The use of verb morphology of advanced L2 learners and native speakers of French

Research on L2 acquisition has proposed a more or less fixed 'natural order' or route of acquisition of various language elements (cf. Dulay, Burt and Krashen 1982; Ellis 1995; Perdue 1993). These acquisitional routes (or 'developmental paths') have been organised in successive stages. Each stage can be seen as constituting a grammatical 'profile' of a learner at a given moment in his development (Clahsen 1984; Pienemann 1998). A shortcoming of many of these proposals is that (a) they are mainly based on the analysis of a small number of target languages (esp. English and German) and (b) they focus on the early phases of L2 acquisition so that only the initial stages are spelled out in sufficient linguistic detail.
In an attempt to redress these imbalances, Bartning and Schlyter (2004) have presented a comprehensive overview of the development of French as a second or foreign language (FFL), a hitherto underspecified target language, on the basis of the linguistic analysis of the spoken French interlanguage of Swedish adult learners. Based on a number of characteristic syntactic and grammatical features, Bartning and Schlyter propose an acquisitional route consisting of six developmental stages or levels ranging from the very onset of acquisition to near-native like production. A subsequent goal of their study is to contribute to a more precise evaluation of the level of linguistic development of a given learner at a given moment in the acquisitional process.
Particularly interesting to Bartning and Schlyter's approach is that it treats in detail the advanced learner, often ignored in previous studies (e.g. Klein et Perdue 1997). Bartning and Schlyter distinguish three advanced substages: a 'lower', 'middle' and 'upper' advanced variety stage. Progress at the level of these stages is characterised (a) by 'un éventail plus large de structures d'énoncés' and (b) by 'la grammaticalisation de la morphologie flexionnelle qui devient fonctionnelle mais avec des zones 'fragiles' de développement' (Bartning & Schlyter 2004 : 296).
Bartning and Schlyter's work raises a number of important questions: (a) to which extent is the acquisitional route for French-L2 observed for Swedish adults valid for learners with a different L1? (b) to which extent is the subdivision of the advanced stage into three substages legitimate? and (c) can the three substages be further refined? The aim of the study reported in this article is to address these three questions.