Estrategias de afirmación en francés y en español: estudio contrastivo (J. Delahaie / I. Solís García)

This paper deals with the functioning of response affirmative strategies in oral interaction from a contrastive perspective. The starting point is a learner problem: learners of French or Spanish as a foreign language develop affirmative strategies that are very different from those used by native speakers. This finding is very common, and several studies have demonstrated that learners can have difficulty interacting, even when they know the grammar of the foreign language. We will focus here on the use of the affirmative feedback-givers voilà and d’accord in French, and vale and claro in Spanish, because these markers are very frequent among native speakers and rarely used by learners. Based on authentic conversations in French and Spanish (with native and non-native speakers), we will show that the affirmative feedback-givers oui/d’accord/voilà in French and sí/vale/claro in Spanish build a coherent system of response affirmative strategies, which is partly, at first sight, very similar. But an accurate analysis of the semantic and metalinguistic dimensions of voilà and claro will show that affirmative strategies in French and Spanish are quite different, and culture-specific.