Abstract:
French is among premier foreign languages taught in Sri Lanka for decades. In this
context it is imperative to analyse the difficulties faced by learners of French. Phonetics,
phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics are the main linguistic areas that pose
difficulties to students mainly due to contrastive aspects between the mother tongue and
the foreign language and interference from the mother tongue. Due to the vastness of
the areas of difficulty, this paper will mainly focus on aspects of negation.
This paper aims to analyse the contrastive aspects of negation in French and Sinhala as
this can be identified as one major area of difficulty in grasping French as a foreign
language by Sinhala native speakers. Furthermore, it will help to determine the
interference from mother tongue or from the second language (English) in learning
French. This study is based on data available from a sample of over 300 monolingual
and bilingual students of French as a foreign language in Sri Lanka. Various problems
encountered by them in acquiring the negation in French and the same samples can be
used in order to understand their learning difficulties.
Different morpho-syntactic elements are used to express the negation in Sinhala and
French. Certain differences are visible in written and spoken varieties of French. The
position of particles in an utterance denoting negation follows a more rigid pattern in
written French than in the spoken variety. The students are faced with the difficulty of
understanding the different nuances of negation, both semantic and pragmatic. Spoken
Sinhala (SS) differs vastly from written form and the particles signalling negation are
more freely used in a sentence according to the context / person. Thus the Sinhala
native speakers face interference from both Written Sinhala and Spoken Sinhala when
learning French as a foreign language. Furthermore, bilingual learners face interference
from both Sinhala and English in learning French as a foreign language.
Therefore this study presented in this paper focuses on identifying the comparative and
contrastive aspects of negation in French and Sinhala which will lead to a new area of
discussion to analyse the difficulties encountered by Sri Lankan Sinhala speakers
acquiring French as a foreign language.
