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De koppelwerkwoorden ser en estar in het licht van recente taalkundige benaderingen en van het onderzoek in tweede-taalonderwijs The copulas ser and estar in the light of recent linguistic approaches and the research in second language teaching

Las cópulas ser estar a la luz de enfoques lingüísticos recientes y de la investigación en la enseñanza de segundas lenguas

 

The copulas ser and estar in the light of recent linguistic approaches and the research in second language teaching

 

Key words: Spanish, copulas, adjectival predicates, evidentiality, grammar teaching

 

The copulas ser and estar(both translated as the English to be) are one of the most characteristic phenomena of the Spanish language.While their meaning structure has been an object of interest for various disciplines, the differences between them have been especially studied in the domain of linguistics and of second-language pedagogy. This thesis successively adopts these two points of view, giving to each discipline an equal importance in the general reflection.Two parallel analyses have therefore been conducted: one dedicated to the grammar of serand estar; the other, to the teaching of their use. The empirical verification of the working hypotheses is central to both approaches.

From a linguistic point of view, some studies claim that the differences between serand estarare neutralized in certain contexts, for instance, when used with predicates like claro(Eng. clear). The grammatical study carried out in this thesis focuses therefore on the analysis of a large corpus of authentic oral contexts containing the segments ser claroand estar claro. Both the quantitative and qualitative analysis of concrete textual marks confirm that these segments are not equivalent. The analysis of the data shows that ser claro is used to perform an abstract categorization of the subject entity. A speaker who declares, for instance, that la solución es clara(Eng. the solution isSERclear), means that that the solutioncan be categorized, classified, defined as something clearaccording to the characteristics considered. On the contrary, estar claro appears in contexts based on an experiential contact with the entity at hand. When one states la solución está clara(Eng. the solution isESTARclear), the emphasis falls on the access to the information necessary to understand the solution. In the same vein, the alternate copular constructions with clausal subject (es/está claro que…‘it is clear that…’) yield different evidential meanings. The results show that estar claro appears in contexts of direct evidence or inference, while ser claroreflects a reasoned outcome.

On the whole, the results of the analysis support the tenet of the motivation of the linguistic sign, which implies that ser claro and estar claroare two different constructions, in the sense that they construe different meanings. The Cognitive Linguistics approach, and the relevant conceptual tools which it offers, have been beneficially adapted to the necessities of the grammatical description of the database. The other question to be answered was whether the same adequacy could be reached when the objective does not correspond to the linguistic description of the system per se, but is transposed to the teaching of the contrast between serand estar. At the best of our knowledge, there did not yet exist any empirical study aimed at finding out whether and how the alternate grammatical descriptions of the copulas serand estarcan orient the teaching activity differently.

To fill this gap, an experiment has been conducted in a concrete teaching context. The objective was to evaluate the relative scope of the different linguistic approaches of the ser/estardistinction when teaching explicit knowledge about these verbs, that is, knowledge that can be verbalized.

Data from six groups of French university students were analysed. Four of these groups received grammatical instruction on the differences between serand estar. For two of them, the grammatical explanation was based on the aspectual distinction between individual level predicates (ser) and state level predicates (estar). For the other two, the explanation relied on the basic cognitive distinction between categorizationand experiential visionpresented above. The remaining two groups were used as control groups, that is, they did not receive any kind of grammatical instruction on the copular verbs. In total, the results of 94 students were retained. They were assessed in writing tasks, in a pretest-posttest design with two delayed posttests. 

The results sustain the relative primacy of the cognitive approach, especially when taking into account the variation in the results over time. With regard to the acquisition of explicit knowledge, both the so-called aspectualand cognitivegroups displayed positive changes after the instruction. There is, however, a difference between these two groups, especially in the stabilization of observed trends. Only for the cognitive group the changes observed in the first test after the instruction persist until, at least, the third posttest. Regarding the use of the verbs in written expression tasks, the results point to a high level of variation in the responses of the different groups; however, they do not permit to identify significant differences between them. Both the control and the experimental groups achieved similar results.

The quantitative investigation has been developed in full recognition of the peculiarities of the individual learners. In order to avoid any depersonalization of the didactic relationship, the variability in student responses has been incorporated in the evaluation of the two grammatical approaches put to test in the teaching of the ser/estar distinction. The different statistical tools used for the data analysis made it possible to report, in an as complete way as possible, on the individual variation in the learners' outcomes.

The methodology adopted in this dissertation keeps linguistics and language pedagogy apart. Rather than questioning the relationship between the two disciplines, the aim was to develop the reflection and elaborate the analysis in accordance with the requisites of each of these disciplines, thus recognizing that language knowledge can hardly be transposed as such into the field of second-language instruction. The explicit articulation of a whole array of formal, semantic and contextual parameters made it possible to avoid any bias in the development of tests. The parallel elaboration of an adequate linguistic description and a relevant didactic explanation has proven fruitful. The results indeed shed a new light on various aspects related, on the one hand, to the grammatical description of the copulas serand estar, and, on the other, to the teaching of their use.

Date:1 Oct 2013 →  4 Dec 2018
Keywords:Spanish, Copulas, Adjectival predicates, Evidentiality, Grammar teaching
Disciplines:Linguistics, Theory and methodology of linguistics, Other languages and literary studies
Project type:PhD project