son sang contaminé” (36). Distant and quiet, her mother periodically visits Montreal’s Hôtel-Dieu hospital, whose name allows young Lucie to believe it is an actual hotel. Finally, young Lucie realizes her mother is dying of cancer. The title is thus transformed—from a simple geography into a clever threeword allusion to both a contemporary literary genre and an ancient one: tragedy. The second half of this short novel chronicles Lucie’s mother’s death, moving eloquently between a chronology of her mother’s decline and Lucie’s own devastation , throughout the illness and well into adulthood. As a novel (or, at 106 pages, arguably a novella), Un roman grec delivers the features one expects from a contemporary novel about coming to terms with childhood tragedy and is thus precisely what its title says it will be. Ledoux’s first-person style achieves a certain power, in spite of the many risks inherent in memoir-like autofiction projects. The novel is not without flaws, of course. Occasional forays into metaphor often 598 FRENCH REVIEW 85.3 work, as in a passage where Lucie views her mother’s cancer with childlike jealousy : “[l]a maladie est sa plus tendre amie [...] ma rivale” (70). At times, though, Ledoux delves so deeply into the narrator’s grief that she dwells on details many readers will not find all that significant—like the fact that her mother’s name, Lise, is a subjunctive form of the verb lire, “une action envisagée,” whereas her own nickname, Lu, is a past participle, “un mode dit impersonnel” (90). This connection is not particularly developed. Nor is the sudden appearance, in the novel’s penultimate chapter, of a tripartite, sub-section-like structure, whose parts are...

REEXAMINING THE ROLE OF EXPLICIT INFORMATION IN PROCESSING INSTRUCTION

The present study sought to observe, through online treatments, whether explicit information assists acquisition in a way that has not been measured in previous processing instruction (PI) studies. Two experiments examined learners' behavior while they processed Spanish sentences with object-verb-subject (OVS) word order and Spanish subjunctive under two treatments: with explicit information (the PI group) and without explicit information (the structured input [SI] group). Participants in both groups worked individually with a computer and processed a series of 30 SI items. They received feedback right after each response, and both accuracy and response time were recorded. It was expected that learners in the PI group would start to process both of the linguistic targets sooner in the sequence of input items and would submit their responses faster than learners in the SI group, because explicit information in the PI treatment would help learners notice the target items early in the series. The results showed no difference between the SI group and the PI group when processing OVS sentences, but the PI group processed subjunctive forms sooner and faster than the SI group. The results suggest that the benefits of explicit information might depend on the nature of the task and the processing problem.

Oposiciones entre formas de subjuntivo en latin bajomedieval: el caso de la documentación notarial asturiana

SummaryOn the basis of a selection of Latin-written Asturian documents from the Xlllth Century, we analyse the relation between subjunctive forms

La variable morfosintàctica del subjuntiu a Bovera

The object of this article is the study of subjunctive mood forms in the north-western Catalan dialect of Bovera (Garrigues area). This dialect has traditional verbal forms both in the present subjunctive and in the past subjunctive which morphologically diverge considerably from Standard (i.e. north-eastern) Catalan but due to schooling and media, this Standard Catalan morphology affects the traditional dialect forms and tends to replace them. The data of this study, which has been collected through questionnaire tasks and was supplemented by conversational data, analyses the morphological paradigms and the distribution of individual forms in correlation with various linguistic (morphological and syntactic) and selected sociolinguistic factors. Special attention is devoted to the use of mixed subjunctive forms, i.e. forms which combine Standard Catalan personal endings with non-standard (dialectal or analogically constructed) stems.

The Relationship of Verb Morphology to Second Language Reading Comprehension and Input Processing

The purpose of the present study was to determine the effects of varying the morphological characteristics of input on comprehension and input processing. The input varied as follows. The text used in this study contained nine, targeted subjunctive verbs. These verbs were substituted in other versions of the passage with infinitives and with a nonsense morpheme. Results revealed that passage comprehension, as measured by recall, was significantly lower for the correct, subjunctive forms than for the infinitives and nonsense forms. Input processing, as measured by a word recognition task, was not affected by verb form. No significant correlations were found between comprehension and input processing scores.

Chairing Meetings: Turn and Topic Control in Development Communication in Rural Zanzibar

This paper presents a linguistic analysis of the roles and verbal contributions of chairwomen in two agricultural co-operatives in rural Zanzibar. Discourse analysis with a focus on realizations of politeness and powerless speech style is used to study two communicative events. In the first co-operative, the chairwoman controls the meeting through the allocation of turns and topics, as well as the use of her position and its privileges to persuade others of her opinion. In this context, the use of passive voice, subjunctive forms, hedges, the choice of pronouns and address forms is of specific interest to us. In the second co-operative, an Agricultural Extension Officer present in the meeting interferes, practically taking over the task of chairing the meeting. While the chairwoman is forced to defend her position, her irritation and uncertainty are expressed in contributions that contain several characteristics of a powerless speech style. At the same time, the chairwoman's reply to the intrusion shows commitment and emphasis on a point that is crucial to her. In Meeting Two presequences, false starts, changes in the word order, hedges, direct speech, choice of tense and address forms are particularly relevant.

Some reflections on o sea: A discourse marker in Spanish

This paper examines the Spanish discourse marker o sea; which consists of the preposition o ‘or’ and sea, the third person singular, present subjunctive form of the verb ser ‘to be’. The uses of o sea are grouped into two broad classes: connective and epistemic. Connective uses guide hearers to the correct semantic interpretation between propositions. Epistemic uses mark speakers' degree of commitment to what they say, increasing the modal content of their utterances. In addition, there are also instances of o sea that appear to carry out both connective and epistemic functions. These latter uses challenge the typology of Fraser (1990), who distinguishes discourse markers from other pragmatic markers along similar lines. It is also argued, contra Fraser (1990), that the pragmatic meaning of discourse markers cannot be analyzed without reference to the content meaning of their lexical sources.

Practising German Grammar: A Workbook

Practising German Grammar: A Workbook is designed to accompany the second edition of Hammer's German Grammar and Usage by Martin Durrell (see review in UP, vol. 26 No. 1 [Spring 1993], pp. 115-16) and is intended for intermediate or advanced students of German who may have a good command of spoken German, but who still need to reinforce their knowledge of the structure of the language. Practising German Grammar parallels exactly the twenty-three chapters of Hammer and offers a variety of exercises that are referenced to the relevant grammar explanations. The exercises range from practicing specific grammar points to text-based exercises that show how the language works in context to project exercises that ask students to work with a text, often of their own choosing, to test the usefulness of the rules and classifications they have learned. They are encouraged even to improve on the explanations given in the grammar. The textbased exercises use authentic texts from newspapers, periodicals, business publications, and literature, and the project exercises require students to work with literary and newspaper sources or dictionaries or to interview native speakers to test the grammatical rules that they have learned. The book concludes with an answer key to all exercises with alternative answers and explanations where necessary. Chapter 6, for example, reviews adjective endings in fourteen exercises, most of which require filling the blank with the correct ending of the adjective or of the determiner and adjective. Two of the exercises are sections taken from an essay by Heinrich B6ill and a report on driving safety from the magazine Test. There are two project exercises in this chapter (ex. 3 and 7). The first asks students to interview several native speakers to determine which combination of determiner and adjective endings in the plural is found to be more acceptable (i.e., alle guten Biicher vs. alle gute Biicher) and then to compare the results with the information in Hammer and Duden, Vol. 9. The second project has students make up a list of all types of noun phrases with different determiners, adjectives, and nouns of different genders and declensions. They are then to check in how many examples endings clearly mark case, number, or gender or where endings are ambiguous. In Chapter 16, where subjunctive forms are reviewed, students must first rewrite sentences in indirect discourse or reconstruct direct discourse dialogue from a passage of indirect speech. They are hen asked to select a longer passage from a modern novel to find out how often the subjunctive is used in reported speech, and to compare the results with the rules in Hammer. A similar project has students collect at least 50 examples of subjunctive II from a modern novel or from five newspaper articles to discover how often wirdeforms occur instead of the one-word present subjunctive forms. Practising German Grammar is a well-conceived workbook that covers all the major aspects of the structure of German. It was developed from materials used with undergraduates at the University of Oxford and tested with students in London, Man ester, and Alberta. It is best suited for advanced language courses that also use Hammer's German Grammar and Usage, but it can easily be coordinated with other course materials; and individual chapters can be assigned according to he needs of students. Since an answer key is provided, the workbook lends itself to independent s udy. H lpful suggestions for the user are provided in the preface (vi-viii). The major strengths of th book are its thoroughness, variety of exercises, and the authenticity and usefulness of the language. Advanced students who work through this wo kbook will solidify their knowledge of the structure f German as well as gain confidence in using it. William E. Petig Stanford University

Modality and Intake in Second Language Acquisition

This study replicates, in the aural mode, Leow's (1993) study on the effects of simplification, type of linguistic item, and second/foreign language experience on learners' intake of linguistic items contained in written input. Aural simplified/unsimplified input with either the present perfect or present subjunctive form was made available to learners at two levels of language experience. Statistical analyses performed on the raw scores of a pre- and posttest multiple-choice recognition assessment task revealed significant main effects for type of linguistic item, language experience, and task and a significant interaction between language experience and task. While results corroborate those found in the written mode for the effects of simplification and language experience on adult learners' intake, the same did not hold true for type of linguistic item, underscoring the need for research to consider seriously the role of modality while addressing cognitive processes in SLA.

To Simplify or Not to Simplify

This study investigates the effects of simplification, type of linguistic item, and second language experience on learners' intake of linguistic items contained in written input. Learners at two levels of language experience were exposed to one of the following four conditions: a simplified or unsimplified reading passage with the present perfect tense form or a simplified or unsimplified reading passage with the present subjunctive form. To measure learners' intake, a repeated-measures analysis of variance was performed on the raw scores obtained on a task consisting of a pre- and posttest. The tests were a multiple-choice recognition assessment task. Significant main effects were found for type of passage and language experience, and there was a significant interaction between type of passage and task. Results suggest that simplification does not have a facilitating effect on learners' intake and that learners at different levels demonstrate a different pattern of performance while internalizing written input. Implications for pedagogical written materials and future research are also discussed.

The use of modal verbs in complex sentences: some developments in the Old English period

In his oft-quoted study of indirect discourse (dependent statements, dependent desires and dependent questions) in Old English, J.H. Gorrell concludes the section on ‘the use of the auxiliaries’ by observing in his statistics an increasing frequency of their use in the period, which he relates to the loss of distinctive subjunctive inflexions:The conclusions to be drawn from these statistics are very evident … RegardingCP., Or., Boe., andBedeas representatives of Alfredian prose andAH., Boe.[sic],W., andBH. as types of the language of the later period, the above statistics show that the relative proportion of the subjunctive to the auxiliary forms in the former period is as 3 to 1, while at the time of Ælfric the proportion is as 2 to 1. This postulates, therefore, a growing tendency in the language to make use of the auxiliary constructions, and this tendency was fostered by the gradual breaking-down of the old subjunctive forms, until in course of time the periphrastic constructions almost entirely replaced the inflectional forms.

Some Factors in the Acquisition of the Present Subjunctive in Spanish

In order to attain the superior level on the ACTFL oral proficiency scale, an individual is allowed to display only occasional (unpatterned) errors in the basic grammatical structures of the language being tested (Omaggio). In Spanish this requires consistent control of the indicative/subjunctive contrast, due to the fact that subjunctive forms are pervasive in the language.1 Many second-language learners become quite fluent in Spanish, but fail to gain control over the subjunctive. This study seeks to shed light on some of the factors which may either facilitate or inhibit acquisition of the Spanish indicative/subjunctive contrast, as well as on the difficulty level of various structures which require a mode selection.

Is the Infinitive Really So Basic?

When discussing the German verb, many elementary texts and reference grammars of modern German distinguish between the and the infinitive. Moeller and Liedloff' describe the infinitive as the of a German verb (the listed in dictionaries and vocabularies) that consists of a stem and the ending -en or Taking a somewhat different approach to the infinitive, Johannes Erben2 states that [d]ie verbale Grundform hat das Morphem -en/-n, indicating that the stem, rather than the infinitive, is the verbal form. George O. Curme's3 method for determining the stem of the verb involves cutting off -en from the infinitive, or -n after -el and -er, to arrive at the of which grow all the varied of conjugation. The discussion of the stem of the strong verb in the Duden grammar 4 identifies a first Stammform of the verb for the formation of the present indicative and first subjunctive and a second Stammform for the formation of the preterite indicative and second subjunctive forms. These discussions of the stem and the infinitive raise the question, Is the German infinitive really the 'basic' of the verb? Should it necessarily be the of the verb we first introduce to our beginning students in vocabularies and glossaries? Could there perhaps be convincing reasons to introduce our students first to the present stems of German verbs as forms and treat infinitives as derivatives of these? Since we prefer that our students learn the language primarily as a means of communication rather than as a system of grammatical paradigms, it is to their advantage to learn the verbs in a way that helps them avoid unnecessary confusion about the these verbs take in discourse. We could prevent the tendency of many beginning students to use the infinitive as the personal in simple utterances by first presenting the stem of the verb as the basic and the infinitive later as derived from it. This article discusses some reasons for beginning with stems and a method for doing so. Clearly the standard way to present German verbs in dictionaries and vocabularies is to list them in their infinitive forms, even though we are repeatedly told that the personal of the simple tenses are derived not from their infinitives, but from their stems. The infinitive, as is pointed out in one way or another, is the present tense stem with the ending -en or -n. The notable exception is, of course, the infinitive sein. Although it is certainly valid to list the German verb in the infinitive in dictionaries, it is more confusing than helpful to students of elementary German to present the infinitive as the form of a verb in beginning textbooks. Linguistically unsophisticated students in beginning German have no clear concept of the difference between the stem and infinitive of a German verb. This seems to be due to the ambiguous relationship between the stem and infinitive in English. Whereas the English make, for example, functions both as the stem of the present tense and as the infinitive, the German machen functions as the infinitive but never as

Subjunctive with Spirit

Foreign language educators are experiencing a mounting demand from business, industry, and government for verbal communication skills in foreign language education.' Given this demand, there exists greater incentive than ever before to promote conversation in the foreign language classroom. Most teachers can stimulate conversation in the present indicative tense with relative ease but encounter difficulty in helping students to speak in the subjunctive mood. For teachers as well as students, the study of the subjunctive is too often an odious task that slows a lively class down to an agonizing plod. Even the authors of some foreign language textbooks apparently feel that the subjunctive mode does not lend itself readily to oral practice. Many introductory Spanish texts on today's market create lively conversational contexts for building oral confidence in various indicative tenses, but too few go beyond theoretical discussions and rote fill-inthe-blank exercises for the subjunctive.2 The results of an exclusively written approach to the subjunctive are all too familiar. Personal experience has shown most language teachers that weeks of subjunctive study through written exercises can help students master a set of formulas for an exam but do little to enhance their conversational skills. Students who are not offered the opportunity to create original sentences in the subjunctive will seldom develop enough confidence to use this mode in conversation. This article presents an oral, contextual approach to Spanish subjunctive study which has been used successfully in the classroom at the elementary, intermediate, and advanced levels. This oral approach is based on the premise that since the subjunctive is widely used in native Spanish speech, foreign language educators should be able to find conversational contexts in which to teach it. With imagination, a teacher can establish a variety of conversational situations in which students want to express wishes, recommendations, preferences, emotions, and doubts-all situations in which they find they need the subjunctive. Initial exercises for each subjunctive usage should be tightly structured to allow students to conce trate on subjunctive verb forms and to hear many correct examples of the usage. As the students gain confidence with each usage of the subjunctive, the exercises should b come more open-ended, allowing for creativity and humor. The sample exercises presented in this article range from structured drills for elementary classes to more difficult creative activities. These should suggest the infinite variety of oral subjunctive exercises which can animate language classes on all levels.

The non-occurrence of a t- prefix in certain Jibbāli verbal forms

In an earlier issue of BSOAS I published some notes on an interesting feature of the Socotri language, namely that certain imperfect forms lack the t-prefix which marks 2nd and certain 3rd person forms in Semitic languages.The J(ibbāli), or Śherí, language of Dhofar also exhibits this negative feature, and in much the same series of forms; principally the indicative, subjunctive, and conditional forms of causative verbs, intensive-conative verbs, quadriliteral verbs and passive verbs.

Remember the Tradition?

Technical writers are speeding language change by dropping possessive forms of nouns before gerunds, subjunctive forms of verbs after “if,” full words to make acronyms, and subjects (and thereby dangle modifiers). Until a generation ago, English teachers and editors admonished students and writers to uphold the traditions of formal style. Remember these traditions: Use noun and verb forms for fullest immediate understanding. Spell out acronyms the first time that you use them, and modify stated subjects. What you lose in time, you gain in meaning.

The Habit of Perception in Foreign Language Learning: Insights into Error from Contrastive Analysis

Languages signal different meaning distinctions through their grammatical units as well as through their vocabulary items. Many errors in a foreign language result not merely from inaccurately learned grammatical items or structures formed on the basis of the learner's native language. They may, instead, represent failure to understand the meaning distinctions indicated in the grammar of the new language that are not marked by a specific form in the native language, or failure to choose habitually the correct form to represent the meaning even when the distinction is understood. For example, the native speaker of English may know the concepts expressed by the Spanish subjunctive, yet fail to indicate them in every case by use of a subjunctive form when using Spanish. A task of the learner of a foreign language is thus to perceive the new meaning distinctions marked in the grammar of the language he is learning and then form the habit of indicating such distinctions when using the language. In other words, he must think in terms of new conceptual units. A task of the language teacher is to devise material to help the learner do this, so that habits of perception and indication of meaning distinctions as well as production of new grammatical forms and vocabulary items become automatic.