Marqueurs de négation et particules de portée en français L2: où les placer?

This paper investigates the acquisition of focus particles and negative particles by two Spanish speakers learning French. Both focus and negative particles obey syntactic constraints which vary remarkably from language to language and which may be difficult to learn for a foreign speaker. This investigation traces the evolution of the syntactic structures in which the particles appear and the positions the learners exploit for their placement. The data reveal the existence of various, chronologically ordered stages of acquisition, in which the placement of the particles become integrated into the utterance. We suggest that the positions exploited are connected with the degree of grammaticalisation of the learners’utterances, particularly the presence vs. absence of verbal morphology.