1245 occurrences of donc in the speech of Chinese L1 speakers of French in France

Abstract

It seems that the French native speakers do not always use donc as argumentative connectors in oral French. In fact, its use as discourse markers has been addressed by many researchers in linguistics. To avoid the overlaps between different categories of functions established by other scholars, we propose to distinguish only two types of donc: the argumentative donc and the discursive donc. This paper exploited the discursive use of the French particle donc in the oral production of Chinese L1 speakers of French in France. We found that donc could have the exemplification function in non-native speech, which was not reported in native speakers’ speech. Meanwhile, from the sociolinguistic perspective, we also investigated how some social factors influence its use in nonnative speakers’ speech. Among different extralinguistic factors examined in this article, only the extracurricular contact with native speakers of French was proved to be statistically significant.