The present study offers an overview of research on the acquisition of sociopragmatic competence in a foreign language. Our starting point is the "hardware", i.e. the bilingual brain and the storage of different types of pragmatic and linguistic information in it. We then adopt a teacher's perpective by looking at how sociopragmatic aspects of the target language are integrated in language courses and language classes. We go on to consider a number of studies on the teaching, the acquisition and the use of sociolinguistic and pragmatic competence in the target language. A number of studies on the teaching, the acquisition and the use of sociolinguistic and pragmatic competence in the target language are then considered. Theoretical and didactical implications are presented in the final part of the study.

Italian grammars written for French speakers do not pay much attention to però and touch very briefly upon its difference with respect to ma. The present study is based upon a detailed analysis of French translation equivalents of però in Veronesi's novel Caos calmo (2005) and draws upon Italian oral data from the LIP corpus (1993). Results of this study show how the grammars considered fail to offer clear indications concerning the freedom of position inside the sentence and the stronger value of però. Furthermore, the introduction of the diachronic dimension shows the gradual development of contrast relations out of temporal and causal lexical sources along paths already established for the processes of grammaticalization and highlights the present-day distribution in both languages.

Many more dictionaries are being updated than are written from scratch. Taylor-made computational linguistic support for lexicographers should thus not only provide corpus-derived data, but, along with this, a comparison with the information given in the targeted dictionary. We are developing a system for German, which provides this kind of comparison, for a set a macro- and microstructural data. We report about the main lexicographic and computational aspects of the approach.

The present article reflects an ongoing research project on the grammar and pragmatics of interrogative constructions in French. The perspective is that of second language acquisition with advanced learners. The aim of the article is to show that the use of a particular interrogative construction in French, which in the language of native speakers is governed by restrictions at different levels, is, in the case of learners, characterized by an imperfect knowledge of these restrictions and by the necessity to rely on specific production strategies.

In this paper we analyse the decoding strategies of two female foreign students in engineering programs in order to uncover best practices. The students were asked to note language items causing difficulties and the different strategies used to arrive at the meaning while using a dictionary. We recommend scaffolding activities to enable these students to bridge the language gap and fully benefit from their program of studies.

Verbal lexicon has key functions at textual level. Competence in second language - and specially narrative competence, with which we are dealing here - can be influenced by lack of verbal lexicon, by partial acquisition or idiosyncratic acquisition of it. A textual and conceptual approach of some narrative productions in French and Spanish as first and second languages (FLM, ELM, FLE and ELE) will allow us to compare both cases in these two languages in order to make clear how oral narratives are built up at propositional level (mainly, the explicit reference to processes, space and temporality) and at suprapropositional level (cohesion and coherence). Finally, we will study the influence of real oral input in the learners' oral productions.

Verbal lexicon has key functions at textual level.Competence in second language - and specially narrative competence, with which we are dealing here - can be influenced by lack of verbal lexicon, by partial acquisition or idiosyncratic acquisition of it. A textual and conceptual approach of some narrative productions in French and Spanish as first and second languages (FLM, ELM, FLE and ELE) will let us compare both cases in these two languages in order to make clear how oral narratives are built up at propositional level (mainly, the explicit reference to processes, space and temporality) and at suprapropositional level (cohesion and coherence). Finally, we will study the influence of real oral input in the learners' oral productions.

This article focusses on the acquisition of discourse strategies by foreign students learning French. The study is based on a corpus of business letters written by Norwegian students. Our aim is to demonstrate how many of the mistakes that occur in this particular genre are due to the fact that even advanced students tend to misinterpret discourse contexts and as a consequence, fail to choose the correct discours strategy. Whereas grammatical mistakes will be considered by the addressee as being due to a poor command of the language and therefore easily forgiven, a bad choice of discourse strategy will often be interpreted as a manifestation of impoliteness or servility.