In this dissertation, Forsberg describes the acquisition of formulaic sequences (séquences préfabriquées or “prefabs”) among Swedish learners of French ranging from beginners to near-native speakers. After a detailed discussion of existing models, Forsberg gives her own definition of prefabs, one that is contextually based and accommodates second language (L2) learners. She adopts and extends Erman and Warren's (2000) model for her own study using six categories: lexical (coup de foudre “love at first sight,” c'est la vie “that's life”), grammatical (être en train de “to be in the process of”), discursive (textual: c'est “it is,” il y a “there is”; own speech management: je pense “I think”; and interactive: bien sûr “of course”), interlanguage or “idiosyncratic” (ils n'ont pas la morale “they aren't in good spirits”), and situational (je m'appelle “my name is”). Interview materials from the Stockholm-based French learner corpus InterFra as well as materials collected by the author for very advanced and native-speaker groups are used for the study. There are four groups: (a) six high school students; (b) six university-level beginners; (c) six very advanced learners, most of whom have spent several years in Paris; and (d) six native speakers.
The results show that whereas idiosyncratic and unanalyzed situational prefabs disappear after the first stages of acquisition, the other categories progressively move toward native-speaker distribution. Discourse prefabs constitute the most important category. They are the most frequent and the most fixed and, therefore, the most easily acquired. On the other hand, lexical prefabs show more variability and are therefore acquired at later stages. In the qualitative part of the study, the author discusses the importance of learning styles for beginners (holistic vs. analytic) and of motivational and sociocultural factors for advanced learners.
Forsberg's study displays the qualities and some of the shortcomings of most dissertations. It is based on a solid literature review, a sound theoretical background, and a thorough analysis of the data. Unfortunately, by drawing on very different models to explain the phenomena that appear in her interviews, the author sometimes provides a rather fragmented analysis of her data and falls somewhat short of offering a coherent framework and explanatory model. Forsberg seems to be aware of this difficulty and suggests in her “Perspectives” section that given the issues related to each level of acquisition, it might be better to study these levels separately.
Yet it may not be the issues related to levels of acquisition per se that explain the author's difficulties but rather the size and the composition of her groups. Groups of six students may yield a large number of prefabs, but they do not necessarily reflect the language use of whole populations. For example, the author notes that the prefab comme ci, comme ça “so-so” appears in the data from the beginners' group but not in the native-speaker group and concludes that textbooks might be outdated. Yet, the expression is still fairly common in everyday language. Although apparently aware of the difficulty in defining the native speaker, in a rather defensive move, Forsberg relies on the most conservative arguments from an ideologically laden debate in World Englishes to circumvent this intricacy. The author observes considerable differences in the use of prefabs between her Parisian informants and Socrates exchange students in Sweden and suggests that these might be due to stylistic or contextual variation. However, might these differences be due to the difference between monolingual and bilingual native speakers? The fact that the only bilingual person in her Parisian group uses fewer prefabs than the other members seems to give credibility to this hypothesis. Along the same lines, can we validly compare a group of learners who have acquired the language in a foreign language context with those who have learned it in a L2 context? The group of very advanced learners have spent 5–11 years in France, and some hardly knew any French before their arrival. The similarity in the use of prefabs with a Parisian group therefore comes as no surprise. In short, we might wonder whether it is appropriate to put these different groups on the same acquisition continuum.
As is the case with most dissertations, this study raises more questions than it answers. Many of these questions are raised by the author. It will therefore be a useful reading for anyone interested in the acquisition of prefabs and of the lexicon.
