Pragmatic Connectives and L2 Acquisition: The Case of French and Dutch

The purpose of this paper is to address the question of connectives from a contrastive point of view. By connectives I understand a particular class of linguistic elements, viz. adverbs and conjunctions that function as linkers between clauses, sentences or larger text fragments. The languages to be dealt with are French and Dutch. The present research grew from the following empirical observation: Dutch speaking students of French encounter very serious difficulties in correctly handling French connectives.2 Given that connectives also exist in their native language, the obvious question to raise is why this is so: why do those students have so much trouble to use poLrtant, toul de mAme, alors, etc. in an appropriate way ? The equivalence problem, which is a central issue in contrastive linguistics, appears to be particularly serious in the domain of connectives. Furthermore, when we deal with syntactic and semantic problems of French, we can usually refer to some rule system, to a chapter of the grammar or to a dictionary. When we deal with connectives, however, we are often left with a statement such as "this is not quite the way a French native speaker would say it". This amounts to saying that connectives are not only badly used by students, but that they are also often poorly taught by teachers. In order to gain insight into this problem, and eventually to solve it, I would like to explore fwo hypotheses, the second being probably a little more controversial I hope refreshingly controversial than the first. The first idea I will provide evidence for, is that adequate use of connectives is intrinsically a difficult matter, even for native speakers. This may be so because connectives involve a variety of processes, both cognitive skills and linguistic competence. To the former belong abilities such as deductive capacity, logical reasoning, concentration, etc. The latter in turn involves both grammatical and pragmatic competence, two components of language which are not