PROPOSAL FOR HELPING LEARNERS OF FRENCH AND MANDARIN CHINESE TO VISUALISE TENSE AND ASPECT FANG lih-juang Lalicc - Université de Paris IV – Sorbonne [email protected]

Résumé :

The expression of abstract concepts like tense and aspect presents a special challenge for Chinese learning a western language and westerners learning Chinese. The reasons for this lie in the radically different resources used by the respective languages to code this information. I present here some initial results, a visual language, with the goal to help the learner to overcome the conceptual facets of the problem.

Mots-clés : Tense, aspect, visual representation of meta-linguistic knowledge, computer assisted language learning

In the field of foreign language learning and teaching, we often observe that mastering abstract notions such as tense and aspect is a notorious problem (Benveniste, 1962) for many native Mandarin Chinese speakers. The difficulties are rooted in the fact that Mandarin Chinese uses completely different resources to convey these notions, namely the temporal adverbs, aspectual markers, while western languages tend to convey this information through verb choice and verbal conjugation. Hence, it is difficult for Chinese students to grasp and use properly notions like the perfect progressive in English or the imparfait in French. Yet, Chinese do tell stories like all other people in the world. How do they express the “concept of time”? Conversely, how do English or French speakers adapt themselves while being deprived of a verbal system (conjugations) to convey this information? Nevertheless, we believe that notions like tense and aspect are universal; only, each language has its own aspect (semantic) and tense (grammatical) system (Huang, 1988) Based on linguistic analyses focusing on the cognitive-semantic facet of tense and aspect, our work aims at proposing a « tool » (Ligozat & Zock, 1992) to help teaching and learning foreign languages. The languages that we’ve been studying are French and Mandarin Chinese. A comparison of the two seems to be interesting as they are so different from one to the other, in particular with regard to their temporal-aspectual systems. Like many other scholars (Comrie, 1976, Li & Thompson, 1981), we make a distinction between TENSE and ASPECT. But what do these notions mean? Are they universally given? How do we perceive them in reality? And how can we represent them? How do we express them in a language? While communicating or translating from one language to another, or, while learning a new language, how do we manage to deal with these differences? After exposing our point of view concerning these concepts, we compare and analyse some sentences in French and in Mandarin Chinese. Along with the identified temporal-aspectual value, we present the figurative invariant (a non-linguistic intermedium) containing the cognitively relevant concept (Desclés, 1993). Let’s take a look at the following examples. In the sentences (a)-(c), the translations in French are almost the same ( “j’ai lu” vs. “j’ai déjà lu”). Yet, the equivalent in Mandarin Chinese are different at the level of aspectual markers : -le˙ & -guo` (Huang & Davis, 1986 ; Iljic, 1987). -1-

One can clearly see the semantic nuances by looking at the figures presented below. The aspectual markers are used to express different “intentions/focuses”. a) Woˇ kan` -le˙ zhe`benˇ xiaoˇshuo¯. Je 

J’ai lu ce roman.

lire ASP ce CL roman 
  

T

b) Woˇ kan` -guo` zhe`benˇ xiaoˇshuo¯. Je 

lire ASP  

ce 

CL roman  

c) Woˇ kan` -guo` zhe`benˇ xiaoˇshuo¯ -le˙. Je lire  

ASP ce CL roman    

ASP: aspectual marker

ASP


J’ai (déjà) lu ce roman. J’ai (déjà) lu ce roman.

X

x T

CL : classifier

Obviously, more work is needed concerning our visual representations of such abstract concepts in order to make them intuitive even for linguistically “innocent” language learners. We hope that such work will make it easier to comprehend these abstract concepts and therefore will help language learners to mastering the related grammatical forms. The aim is to elaborate a pedagogical tool performed on computers, as it seems to be particularly well suited for the visualization of the underlying representations. Our current analyses are confined to sentences in French and Mandarin Chinese. It might be useful to extend them to larger stretches of discourse like paragraphs. Of course, the same paradigm could be used for other languages: English, Japanese... etc. In addition, it could be extended to other sub-systems of a language (adverbs, verbs…).

References : BENVENISTE, Émile (1962). Problèmes de linguistique générale. Vol. 1 (p.237-p.250) & vol. 2 (p.69-p.78). Paris : Gallimard. COMRIE, Bernard (1976). Aspect. Oxford : Oxford University Press. LI, Charles, THOMPSON, Sandra (1981). Mandarin Chinese : a functional reference grammar. University of California Press. DESCLÉS, Jean-Pierre (1993). "Un modèle cognitif d'analyse des temps du français : méthode, réalisation informatique et perspectives didactiques". SCIAL, Clermont-Ferrand. HUANG, Lillian M. (1988). Aspect : A general system and its manifestation in Mandarin Chinese", Taipei : Student Book Co., Ltd. HUANG, Lillian, DAVIS Philip (1986). Remarks on aspect and Mandarin LE. Paper presented in the Southeast Conference on Linguistics, Auburn, Alabama, USA. ILJIC, Robert (1987). L'exploitation aspectuelle de la notion de franchissement en chinois contemporain, Paris : L'Harmattan. LIGOZAT, Gérard, ZOCK Michael (1992). How to Visualise Time, Tense and Aspect? In proceedings COLING-92, Nantes, pp.475-482.

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