| Summary: | This work focusing on listening comprehension in second language (L2) in an exolingual interaction is based on the “totext” – or total utterance – defined by Cosnier (2012: 104) as a combination of the text (verbal) and cotext. In face-to-face interaction the speech structure is indeed marked out with several gestural and prosodic cues in both endolingual and exolingual communication (Kida, to be published; Kida & Faraco, 2009). Yet, the emphasis (gestural accent) follows constraints specific to each language (see, among others, Müller, 1994; Kita, 1993; Stam, 2006) which forces the speakers to use a sort of gestural syntax governed by their dominant language. This is how this type of “accent gestuel” (Creider, 1978, 1986; Kida & Faraco, 2009) or “manual accent” (Kellerman & van Hoof, 2003) is often transferred from one language to the other during second-language acquisition (Stam, 1998; van Hoof & Kellerman, 2001; Yoshioka & Kellerman, 2006). Based on these observations, a study on second language learners’ gestures has been conducted since the transfer of manual accent behavior from the mother tongue to the L2 proves the existence of a grammaticality of gestural modality in speech. Work has already been done (Kida & Faraco, to be published) on the appropriation of gestures by Japanese speakers learning French as a second language –that is to say for two languages that have a similar gestural “grammaticality”, at least in regards to manual accent. Japanese and French are indeed classified in the group of verb-framed languages and not in the satellite-framed one (Talmy, 1991 and 2000, among others).This paper intends to specify the observations previously made on oral, prosodic and gestural appropriation of a target language (French) by non-native speakers (NNS). After some general comments on the way the gestural and vocal modalities behave when the verbal is absent from the explanatory discourse of a native speaker trying to be understood by his non-native partner, we will study how the non-verbal focusing works on the pragmatic level when verbal ellipsis is used by the NNS.The reference corpus (Kida, 2005) proposes video footage of native and non-native speakers mutually explaining recipes from their own country. Two recording conditions were put in place: one where the interlocutors see each other and one where they do not because they are separated by an opaque screen. The NNS are for the most part Japanese speakers (of various linguistic levels) but are also speakers of other native languages (Danish, Spanish, English). Recordings took place at the university in an anechoic chamber, participants interacted in dyad, following the NS-NNS or NNS-NNS pattern and this work will focus more precisely on exchange including example of syntactic ellipsis (a distinctive feature of oral communication): when verbal information is missing, the point is to know whether there is a prosodic continuity and what part the gestural activity plays in it.After having defined the ellipsis as an “explanatory shortcut”, the authors underline the ambiguity of this process because it can make the intercomprehension easier as well as it can blur it. Nonetheless, the number of ellipsis made by the NS increases when the non-native speakers are linguistically less advanced but when the visibility/non visibility feature does not show much difference; however, when interacting with an advanced NNS, the NS’s ellipsis increase when the screen is on compared to the face-to-face interaction. Overall, in an exolingual interaction ellipsis can be a strategy of interaction used by the NS to make the speech easier and faster to follow for his partner. However, it should be added that the use of ellipsis is not only linked to the non-native speaker’s L2 level of proficiency but also to the availability of the visual information that comes with speech.During these observations made in this elliptical context we saw that the discursive comprehension mostly rests upon gestures – ideographic or deictic. For these gestures, the non Japanese-speaking NNS’s gestural behavior gets close to the NS’s one. It remains to be seen whether this is due to the geographic proximity of the language-culture they belong to or to its functional proximity.As we have said before, when a native interacts with a non-native ellipsis can be an avoidance procedure, a precautionary principle, but when the verbal is missing it can also act –as some of the exchange in the reference corpus reveal– as a pragmatic marking of the interaction: meta-enunciative gloss, identification of the enunciative centers (constative vs performative)… To clarify, the absence of the verbal or the ellipsised part can be intentional and thus strategic; it is then the non-verbal that assumes what is not stated by speech in L2.
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