A Comparable French-Chinese Oral Corpus for Teaching French as a Foreign Language

A Contrastive Study of je ne sais pas and wǒ bù zhīdào

Abstract

This study presents an example of a study based on a comparable corpus of spoken French and Chinese, designed to support the teaching of French as a Foreign Language to a Chinese learner. The analysis focuses on the contrastive use of the expressions je ne sais pas in French and its semantic equivalent wǒ bù zhīdào in Chinese. Through a semantic, pragmatic, and discursive examination, we explore how these expressions, beyond their basic function of signaling ignorance, are employed in various interactional contexts. The findings highlight morphosyntactic and pragmatic divergences between the two languages, which may impact the development of pragmatic competence among Chinese learners of French.