French - Book Chapters

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    Second language acquisition of the English passive voice by adult Chinese learners
    (University College Cork, 2024) Zhao, Bei; Howard, Martin
    This thesis investigates the acquisition of the English passive voice, presenting a longitudinal analysis in relation to a number of factors, namely learning environment (ESL versus EFL contexts), proficiency level, learning time, and their interaction. Additionally, it explores the characteristic linguistic expression of Chinese learners in employing English passive constructions and examines the alternative constructions that learners resort to when the passive is not used. It also includes an analysis of common error patterns and their frequency of occurrence in writing, challenges in recognizing the passive voice during reading, and speech onset latency time in generating passive constructions in spontaneous speech. The research collected longitudinal data from Chinese university learners of English across two educational contexts: in English-speaking countries (the United States, the United Kingdom, and Ireland) representing the ESL environment, and within Mainland China, representing the EFL context. Participants were categorized into three proficiency levels: pre-intermediate, intermediate and advanced. In the English-speaking context, 11 intermediate learners and 10 advanced learners participated. In the Chinese context, 180 pre-intermediate learners and 139 intermediate learners were involved. Furthermore, 10 native English speakers were included as a control group to establish a benchmark. All the participants are aged between 20 to 25 years, with a gender ratio of 3 females to every 2 males. Participants were required to complete both written and oral tasks, designed to generate robust and inclusive data for the analysis of English passive acquisition. The collected data were recorded and analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. The study findings indicate that learning in an English-speaking environment enhances the acquisition of passive constructions over time, although the EFL setting in China also sees significant learner improvement, albeit with a broader error range compared to the ESL learners. Enhanced L2 proficiency correlates with fewer passive construction errors and faster response times, underscoring a link between proficiency and passive usage accuracy. Higher proficiency learners show increased, more native-like passive usage, with BE-passive constructions preferred across all proficiency levels and contexts. GET- and HAVE-passive are less common, mainly used by more advanced English learners. When a passive construction is not used, the active voice is the predominant alternative, with middle voice as a rarer substitute. Besides, learners sometimes produced sentences that, while grammatically active, conveyed a passive meaning.
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    Proust’s House of Fiction
    (Legenda, Modern Humanities Research Association, 2022-09-13) O'Donovan, Patrick
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    Chant du corps interdit: The theatre of Hélène Cixous
    (Legenda, 2014) Noonan, Mary
    In this chapter, I would like to establish that Hélène Cixous developed a form of theatre that performed the enmeshing of writer and writing - the embodiment of text, the textualization of body - in the space of the voice. Some consideration of her theoretical writings will pave the way for a discussion of her theatre.
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    Women and scarecrows: Marina Carr’s stage bodies
    (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) Noonan, Mary; Etienne, Anne; Dubost, Thierry
    This chapter considers the theatre of Marina Carr in the light of the feminist thought of French writers Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray, in particular their work on the cultural representations of the feminine-maternal body. Taking the play Woman and Scarecrow as a case-study, the chapter examines Carr’s undermining of the visualist bias of conventional theatre, and demonstrates the extent to which she privileges the auditory in an attempt to confer on the stage a female voice and body.
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    Auditory perception and auditory imagination in the late plays of Marguerite Duras
    (Brill Rodopi, 2018) Noonan, Mary; Noonan, Mary; Pagès-Pindon, Joëlle
    This chapter examines the scenic strategies Marguerite Duras developed in the plays India Song, Savannah Bay and L’Éden Cinéma in order to position the spectator in a place that enables her to inhabit her auditory imagination for the space of the play – to move, through the activity of listening to voices and non-verbal sounds, between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ auditory realms. The ‘outer’ space that is represented on the Durassian stage as frustratingly inaccessible figures the ‘inner’ space to which Duras’s text directs the spectator-auditor unremittingly. Drawing on Didier Anzieu’s theory of the ‘skin-ego’, the primitive psyche constructed on the basis of ‘psychic envelopes’, the analysis presented here demonstrates that in her later plays, Duras generates a form of listening that breaks down the univocal defences of language and leads both actor and spectator to an intense apprehension of loss on the threshold of symbolic representation.