La description du conditionnel français dans quatre grammaires finlandaises

Abstract

The present study aimed to explore whether the French grammar books produced in Finland between 1990 and 2015 show signs of contextualization in their description of the French conditional form.

The research plan for the present study was inspired by the one used by the research program GRAC (Grammaire et contextualisation) that aims to discover the varieties of descriptions of the French grammar in different countries.

Contextualization is understood as differences in relation to the standard French description of the French lan-guage. The grammar books studied in the present study are all in Finnish and are used by Finnish students learning French. Therefore it is expected that the common L1 shared by the writers of the grammars and the students they aim to serve might have an influence in the description given.

In order to acquire a clear picture of the features that might influence the description, the differences and the simi-larities between the French conditional form and the Finnish conditional form are studied. After this the descrip-tions given in the corpus were studied in detail and compared with the standard description.

As a result, we were able to conclude that the Finnish description of the French conditional form did not present contextualization of the standard French description although some comparative remarks were made. This is largely due to the fact that the two forms in the two languages have great similarities and that the differences are more likely presented in relation with the description of the French subjunctive form.