'But hence I think that...': A qualitative study of the custom of 'hence' and 'but' by French learners of the Dutch

A study by Perrez (2006) illustrated that French-speaking learners of Dutch showed the tendency to overuse frequent causal and contrastive connectives when writing in their foreign language. Further cross-linguistic analyses suggested that this overuse could not be explained in terms of transfer from the mother tongue of these learners. Instead we claimed that this overuse was typical of the interlanguage learners develop when learning a foreign language. Relying on the work by Bestgen (1998), we hypothesized that the learners' overuse of connectives could be explained in terms of the theory of traces of discourse segmentation, according to which the overused connectives would function as traces of the difficulties learners encounter when trying to coherently organize their discourse. To confirm this intralingual hypothesis of traces of discourse segmentation we conducted a qualitative study of the usage of two frequent connectives by French-speaking learners of Dutch, namely dus ('therefore, thus') and maar ('but'). The results of this study show that the learners and the natives use both connectives to the same extent in causal and contrastive contexts, which does not support our main hypothesis. However, the qualitative analysis also points to subtle differences between the native and the learner usage of both connectives, suggesting that learning how to deal with connectives and their contexts of use is part of a gradual proces which is typical of a developing interlanguage.