Comparative Perspectives on Language Acquisition: A Tribute to Clive Perdue 9781847696045

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Comparative Perspectives on Language Acquisition

SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION Series Editor: Professor David Singleton, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland This series brings together titles dealing with a variety of aspects of language acquisition and processing in situations where a language or languages other than the native language is involved. Second language is thus interpreted in its broadest possible sense. The volumes included in the series all offer in their different ways, on the one hand, exposition and discussion of empirical findings and, on the other, some degree of theoretical reflection. In this latter connection, no particular theoretical stance is privileged in the series; nor is any relevant perspective – sociolinguistic, psycholinguistic, neurolinguistic, etc. – deemed out of place. The intended readership of the series includes final-year undergraduates working on second language acquisition projects, postgraduate students involved in second language acquisition research, and researchers and teachers in general whose interests include a second language acquisition component. Full details of all the books in this series and of all our other publications can be found on http://www.multilingual-matters.com, or by writing to Multilingual Matters, St Nicholas House, 31-34 High Street, Bristol BS1 2AW, UK.

SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION Series Editor: David Singleton, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland

Comparative Perspectives on Language Acquisition A Tribute to Clive Perdue

Edited by Marzena Watorek, Sandra Benazzo and Maya Hickmann

MULTILINGUAL MATTERS Bristol • Buffalo • Toronto

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Comparative Perspectives on Language Acquisition: A Tribute to Clive Perdue/Edited by Marzena Watorek, Sandra Benazzo and Maya Hickmann. Second Language Acquisition: 61 Includes index. 1. Language acquisition. 2. Perdue, Clive. P118.C63 2011 401'.93–dc23 2011035427 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN-13: 978-1-84769-603-8 (hbk) Multilingual Matters UK: St Nicholas House, 31–34 High Street, Bristol BS1 2AW, UK. USA: UTP, 2250 Military Road, Tonawanda, NY 14150, USA. Canada: UTP, 5201 Dufferin Street, North York, Ontario M3H 5T8, Canada. Copyright © 2012 Marzena Watorek, Sandra Benazzo, Maya Hickmann and the authors of individual chapters. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. The policy of Multilingual Matters/Channel View Publications is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products, made from wood grown in sustainable forests. In the manufacturing process of our books, and to further support our policy, preference is given to printers that have FSC and PEFC Chain of Custody certification. The FSC and/or PEFC logos will appear on those books where full certification has been granted to the printer concerned. Typeset by Techset Composition Ltd., Salisbury, UK. Printed and bound in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group.

Contents

Contributors

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Introduction: New Comparative Perspectives in the Study of Language Acquisition – Clive Perdue’s Legacy Marzena Watorek, Sandra Benazzo and Maya Hickmann

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Part 1: Second Language Acquisition: From Initial to Final Stages 1 A Way to Look at Second Language Acquisition Wolfgang Klein

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2 L2 Input and the L2 Initial State: The Writings of Clive Perdue Rebekah Rast

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3 Finiteness and the Acquisition of Negation Angelika Becker

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4 The Different Role of Additive and Negative Particles in the Development of Finiteness in Early Adult L2 German and L2 Dutch Sarah Schimke, Josje Verhagen and Giuseppina Turco 5 Lexical Categories in the Target Language and the Lexical Categorisation of Learners: The Word Class of Adverbs Giuliano Bernini 6 Is it Necessary for Chinese Mandarin Speakers to Mark Time? Reflections About the Use of Temporal Adverbs with Respect to Verbal Morphology Jili Sun 7 The Development of Reference to Time and Space in French L3: Evidence from Narratives Pascale Trévisiol v

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8 Verbal Morphology in Advanced Varieties of English L2: Aspect or Discourse Hypothesis? Eleonora Alexandra Vraciu

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9 High-Level Proficiency in Second Language Use: Morphosyntax and Discourse Inge Bartning

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10 Ultimate Attainment and the Critical Period Hypothesis: Some Thorny Issues David Singleton 11 Language Origins, Learner Varieties and Creating Language Anew: How Acquisitional Studies Can Contribute to Language Evolution Research Sandra Benazzo 12 Multiple Perspectives on the Emergence and Development of Human Language: B. Comrie, C. Perdue and D. Slobin Ivani Fusellier-Souza

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Part 2: L1 and L2 Acquisition: Learner Type Perspective 13 Child Language Study and Adult Language Acquisition: Twenty Years Later Dan I. Slobin

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14 The Derivation of Mixed DPs: Mixing of Functional Categories in Bilingual Children and in Second Language Learners Nadine Eichler and Natascha Müller

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15 L1 or L2 Acquisition? Finiteness in Child Second Language Learners (cL2), Compared to Adult L2 Learners (aL2) and Young Bilingual Children (2L1) Suzanne Schlyter and Anita Thomas 16 Young L2 and L1 Learners: More Alike than Different Rosemarie Tracy and Vytautas Lemke 17 The Older the Better, or More is More: Language Acquisition in Childhood Christine Dimroth and Stefanie Haberzettl

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Content s

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18 Additive Scope Particles and Anaphoric Linkage in Narrative and Descriptive Texts: A Developmental Study in French L1 and L2 Sandra Benazzo, Clive Perdue and Marzena Watorek

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19 Discourse Cohesion in Narrative Texts: The Role of Additive Means in Italian L1 and L2 Patrizia Giuliano

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20 The Role of Conceptual Development in the Acquisition of the Spatial Domain by L1 and L2 Learners of French, English and Polish Henriëtte Hendriks and Marzena Watorek 21 The Grammaticalisation of Nominals in French L1 and L2: A Comparative Study of Child and Adult Acquisition Ewa Lenart

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Part 3: Typological Variation and Language Acquisition 22 Typology Meets Second Language Acquisition Anna Giacalone Ramat

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23 Linguistic Relativity: Another Turn of the Screw Rainer Dietrich, Chung Shan Kao and Werner Sommer

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24 Paths in L2 Acquisition: The Expression of Temporality in Spatially Oriented Narration Annie-Claude Demagny 25 A Cross-Linguistic Study of Narratives with Special Attention to the Progressive: A Contrast between English, Spanish and Catalan Carmen Muñoz 26 Reference to Entities in Fictional Narratives of Russian/ French Quasi-Bilinguals Tatiana Aleksandrova 27 The Cohesive Function of Word Order in L1 and L2 Italian: How VS Structures Mark Local and Global Coherence in the Discourse of Native Speakers and of Learners Cecilia Andorno

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28 Macrostructural Principles and the Development of Narrative Competence in L1 German: The Role of Grammar (8–14-Year-Olds) Christiane von Stutterheim, Ute Halm and Mary Carroll 29 Online Sentence Processing in Children and Adults: General and Specific Constraints. A Crosslinguistic Study in Four Languages Michèle Kail 30 A Personal Tribute Sir John Lyons

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Contributors

Tatiana Aleksandrova Université de Paris 8 & CNRS, France [email protected] Cecilia Andorno Università di Pavia, Italy [email protected] Inge Bartning Université de Stockholm, Sweden [email protected] Angelika Becker Universität Osnabrück, Germany [email protected] Sandra Benazzo Université Lille 3 & CNRS, France [email protected] Giuliano Bernini Università degli Studi di Bergamo Linguistica, Italy [email protected] Mary Carroll Universität Heidelberg, Germany [email protected]

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Annie-Claude Demagny Université de Paris 8 & CNRS, France [email protected] Rainer Dietrich

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany [email protected]

Christine Dimroth Universität Osnabrück, Germany [email protected] Nadine Eichler Bergische Universität Wuppertal, Germany [email protected] Ivani Fusellier Université de Paris 8 & CNRS, France [email protected] Anna Giacalone-Ramat Università di Pavia, Italy [email protected] Patrizia Giuliano Università degli studi di Napoli, Italy [email protected] Stefanie Haberzettl Universität des Saarlandes, Germany [email protected] Ute Halm Universität Heidelberg, Germany Henriëtte Hendriks University of Cambridge, UK [email protected] Maya Hickmann CNRS, France [email protected]

Contr ibutors

Michèle Kail Laboratoire de Psychologie Cognitive CNRS & Université Aix-Marseille, France [email protected] Chung Shan Kao Université de Fribourg, Switzerland [email protected] Wolfgang Klein Max Planck Institut für Psycholinguistik, Netherlands [email protected] Vytautas Lemke Universität Mannheim, Germany [email protected] Ewa Lenart Université de Paris 8 & CNRS, France [email protected] Sir John Lyons [email protected] Natasha Müller Bergische Universität Wuppertal, Germany [email protected] Carmen Muñoz Universitat de Barcelona, Spain [email protected] Rebekah Rast American University of Paris & CNRS, France [email protected] Sarah Schimke Universität Osnabrück, Germany [email protected] Suzanne Schlyter University of Lund, Sweden [email protected]

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David Singleton Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland [email protected] Dan Slobin University of Berkeley, USA [email protected] Werner Sommer Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany [email protected] Christiane von Stutterheim Universität Heidelberg, Germany [email protected] Juli Sun Northwestern University, USA [email protected] Anita Thomas University of Lund, Sweden [email protected] Rosmary Tracy Lehrstuhl Anglistische Linguistik, Germany [email protected] Pascale Trevisiol Université de Poitiers, France [email protected] Giusy Turco Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Netherlands [email protected] Josje Verhagen Max Planck Institute, Nijmegen & Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Contr ibutors

Alexandra Vraciu Université Paris X Nanterre & Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain [email protected] Marzena Watorek Université de Paris 8 & CNRS, France [email protected]

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Introduction: New Comparative Perspectives in the Study of Language Acquisition – Clive Perdue’s Legacy Marzena Watorek, Sandra Benazzo and Maya Hickmann

Introductory Remarks This volume is a tribute to Clive Perdue (CP), who passed away on 14th March 2008. It was the strong wish of his colleagues and friends to honour his memory by bringing together chapters from representative members of the scientific community at large in the field of second language acquisition. It is their hope that this collection will highlight the major influence of CP’s contribution to this field on the international scene and his particularly central role on the French scene, where he was one of the main founders of this field as a discipline in its own right. Born on 18th October 1944 (Bedford, UK), Clive Perdue received several degrees from the University of Oxford (BA 1968, Master of Arts 1971) and from the University of Paris 8 (Licence and Masters de Linguistique Générale in 1969–1970, Doctorat de Troisième Cycle en Linguistique in 1978, Doctorat d’Etat en Linguistique in 1990), where he was then appointed Professor in Linguistics in 1992. In order to best situate his work, two central points should be mentioned from the outset. First, among his many responsibilities over the years, he was the Scientific Coordinator of the international program Second Language Acquisition by Adult Immigrants, initiated by Wolfgang Klein at the Max-Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (Nijmegen, The Netherlands) under the auspices of the European Science Foundation (ESF, Strasbourg, 1981–1988). It is common knowledge in the community that this project 1

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(still well known as the ESF project) was a major force in structuring research on second language acquisition in Europe and beyond. The network of researchers that was created at that time continues to be active and the program itself still lies at the forefront of current language acquisition research nowadays. We return to this point in some detail below. Second, in order to understand the historical context of CP’s work, we must go back to the 1970s and 1980s when a research team became interested in a field that did not yet exist in France. At this time CP taught English in the English Department of the Centre Expérimental de Vincennes which later became the University of Paris 8. He was a very active member of this group whose objective was to study language acquisition in the perspective proposed by Corder (1967). This proposal was the first one to view the productions of second language learners (L2) as the manifestations of a coherent linguistic system in which learners’ errors were not considered as simple deviations from a target linguistic system, but rather as reflecting rules underlying their own system. According to this view, simply comparing L2 productions to the source and target language systems (SL and TL) does not suffice to account for the logic and organization of this original linguistic system. CP took on the task of making Corder’s work known. In number 57 of the journal Langages, edited by CP and Remy Porquier in 1980, three of Corder’s major papers were translated and published in French. It is also in this framework that an international conference was organized in 1979.1 In the proceedings of this conference, which were published in the journal Encrages of the Department of English Studies at Paris 8 with a preface by CP and Remy Porquier (1979), one finds the fundamental questions that have guided CP’s research during his entire life: How does one learn a foreign language? By what processes is this learning constructed? Are these processes specific? Are they in particular different from the processes that take place during first language acquisition? What factors determine and promote this learning? What are variable and invariant patterns? How should one examine this learning process? How should one describe it? How should one analyze it? How should one explain it? What language do learners speak? Can one speak of an L2 “learner’s language”? How should one describe this language? What is the status of this intermediate language among other linguistic systems? What are the factors and variables that influence its use? It is obvious that this research is interdisciplinary. It stands at the crossroads between linguistics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, education, language teaching and still other disciplines. It touches on a great number of questions (including old ones): language acquisition; the status of natural languages; questions concerning norm, dialect, linguistic variety; bilingualism, multilingualism, diglossia, linguistic dominance; language-related politics, teaching policy, etc. (Perdue & Porquier, 1979: 4, our translation)

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We are still in 1979 but the main ideas developed by CP from then on will determine his research directions. Three dimensions in the above extract became the focus of his subsequent research. His first aim was to describe and understand the process whereby a second language is acquired. Understanding this process requires describing the learner’s system, which is unique, unstable and transitory, but nonetheless also systematic and coherent (see section ‘The Dynamics of Language Acquisition’). Second, although CP’s research focused on the process of L2 acquisition during this period, one of his concerns was already to relate this process to first language acquisition (L1), a theme he systematically developed in his work from 2000 on (see section ‘Comparisons across learners’). Third, addressing the question of variable and invariant acquisition processes requires examining the impact of language-specific factors in acquisition. Thus, particular attention must be placed on language contrasts within a cross-linguistic and/or typological perspective in the study of learners’ language (see section ‘Cross-linguistic approaches to language acquisition’).

Clive Perdue’s Legacy The Dynamics of Language Acquisition: Principles Organizing Learners’ Varieties As mentioned above, CP coordinated a large European research program (the ESF project), which had as its main objective the study of how L2 learners construct their language at different points during acquisition. He became one of the major actors in this program. His significant and long-lasting collaboration with Wolfgang Klein (WK) during this period and beyond is shown in WK’s contribution to this volume. Comparative perspectives were associated to the developmental paths of different learners with the aim of finding invariants in L2 acquisition. In particular, systematically pairing source and target languages made it possible to compare the acquisition of a given target language by learners of different source languages with the acquisition of different target languages by learners of the same source language. This ESF project gave rise to extremely productive collaborations and numerous publications, including a well-known two-volume collection edited by CP (1993a). A considerable amount of empirical research on these data led CP to theoretical considerations concerning variable and invariant aspects of acquisition, as well as to make further general proposals concerning the human language faculty (Klein & Perdue, 1997). The productions of adult learners in their L2 display a simple linguistic organization that is nonetheless well structured around a set of system-internal principles that are universal in the sense that they are shared by learners of different source and target languages during a certain period of time in the acquisition process. These considerations raise some questions concerning our language faculty that emerge from descriptions of longitudinal data showing how learners acquire one or

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another second language in a natural setting from the very first contact with this L2 onwards.2 Taking Corder’s (1971) hypothesis as its starting point (idiosyncratic dialect), the perspective adopted views the learners’ system (or a particular type of learner variety) as an unknown language the structure and functioning of which must be discovered by means of fine-grained analyses. According to this ‘learner variety approach’, L2 productions are not viewed as a mixture of properties from the source and target languages that would deviate from the rules of the target language, but rather as an independent linguistic system which has its own regularities. Learners’ very first productions comprise a set of lexemes without any grammatical marking and organized in the utterance according to the principle focus last. This Prebasic Variety rapidly evolves towards a second level, known as the Basic Variety, organized around an invariant verbal element with no morphological markings and observed in all learners. This type of organization is particularly interesting in that it is relatively unaffected by the specific properties of the source/target languages and reflects properties that are shared by all learners (language-neutral organization). For example, among the very first doctoral dissertations supervised by CP, two of them (Benazzo, 2000; Giuliano, 2000) further specified how principles of information structure play a role in scope phenomena (negation, focus particles) at the Basic Variety and showed how such principles are progressively abandoned only with the emergence of finite verbs (cf. Perdue et al., 2002). The Basic Variety also constitutes a first potential level at which the L2 can fossilize, as shown by the fact that about one-third of the learners studied in the project never went beyond this level. CP and WK (Klein, 2001; Klein & Perdue, 1997; Perdue, 2006) proposed the hypothesis that this type of linguistic organization, which is constructed by all learners during the acquisition process, is actually a manifestation of our language faculty. In comparison with full-fledged languages, the system underlying the Basic Variety is extremely simple and is based on the interaction among three types of principles: sentence-level principles organizing the arguments around the verb, the discourse principle focus last and the semantic principle controller first according to which the first position in the utterance is reserved for the NP that expresses the most active role. Nonetheless, if one views the Basic Variety as a ‘real’ language, it becomes clear that it displays a high level of organization based on principles that cut across particular languages and that function efficiently in communication. As compared to full-fledged natural languages, the Basic Variety thus seems to be the core of our language faculty. Klein and Perdue claim that studying L2 learners’ varieties is the best way to understand how this capacity functions: Rather than taking the latter as point of departure and working back in trying to understand how acquisition works, the study of language acquisition should help us to understand how the human language

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capacity functions – in its elementary manifestations no less than in the most complex cases it normally attains. (Klein & Perdue, 1997: 308) Thus, the fundamental properties of language, of which sophisticated versions can be found in natural languages, can be best understood in learners’ varieties. Klein and Perdue’s (1997) proposal constitutes the first attempt to account for the language faculty on the basis of L2 acquisition studies within a functionalist approach that could constitute an alternative to the theory of Universal Grammar, where this question was mostly debated at the time. Somewhat later, CP’s first encounter with sign languages led him to go beyond these reflections.3 Ivani Fusellier-Souza’s research on emergent sign languages (Masters degree followed by a Doctoral dissertation in 2004, codirected by CP and Christian Cuxac), opened new theoretical directions. In particular, these languages share some properties of learners’ varieties, despite their different modalities: these communicative systems are idiosyncratic, dynamic and formally simple, but structurally complex, with organizational principles that are very similar to those observed in the Basic Variety. The development of emergent sign languages also provides the opportunity to address some more general questions concerning the impact of various factors on the construction of linguistic systems (critical periods, input, the interplay between cognitive and linguistic development, social communicative processes). The relation between simple systems, formal complexity and the language faculty emerges again in CP’s work in a debate around the origins of human language during a seminar he attended in 2003.4 On the basis of Comrie’s (2000) ideas, CP (2006) discusses the ontogenetic processes that might shed light on a phenomenon that has left no direct traces. In particular, he shows how the intrinsic creativity of learners’ elementary varieties is relevant to gain insights into the process of language evolution. He furthermore argues that ‘simple’ (protolanguage-like) communicative systems can provide a window onto human language before the development of formally complex full-fledged languages, as well as on the functional motivation of this development: ‘very simple manifestations of the human language capacity should be taken very seriously indeed as the seedbed for the development of complex syntax’ (Perdue, 2006: 853).

Comparisons Across Learners: L1 and L2 Acquisition CP’s concern for comparing adult L2 and child L1 acquisition emerged from his work on universals in acquisition discussed above. These two types of learners, adults and children, differ first and foremost with respect to their general level of cognitive maturity. Children develop language at the same time as they learn fundamental concepts in various domains of human cognition, such as time and space, as well as develop general cognitive skills

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necessary for language production, processing and comprehension (memory, attention, executive functions, discourse planning . . .). In sharp contrast, adult learners come to the task of learning a second language with a fully developed first language and a mature cognitive system. They therefore already have a full conceptual system and understand the basic rules governing the construction of coherent and cohesive discourse in communicative situations. Their first main task is to find out how the L2 linguistic system can allow them to express concepts and functions they have already developed. Comparing these two types of acquisition, then, can highlight the relative role of cognitive and linguistic factors that are notoriously confounded during first language acquisition. If these two types of acquisition were to show similarities, above and beyond the obvious expected differences between them, they could shed light on our language faculty. In addition, on the basis of recent neo-Whorfian proposals, according to which language may influence cognition (e.g. Slobin’s ‘thinking for speaking’ hypothesis, first formulated in relation to L1 acquisition; also see Bowerman, 1996, 2007; Bowerman & Choi, 2003; Choi & Bowerman, 1991), the question arises as to whether learning language implies a particular form of conceptualization during L1 acquisition and some types of re-conceptualization during L2 acquisition. As CP was editing the final report synthesizing the results of the ESF project, he invited Dan Slobin to shed light on these results from the point of view of research on L1 acquisition. Slobin (1993) compared the Basic Variety of L2 learners with Basic Child Grammar (Slobin, 1985) discussing the similarities and differences between these two simple systems. He distinguished three general principles driving the construction of ‘simple’ systems: (a) using simple forms before complex ones, (b) using whatever means are available, (c) maximally using limited means. The last two principles operate in both types of learners guiding the construction of the adult’s Basic Variety in L2 and of the child’s Basic Grammar in L1. The first principle raises the question of what is ‘simple’ or ‘complex’ since complexity may differ for children and for adults depending on their cognitive maturity. One of Slobin’s examples concerns the use of temporal adverbials that can be observed in the productions of adult learners at the level of the Basic Variety but not in the Basic Child Grammar of very young children at about two years of age. On the one hand, before the development of full-fledged temporal–spatial concepts and discourse cohesion, young children’s utterances are anchored in the immediate context (‘me here now’), whereas adult learners’ mature cognitive system allows them to find linguistic means in their L2 repertoire, despite the fact that these linguistic means are still rudimentary or idiosyncratic. On the other hand, the child’s Basic Grammar is not limited to uninflected forms, whereas verbal morphology is absent from the adult’s Basic Variety. As soon as a morphologically marked form is perceptually salient for children and as soon as the corresponding

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concept is available to them, this form becomes part of their productive repertoire in early phases of grammatical development. As a result of some joint reflection with CP, Watorek began a project in 2000 comparing discourse organization in adult L2 learners and children L1 learners (4-, 7- and 10-year-olds) in several languages (French, English, Italian, Polish, German, Greek).5 The results show that adult learners’ discourse displays a cohesive, coherent and conceptually complex type of organization. In addition, L2 discourse is more efficient from a communicative point of view as compared to children’s, especially at four years. However, the repertoire of adult L2 learners at the sentence level is linguistically less developed than the one observed among children after age four. These results suggest that the informational and conceptual organization of discourse presents more problems to children than to adults, whereas organization at the sentence level is less difficult for children than it is for adult learners (cf. Watorek, 2004). Notwithstanding these differences, similarities among these two types of learners raise interesting questions concerning what they might share. Slobin (1993) suggests that some principles underlying language processing in children also apply to adult learners: the principle of perceptual salience in the input and the principle according to which semantic relations must be clearly marked by linguistic structure. For example, one of the results from the ESF project shows that some learners of English use the suffix -ing during the first phase of L2 acquisition. Since this suffix is salient and corresponds to a very regular inflection, its early use in learners’ varieties reflects their use of the principle of perceptual salience. Sandra Benazzo’s doctoral research under CP’s supervision is relevant to this point. In particular her analyses of the position of ‘scope particles’ (adverbials such as English also, as well, only) in the productions of adult second language learners (based on the longitudinal data of the ESF project) highlight the role of operating principles that are similar to the ones observed in children. For example, Benazzo (2005) proposes that, during early phases of untutored L2 acquisition, adult learners follow one of two principles: they either rely on perceptual salience in the input, placing additive scope particles in final position (e.g. aussi in French L2 or as well in English L2) independently of the position of the constituents in their scope; or they place the particle next to the constituent in its scope (e.g. as is the case for auch in German L2), thus applying the principle according to which one should keep together constituents that are semantically linked (word order reflecting the underlying semantic relations). The choice between these two principles depends on the most frequent position of the scope particle in the input, and reflects the interaction between perceptual saliency and cognitive principles of language processing. In a more recent study published posthumously (Perdue, 2008, 2010), CP highlights some interesting similarities between L1 and L2 acquisition. His

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analysis focuses on the early expression of finiteness in German, Dutch and French L1 and L2. He shows that the two types of learners clearly differ in the speed and success with which they acquire these forms (particularly their morphosyntactic development), as well as show more inter-individual variation among adults. Nevertheless, both types of learners end up structuring their utterances in the same way, following the same acquisition order, despite the fact that adult learners never succeed in learning the necessary morphosyntactic markings of finiteness, at least by the end of the observation period. Further ongoing research systematically compared L1 and L2 acquisition. In particular, CP and Maya Hickmann conceived a large French–German project (Langacross) in collaboration with German researchers (particularly the teams led by Christiane von Stutterheim and Christine Dimroth) that opened more complex research directions combining comparisons between L1/L2 acquisition with cross-linguistic comparisons.6 This project was accepted for financial support just a few months before CP passed away and resulted in a number of contributions, some of which appear in this volume, particularly in relation to L2.

Cross-Linguistic Approaches to Language Acquisition The study of L2 acquisition necessarily involves a cross-linguistic perspective since the learner is confronted to at least two linguistic systems, his first language (and/or other languages he already masters) and the second language to be learned. The question of the relative impact of the specific properties of these two languages was raised during the ESF project and examined in further analyses of the data collected in this project. Although the Basic Variety seems to be relatively unaffected by such factors, learners are influenced by language-specific properties of the languages involved during the acquisition process. Beyond this initial stage (Basic Variety), individual trajectories diverge because learners acquire the grammatical categories that are specific to different target languages and interestingly make more errors presumably as a result of the influence of the source language. (Perdue, 1993b: 12) It is therefore necessary to study the language varieties of advanced learners. This is precisely the aim of the research carried out by the network on language acquisition ‘Structure of learner varieties’ organized by the MaxPlanck Institute for Psycholinguistics at the end of the ESF project (from 1992 onwards) and adding to previous work a particular emphasis on advanced and very advanced learners in order to examine the last phases of acquisition and to determine the role of typological contrasts that might influence the acquisition process.

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Perdue (1993b) proposes to consider the question of language-specific determinants of acquisition in light of Boas’ writings as discussed by Jakobson. Beginning with the fact that some concepts are grammaticalized and obligatory in some languages, but lexicalized and optional in others, the proposal is that the grammatical system of a given language determines which aspects of reality must be – or are habitually – expressed in that language. Thus, the linguist’s – as well as the learner’s – task is to identify ‘what is similar or different in the two languages with respect to the selection and differentiation of grammatical concepts’ (Jakobson, 1963: 81). Slobin’s recent work (1991, 1996, 2004, 2006 among others) constitutes another important reference in the systematic cross-linguistic study of L2 acquisition showing that speakers of different languages adopt a different ‘rhetorical slant’ when expressing the same content in comparable discourse activities. The question of language-specific grammatical properties is therefore examined anew in relation to the construction of discourse: to what extent do the specific grammatical properties of the language used by learners in discourse influence the information they select and the way they organize this information in discourse? The first doctoral dissertation supervised by CP (Watorek, 1993–1996) addressed these questions in the study of Italian adult learners of French and French learners of Italian in the domain of space. It gave rise to collaborations with a research team in Heidelberg (particularly with Mary Carroll and Christiane von Stutterheim) that is still very active in the ‘Structure of Learner Variety’ network. In particular, the importance of typological differences for L2 acquisition at very advanced levels is at the center of ongoing research (e.g. Lambert et al., 2008). Carroll and von Stutterheim note that the differences between advanced learners and native speakers: are not really visible if one views different lexical, syntactic, morphological . . . types of knowledge as separate components, because few of these aspects of performance deviate from the norm. However, despite the fact that these learners master grammatical rules at the sentence level, they must learn to regulate information in a coherent whole in a given context and to express it in one grammatical form rather than in another, in order to reach a native-like competence. (Carroll & von Stutterheim, 1997: 84, our translation) In the 1980s a growing debate concerning child language opposed relativistic views, according to which language-specific determinants have an impact on first language acquisition, and universalistic conceptions, according to which the acquisition process depends exclusively on the child’s general cognitive development. CP’s collaboration with Maya Hickmann, whose work on L1 acquisition was based on a similar theoretical framework (e.g. Hickmann, 2003), led to a full-blown comparative approach including

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children’s first language acquisition and adult learners during L2 acquisition. In particular, the French–German Langacross project (see Note 6), begun just before CP passed away, has been pursued and gave rise to an extension (Langacross-2, 2011–2013) which will examine all types of language acquisition (native adults, child L1, 2L1, L2, adult L2), in several domains (time, space, contrastive and additive relations in discourse) and by means of multiple measures (production, co-verbal gestures, comprehension, categorization, memory, eye-tracking . . .), aiming at uncovering the relative weight of cognitive and linguistic constraints on language use and acquisition, while taking into account both structural and functional determinants in a multidisciplinary perspective.

Pursuing Clive Perdue’s Legacy The three main topics in CP’s research discussed above show his major role in advancing research on language acquisition in Europe and beyond. His coordination of the ESF project resulted in the creation of a large network that is still actively carrying out leading research in the field of language acquisition. He also contributed to further structuring the field of language acquisition in several ways. Among other still lively legacies, he was one of the main founders of the European Association for Second Language Acquisition (EUROSLA) in 1989. He participated in setting up the constitution of this Association and co-organized with Susan Foster-Cohen the 8th EUROSLA conference which took place in Paris in 1998. Since 1989, EUROSLA conferences have become leading international meeting points that bring together every year all ongoing forefront SLA researchers from Europe and beyond. CP also founded the journal AILE (Acquisition et Interaction en Langue Etrangère) in French, which published its first issue in 1991. This journal was initially meant to promote exchanges between researchers in France and in other countries all working on language acquisition. Between 1991 and 2008, a total of 27 issues were published, each of which provided a state of the art in one the central themes of L2 acquisition research. The journal also covered other themes. Number 4 on ‘Learners’ profiles’ (edited by Harriet Jisa in 1994), Number 6 on ‘Simultaneous bilingual acquisition in preschool years’ (edited by Suzanne Schlyter in 1995), and Number 20 on ‘Analyse comparative des processus d’acquisition en L1 et en L2’ (edited by Henriëtte Hendriks in 2004) are all about first language acquisition. Furthermore, the journal included an emerging discipline, sign language research, with the publication of Number 15 on ‘Les langues des signes: une perspective sémiogénetique’ (edited by Christian Cuxac in 2001). Finally, several numbers covered questions that cut across many fields of research on language acquisition, such as exchanges among different theoretical approaches (Numbers 21 and 22) as well as the interface between language acquisition and teaching (Numbers 16 and 23).

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AILE became an international reference in the field of language acquisition where it made a rich scientific and intellectual contribution. Given its increasingly wide coverage, readership and impact, it was transformed into a new journal, now edited by Maya Hickmann and published by John Benjamins since 2010 under the title LIA (Language, Interaction and Acquisition/Language, Interaction et Acquisition). Two numbers appeared in 2009 under the transition journal title Aile. . .Lia, including a double number introducing the new journal, titled ‘At the crossroads of different types of acquisition: Why compare and how?’ (edited by Sandra Benazzo). Following CP’s wish, LIA covers all dimensions of language acquisition/learning and all situations in which different types of learners construct language systems: first and second language acquisition, including the acquisition of sign languages; the relation between co-verbal gestures and speech and/or the relation between language and cognition during acquisition; bilingual/multilingual speakers; situations of linguistic contact. Furthermore, the journal has become bilingual, now publishing papers in French and in English. Finally, among the most prestigious members of the community of researchers in all domains of language acquisition have accepted to support the journal by joining its editorial and advisory boards.

Contents of the Volume This volume is organized into three parts reflecting the three main themes that were dear to Clive Perdue, with particular attention to the major contribution of comparative approaches to language acquisition research. Part 1 (Second Language Acquisition: From Initial to Final Stages) mostly brings together chapters concerning L2 acquisition that study the dynamic process of acquisition by taking into account different levels of competence in L2. In Part 2 (L1 and L2 Acquisition: Learner Type Perspective), chapters compare child and adult learners. Part 3 (Typological Variation and Language Acquisition) comprises chapters on L1 and L2 acquisition that are more specifically concerned with typological language differences and their impact on acquisition.

Part 1: Second Language Acquisition: From Initial to Final Stages The contributions of Part 1 focus on the development of learners varieties following the theoretical and methodological approach developed in the ESF project (see section ‘The dynamics of language acquisition’) that deeply influenced CP’s research. The authors question the progressive implementation of linguistic means by adult learners to solve diverse communication tasks. A large range of learner varieties are examined, including systems emerging from the first contacts with the L2 to those that can be observed at the very advanced or near bilingual stage. Discussions of this SLA research lead to reflections concerning human language development and the language faculty.

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The first chapter by Klein is a general theoretical introduction to SLA research that summarizes the main issues in this field of research. He discusses the nature and characteristics of this type of acquisition process with particular attention to the approach he and CP proposed in their joint research. The original point of view adopted in this approach is to combine a cross-linguistic perspective with a ‘learners’ perspective’, taking as the main starting point the adult learners’ own activities during the acquisition process. The main question is to determine how learners across languages manage to express very complex information by relatively poor linguistic means during early stages of L2 acquisition and the mechanisms whereby these means evolve during later phases of the acquisition process. Subsequent contributions in Part 1 develop these issues through empirical analyses. Chapter 2 by Rast studies the processing of input by adult learners in an analysis of the initial stage of second language acquisition. After confronting formal and functional approaches of SLA, she presents an experimental study of French learners’ first hours of contact with the Polish language. The analysis focuses on these learners’ intake in order to answer the following question: what does the processing of L2 input teach us about linguistic capacity? The next two chapters bear on related phenomena linked to the acquisition of finiteness and negation during SLA. These studies follow Klein’s (2006) theoretical framework, in which finiteness is not a property of verbs, but rather a property of utterances, linked to two semantic dimensions: illocutionary force (‘assertion’) and the anchoring of some descriptive content, a state of affairs, with respect to a topic situation. Becker (Chapter 3) analyses the place of the negator in varieties of Italian learners of German at different stages of development, through a study of three interacting factors: the structure of the utterance where the negator is inserted, the interaction between negation and finiteness, and the meaning of the negator. The results show that the placement of the negator depends on utterance organization. Moreover, the evolution of this position depends on the acquisition of finiteness. Finally, learners are sensitive from early on to the interaction between the informational structure of the utterance and the place of the negator. Verhagen, Schimke and Turco (Chapter 4) analyze the relationship between the acquisition of negation and of finiteness by Turkish learners of German and Dutch. Their study shows that finite verb forms appear earlier in utterances that do not contain a negator. Chapters 5 and 6 focus on the acquisition of adverbs during SLA in relation to the acquisition of morphology in the L2 learner’s variety. Bernini’s contribution (Chapter 5) concerns the acquisition of L2 Italian by learners of different source languages for which the adverb class is not organized in the same way as in L2 Italian. The author traces back the evolution of adverb formation through three initial acquisitional steps: Pre-basic, Basic and Postbasic Varieties (cf. Klein & Perdue, 1997). Sun (Chapter 6) analyses the

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productions of two groups of Chinese learners of French (one group studying French in China and one in France) collected in a narrative task (retelling the film Modern Times) in order to test the hypothesis that the acquisition of adverbs is a substitute for verbal morphology in the marking of tense and aspect. Her results show no evidence for a compensatory relation, but rather a joint development of different means. Trévisiol (Chapter 7) then examines the role of learners’ knowledge of several foreign languages in the construction of their variety with particular attention to the acquisition of a third language (L3). Focusing on narratives and spatial descriptions produced by Japanese learners of French L3 at three competence levels (beginners, intermediate, advanced) who had acquired English as their L2, her results show the joint influence of L1 Japanese and of L2 English in the acquisition of L3 French. She also discusses the conditions that allow the transfer of previous knowledge to express time and space. Chapters 8 to 10 analyze the use of L2 by very advanced learners. Vraciu (Chapter 8) focuses on fiction narratives produced by French learners of English to determine whether their use of verbal morphology is guided by the lexical and grammatical aspectual properties of the target language (English) or by a task-related effect linked to the lexical properties of the verbs used in the given communicative situation. The results show that both factors have a variable importance depending on the degree of mastery of the target language (advanced vs. very advanced learners). Bartning (Chapter 9) analyzes the production of French by Swedish learners at a very high L2 competence level. Her analyses of the linguistic means used by learners show the interaction between three linguistic levels in oral production: information structure, formulaic language and morphosyntax. Singleton’s contribution (Chapter 10) concerns the final stage of L2 acquisition in relation to the Critical Age Hypothesis (CPH). He discusses three problematic issues: how to evaluate the degree of success relative to the final result of acquisition; divergences among different versions of the CPH that do not situate the end of this period at the same level; and the reasons why the CPH has become a reference in discussions of different levels of achievement for very advanced learners at the final state of acquisition. The last two chapters of Part 1 propose a reflection that goes beyond the framework of empirical studies and show how SLA studies can contribute to our understanding of the language faculty. Benazzo (Chapter 11) focuses on the debate that opposed Comrie (2000) and Perdue (2006) concerning modern-day ontogenetic processes during which ‘language is created anew’ and their relevance for human language development. She discusses the manifestations of the human faculty of language through the study of temporality in ‘simple systems’ such as early L2 varieties and homesigns, speculating on its implications for early language emergence and evolution. Similarly, Fusellier (Chapter 12) discusses Perdue’s, Comrie’s and Slobin’s

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points of view concerning the emergence and development of human language, comparing L2 learner varieties, emerging sign languages and child language development.

Part 2: L1 and L2 Acquisition: Types of Learners The chapters in Part 2 discuss the language acquisition process by comparing children and adult learners. Two such types of comparisons are proposed: some studies compare early bilingual 2L1 acquisition by children and L2 acquisition by adult learners; others compare L1 monolingual acquisition and L2 acquisition by adults. Slobin’s contribution (Chapter 13) provides a framework to study the relationship between child first language acquisition and adult second language acquisition. Taking the ESF project as a starting point (Perdue, 1993a), he shows that the theoretical orientation of this project, as well as its research methodology, can be applied to first language acquisition research. He also shows that the articulation between both types of acquisition lead to new interesting studies suggesting the existence of similar processes for both groups of learners. The next four contributions focus on early bilingualism and adult L2 acquisition. Müller and Eichler (Chapter 14) compare mixed utterances produced by children who are simultaneously acquiring German and a Romance language (Italian, French, Spanish) with utterances produced by German adult learners of French L2. Analyses examine more specifically the uses of NPs that shed light on the representation of underlying gender and number agreement features. Results raise questions concerning possible differences in how adult L2 learners and children acquiring two L1 represent abstract grammatical features. Schlyter (Chapter 15) studies the development of finiteness in three groups of learners: a group of adult Swedish learners of French L2 and two groups of French–Swedish bilingual children aged two to four years and three to eight years. The analysis of the differences and similarities between these groups raises several questions: What is the borderline between the acquisition of finiteness in L1 and L2? When is it possible to speak of child L2 acquisition? What is the initial age of L2 acquisition? The author argues that child L2 acquisition constitutes a special type of acquisition with its own properties. Tracy and Lemke’s contribution (Chapter 16) summarizes the results of a longitudinal study of a group of eight children (Turkish, Arabic and Russian L1) and of a crosssectional study concerning the productions of 90 children in these languages. The author argues that, in spite of limited input conditions, the emergence of clause structure (V2 effects) and of finiteness is quite robust and much more similar to what we know about L1 learners as compared to adults acquiring German as a second language.

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Dimroth and Haberzettl (Chapter 17) compare the rates with which German verbal morphology is acquired by two groups of children observed in a longitudinal study: young monolingual children during L1 acquisition and older children (aged 7–9 years) with L1 Russian during untutored L2 acquisition. While ultimate attainment in this domain was target-like in both groups, the older learners outperformed the younger children in that they needed less time to build up their first target-like form-function distinctions (the so-called mini-paradigms) and thus to use verbal inflectional morphology productively. These results refute the Less is More Hypothesis (Newport, 1990, 1991) which predicts an advantage for younger learners whose less advanced information processing abilities should be better adapted to the task of learning inflectional morphology. The findings show that rather than being a hindrance, advanced cognitive maturity contributes to a cluster of advantageous capacities and strategies for language learning responsible for the success characteristic of child L2 learners. The last four contributions in Part 2 compare the development of discourse skills in adult L2 acquisition and monolingual children’s first language acquisition. The first paper in this series is co-authored by CP. It presents ideas that were developed for a joint conference presentation in 20027 and further elaborated subsequently. The present volume in tribute to CP provides a most appropriate opportunity to make these ideas known to the community. In this paper Benazzo, Perdue and Watorek (Chapter 18) address the general question of discourse construction focusing particularly on the use of additive morphemes (aussi, encore, toujours) in the production of two different text types: picture descriptions and story retellings. The analysis of the data in French L1 (children aged 4, 7 and 10) and in French L2 (Polish adult learners at the beginning and intermediate levels) shows that the acquisition and use of these devices strongly depend on the capacity to organize discourse. This capacity is under construction in the case of children and already developed in the case of adults. Thus, unlike adults, children master the morphosyntax of scope particles; however, contrary to adults, they have difficulties using them appropriately in a complex discourse. These results are confirmed by Giuliano (Chapter 19) who analyses the role of the scope additive particles ‘anche’ (also) and ‘ancora’ (still) in narrative discourse produced by monolingual children acquiring L1 Italian (aged 4, 7 and 10 years) and by adult English learners of Italian L2. Taking into account a different target language, her contribution constitutes additional evidence for the impact of language-specific features on the acquisitional process. Lenart’s contribution (Chapter 20) then provides a comparison between child language acquisition in the case of monolingual Polish and French children of 4, 7 and 10 years vs. adult Polish learners of L2 French. This comparison focuses on uses of NPs when referring to entities in fiction narratives. The main problem for the child is to understand the plurifunctionality of morphemes as well as the relation between referents and the extralinguistic

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or intralinguistic context necessary to identify them. The acquisitional problem for adult learners consists in learning some functions of French articles that are not obligatory in their source language. Pronominal and Ø forms in the NP paradigm present difficulties that are shared by all children, irrespective of their mother tongue. These problems differentiate child L1 acquisition and adult L2 acquisition, clearly reflecting a cognitive problem, rather than a linguistic one. Finally, Hendriks and Watorek (Chapter 21) compare the developmental path of first and second language learners with particular attention to the influence of two factors on the construction of coherent and cohesive spatial discourse: cognitive development and the structure of the language to be acquired. The data were elicited in a poster description task administered to monolingual adults and children at 4, 7 and 10 years in four language groups (French, English and Polish), as well as to a group of Polish L2 learners of French. The authors’ assumption is that the available linguistic means not only differ as a function of language itself, but also change as a function of the proficiency level of the particular speakers of that language. Results show differences in first vs. second language acquisition, resulting from the cognitive maturity of child and adult learners. However, they also show some similarities in the discourse produced by these two types of learners that occur when both types of learners fall back on a minimal treatment of the task.

Part 3: Typological Variation and Language Acquisition Part 3 brings together contributions focusing mainly on the impact of typological contrasts in L1 and/or L2 acquisition. Giacalone-Ramat (Chapter 22) opens this section of the volume with a general overview of how the study of learner varieties contributes to linguistic theory and to our understanding of human language. She also shows that comparative perspectives, essential to functional typology, are highly relevant to SLA research insofar as the source and target languages compete in the acquisition process. The subsequent nine contributions focus on L2 acquisition and on the importance of language-specific properties in this process. These different analyses study a vast array of languages: Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian), Germanic languages (English, German), Slavic languages (Polish, Russian) as well as Chinese. Dietrich (Chapter 23) tests the hypothesis that perspective-taking in discourse planning is biased by language-specific means of expressing temporal or spatial references. The aim is to determine whether lower-level and more automated procedures of utterance production might also be linguistically biased. Focusing on the time course of operations at the interface between semantic and syntactic levels of processing, the author presents results from a cross-linguistic production experiment. Speakers of Chinese, German and Polish were prompted to produce Yes/No questions, a type of speech act that is syntactically coded differently in the three languages. Using a two-choice

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Go-NoGo Paradigm with LRP measures, the chronological correspondence between conceptualization and syntactic encoding is tested. The results are at variance with the assumption of linguistic relativity at this level of language processing. Demagny (Chapter 24) then examines the two domains of space and time in adult second language acquisition. She compares how Englishspeaking learners of French L2 (at two competence levels) and native speakers (of French vs. English) mark boundaries and simultaneity in controlled situations where they had to describe motion events. The results show crosslinguistic differences in the discourse of French vs. English natives that can be related to the particular temporal–aspectual and spatial systems of these languages. As for learners, after a first phase where they rely mostly on lexical means (inherent semantic properties of predicates, adverbial expressions), they gradually and simultaneously acquire both verbal morphology and syntactic constructions (subordination) in order to express both temporal– aspectual and spatial relations in L2 discourse. Still in the domain of temporality, Muñoz (Chapter 25) reports a preliminary comparative analysis of how Spanish advanced learners of English and native speakers of English use temporal–aspectual morphology in the same task, with particular attention to their use of the progressive. The emphasis is on exploring potential differences across these two languages, despite the fact that both mark the progressive aspect in apparently similar ways, showing the implications of such differences for second language acquisition. Aleksandrova’s contribution (Chapter 26) examines cross-linguistic influences on the production of quasi-bilingual Russian/French speakers based on previous findings concerning highly advanced L2 learner varieties and bilingual speakers indicating reciprocal influences of L1 on L2 and of L2 on L1. This chapter concerns narratives produced by quasi-bilinguals in Russian and French, as compared to those produced by monolingual speakers of the same languages, focusing specifically on strategies of reference to entities. Reciprocal influences of L1 and L2 are attested in analyses of the databases that are guided by two questions: how the different linguistic means of reference to entities in Russian and French determine the organization of information in the referential domain; and how these differences are reflected in the production of quasi-bilinguals in both languages. Andorno (Chapter 27) then examines how advanced German learners of L2 Italian discover the semantic and pragmatic values of word order, which differs in German and in Italian. These languages share a common SV basic order but the VS order is always possible under certain conditions, which differ in German vs. Italian. The analysis examines whether and how advanced learners manage to reach a native level. The results show that differences between source and target languages play an important role in the constitution of a new system in L2. The last two contributions present studies concerning first language acquisition. Von Stutterheim et al. (Chapter 28) first note that acquiring narrative competence during first language development requires learners

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to create a narrative that is coherent across a range of conceptual domains (entities, time, space, worlds) both within and across utterances. They show how the acquisition of narrative structure is driven by grammatically based macro-planning principles, charting development in a large database that includes four different stages (7–8 years, 9–10 years, 11–12 years, 13–14 years). The findings indicate changing constraints during acquisition. Until a late age, children construct coherence mainly by relying on temporal relations at the expense of other types of relations (e.g. causal). The discussion focuses on the nature of the acquired linguistic knowledge and on how it is anchored in relevant typological features of a V2 language. In a different line of research, Kail (Chapter 29) examines online sentence processing by children, aiming for general principles that regulate how morphosyntactic clues are temporally integrated throughout development. She proposes that processing cost should be determined by three main factors: contextual information, structural information available at a given point of the sentence, and the relation between morphological clues and word order in a given language. She presents an experiment involving monolingual adults and children between 6 and 11 years, as well as simultaneous bilingual children of the same age, comparing four languages that present similar and contrasting features (French, Portuguese, English, Swedish). The discussion stresses the hierarchical relationships among different components of cue cost during online sentence processing. Sir John Lyons provides closure to the volume with a personal and nostalgic note that highlights the importance of his encounter with Clive in 1971–1972 and his attachment to him as a colleague and friend ever since. Citing the Greek poet Callimachus (c.305–c.240 BC), he reminds us that death will not take away Clive’s legacy from us – the pleasant voices of his nightingales. Nostalgia will remain with the reader at the end of this volume, as it will for all of his closest collaborators, students, family and friends, who will never forget the person he was and who will pursue the tracks he set out for all of us.

Notes (1) This conference entitled Acquisition d’une langue étrangère: Perspectives de recherche (The acquisition of a foreign language: New perspectives) took place at the University of Paris 8 Vincennes on 27–28th April 1979. (2) The learners in this study were learning a second language through daily exchanges with no formal teaching of the L2 (cf. Perdue, 1993a). (3) The crucial moment was the creation of the Department of French sign language in 1998 at the University of Paris 8 with the arrival of Christian Cuxac followed by the fi rst students involved in research for their masters’ thesis and doctoral dissertations in this field. (4) This seminar took place in Wassenaar (The Netherlands) in 2003 and was the starting point for the project under the direction of R.P. Botha entitled Restricted Linguistic Systems as Windows on Language Genesis (NIAS 2004–2006).

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(5) This project entitled ‘Construction du discours par des apprenants des langues, enfants et adultes’ was supported by the CNRS (APN 2JE 454). (6) This project entitled Utterance structure in context: first and second language acquisition in a cross-linguistic perspective (Langacross, 2007–2010) was jointly supported by the Agence Nationale pour la Recherche in France (ANR) and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in Germany (DFG). An extension of the project was submitted in 2010 to the same agencies under the title Utterance structure in context: language and cognition during first and second language acquisition in a cross-linguistic perspective (Langacross-2, 2011–2013). (7) Euresco conference The structure of learner language, Kolymbari (Greece), 7–12th October 2002.

References Benazzo, S. (2000) L’acquisition de particules de portée en français, anglais et allemand L2. Etudes longitudinales compares. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Université Paris 8/Freie Universität Berlin. Benazzo, S. (2005) Le développement des lectes d’apprenants et l’acquisition de la portée à distance en L2. Acquisition et Interaction en Langue Etrangère 23, 65–94. Bowerman, M. (1996) The origins of children’s spatial semantic categories: Cognitive versus linguistic determinants. In J.J. Gumperz and S.C. Levinson (eds) Rethinking Linguistic Relativity (pp. 145–176). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bowerman, M. (2007) Containment, support and beyond: Constructing topological spatial categories in first language. In M. Aurnague, M. Hickmann and L. Vieu (eds) Spatial Entities in Language and Cognition (pp. 177–203). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Bowerman, M. and Choi, S. (2003) Space under construction: Language-specific categorization in first language acquisition. In D. Gentner and S. Goldin-Meadow (eds) Language in Mind: Advances in the Study of Language and Thought (pp. 387–427). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Carroll, M. and von Stutterheim, Ch. (1997) Relations entre grammaticalisation et conceptualisation et implications sur l’acquisition d’une langue étrangère. Acquisition et Interaction en Langue Etrangère 9, 83–115. Choi, S. and Bowerman, M. (1991) Learning to express motion events in English and Korean: The influence of language-specific lexicalization patterns. Cognition 41, 83–121. Comrie, B. (2000) From potential to realization: An episode in the origin of language. Linguistics 38, 989–100. Corder, S.P. (1967) The significance of learners’ errors. International Review of Applied Linguistics 5, 161–170. Corder, S.P. (1971/80) Idiosyncratic dialects and error analysis. IRAL IX, 147–160. (Traduit en français en 1980 par Perdue et Porquier: Dialectes idiosyncrasiques et analyse d’erreurs). Langages 57, 17–27. Fusellier-Souza, I. (2004) Sémiogenèse des langues des signes. Etude de langues de signes primaires (LSP) pratiquées par des sourds brésiliens. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Université Paris 8. Giuliano, P. (2000) L’acquisition et l’expression des fonctions négatives en français et en anglais comme langues secondes. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Université Paris 8. Hickmann, M. (2003) Children’s Discourse: Person, Time and Space Across Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jakobson, R. (1963) Essais de linguistique générale. Paris: Ed. de Minuit. Klein, W. (2001) Elementary forms of linguistic organisation. In S. Ward and J. Trabant (eds) The Origins of Language (pp. 81–102). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Klein, W. (2006) On finiteness. In V. van Geenhoven (ed.) Semantics in Acquisition (pp. 245–272). Dordrecht: Springer.

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Klein, W. and Perdue, C. (1997) The basic variety (or: couldn’t natural languages be much simpler?). Second Language Research 13, 301–347. Lambert, M., Carroll, M. and von Stutterheim (2008) Acquisition en L2 des principes d’organisation de récits spécifiques aux langues. Acquisition et Interaction en Langue Etrangère 26, 6–11. Newport, E. (1990) Maturational constraints on language learning. Cognitive Science 14, 11–28. Newport, E. (1991) Contrasting conceptions of the critical period for language. In S. Carey and R. Gelman (eds) The Epigenesis of Mind (pp. 111–130). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Perdue, C. (ed.) (1993a) Adult Language Acquisition: Cross-Linguistic Perspectives. Vol. 1: Field Methods; Vol. 2: The Results. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Perdue, C. (1993b) Comment rendre compte de la ‘logique’ de l’acquisition d’une langue étrangère par un adulte. Etudes de Linguistique Appliquée 92, 8–22. Perdue, C. (2006) ‘Creating language anew’: Some remarks on an idea of Bernard Comrie’s. Linguistics 44, 853–871. Perdue, C. (2008) L’expression de la finitude chez les apprenants L1 et L2 du néerlandais, du français et de l’allemand. In M. Kail, M. Fayol and M. Hickmann (eds) L’apprentissage des langues. Paris: CNRS Editions. Perdue, C. (2010) The expression of finiteness by L1 and L2 learners of Dutch, French, and German. In M. Kail and M. Hickmann (eds) Language Acquisition Across Linguistic and Cognitive Systems. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Perdue, C. and Porquier, R. (1979) Présentation. Encrages, numéro spécial de Linguistique appliquée (pp. 4–7). Vincennes, Pairs: Université de Paris 8. Perdue, C. and Porquier, R. (eds) (1980) Apprentissage et connaissance d’une langue étrangère. Langages 57 (pp. 5–7). Perdue, C., Benazzo, S. and Giuliano, P. (2002) When finiteness gets marked: The relation between morphosyntactic development and use of scopal items in adult language acquisition. Linguistics 40, 849–890. Slobin, D.I. (1985) Crosslinguistic evidence for the language-making capacity. In D.I. Slobin (ed.) The Crosslinguistic Study of Language Acquisition (Vol. 2, pp. 1157–1256). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Slobin, D.I. (1991) Learning to think for speaking: Native language, cognition and rhetorical style. Pragmatics 1, 7–25. Slobin, D.J. (1993) Adult language acquisition: A view from child language study. In C. Perdue (ed.) Adult Language Acquisition: Cross-Linguistic Perspectives (2 Vols.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Slobin, D.I. (1996) From ‘thought to language’ to ‘thinking for speaking’. In J.J. Gumperz and S.C. Levinson (eds) Rethinking Linguistic Relativity (pp. 70–96). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Slobin, D.I. (2004) The many ways to search for a frog. In S. Strömqvist and L. Verhoeven (eds) Relating Events in Narrative: Typological and Contextual Perspectives (pp. 219–257). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Slobin, D.I. (2006) What makes manner of motion salient? Explorations in linguistic typology, discourse, and cognition. In M. Hickmann and S. Robert (eds) Space Across Languages: Linguistic Systems and Cognitive Categories (pp. 59–81). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Watorek, M. (1996) Conceptualisation et représentation linguistique de l’espace en italien et en français, langue maternelle et langue étrangère. Doctoral dissertation, Université de Paris 8. Watorek, M. (ed.) (2004) La construction du discours en français langue cible. Langages 155, 3–13.

Part 1 Second Language Acquisition: From Initial to Final Stages

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A Way to Look at Second Language Acquisition Wolfgang Klein

Thinking Back It is peculiar, but often it is neither the most recent nor the most important events that are most vividly remembered. I must have met Clive Perdue for the first time at a workshop of the GRAL group in Vincennes 30 years ago. But while I clearly remember Larry Selinker pouring a glass of red wine over my jacket, there is no recollection whatsoever of speaking with Clive. Still, the impression must have been deep, because when, soon afterwards, the European Science Foundation in Strasbourg decided to fund a Europewide research project on the second language acquisition of immigrant workers, and the Max Planck Society in Munich granted me money for a coordinator for this project, it was Clive Perdue who immediately came to my mind. So, I called him in Paris, he listened, and after one of those long and thoughtful pauses that were so characteristic of him, he asked ‘Ah, ah, are you offering me a job?’ And I still hear the slight tone of disbelief and the distinct rise on the word ‘job’ in his voice, as if it had been yesterday. I said ‘yes’, and this was the beginning of a wonderful cooperation and of a wonderful friendship spanning almost three decades. In fact, friendship as well as cooperation last well beyond his death, because once in while, I note to my own surprise that I keep asking him questions, and he keeps answering them. When you learn a second language, be it in the classroom or in the wild, you often face substantial problems because a particular feature of this language – a sound, a word, a construction – has no immediate counterpart in your earlier linguistic knowledge. French learners of English often struggle with the first sound in this because there is no such sound in French; and English learners of French often struggle with the last sound in tu, because there is no such sound in English. But you may also have problems because a particular feature has a counterpart which is very similar but not completely identical. French as well as English have an unvoiced dental stop /t/; but in English, it is aspirated, and in French, it is not; such little differences belong to the hardest pièces de résistance for ultimate achievement. German 23

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learners of English regularly have problems with the choice between the progressive form and the simple form: He was singing – He sang. There is no grammatical distinction of this sort in German; both meanings are expressed by the same verb form, which in shape and history corresponds to the English simple form: Er sang. But they also have problems with the present perfect He has sung; while the German counterpart Er hat gesungen is very close in composition and meaning, there are subtle differences, reflected for example in the fact that in English, the time of the event, although clearly in the past, cannot be specified by a past time adverbial, such as yesterday or a while ago. In the early 1980s, when I still tried, or was trying or have tried, to improve my English, I once asked Clive: ‘Can you tell me in a single sentence how the English continuous form is used?’ I do not remember exactly in which year this was, but I do remember exactly that he first began to roll a cigarette, and just before lighting it, he answered: ‘You use it when you are 100% in the action.’ This is not what I had read in the grammar books, and it had never occurred to me when I tried to speak English. But I thought it was a perfect answer, for at least three reasons: • • •

It is simple. It helps the learner because it takes his perspective. It captures the crucial semantic intuition.

So, this one-sentence explanation is not a perfect linguistic account of the meaning of the English progressive form, but it contains the decisive empirical germ for such an account. A few years later, our findings on how second language learners express temporality in the absence of inflectional morphology increasingly excited my interest in how time is encoded in general by natural languages. And more than any tradition of tense studies (which one must not ignore, of course), it was this simple and direct way of looking at the phenomena which guided my interest. If you are 100% in the action, this means that the time about which you make a claim when you speak must be fully contained in the time during which the action lasts. And if you use the past tense I was singing, this means that the time about which you talk (the ‘topic time’, so to speak) (a) precedes the moment of speech, and (b) is fully included in the time of singing – the ‘situation time’; you are 100% in the action; but it does not imply that the action itself cannot include the moment of speech. Hence, tense does not express a relation between the time of speaking and the time of the event, as you read in every text book; instead, it expresses a relation between the time of speaking and the topic time. The aspectual dimension, as brought in by the choice of the progressive rather than the simple form, reflects the fact that the topic time is properly included in the time of the action (see Klein, 1994). If you follow the grammar books and teach your students that tense serves to place the action before the moment of speech,

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then this is not entirely false; nevertheless, the learners will often be misled, and if they make mistakes, it is the teachers and the linguists who are to be blamed, not the learner. So, if one wants to understand how language works and how people learn languages, one should not, at least not as the first stage, ask what tradition tells one, but just have a fresh, simple and unbiased look at the phenomena at hand. This is the way in which we – Clive Perdue, myself and many others around the original ESF (European Science Foundation) project and various follow-up projects – began to look at second language acquisition in the early 1980s. This is not the place to recapitulate this work (see e.g. Klein & Dimroth, 2009; Klein & Perdue, 1997; Perdue, 1984, 1993). But in what follows, I will try to characterise the perspective which underlies a great deal of this work in the form of four simple maxims, each of which will be illustrated with a few examples. This perspective is not a theory of language acquisition; it is just a way to approach a field, no more, no less.

Don’t Lose Sight of the Obvious! Here is a small list of facts which, I believe, no one can seriously deny. (1) No one is born with a specific language in his or her head. But we are all born with the capacity to learn any language. We pass through this long and tedious process which we call language acquisition once, and frequently more often, in life. It can take very different forms, depending on factors such as • • •

age, learning conditions, previous linguistic knowledge

and perhaps many others. The course, speed and eventual result of this process vary considerably according to these factors. This is what language acquisition researchers aim to find out. (2) Language acquisition is not the only possible transition between ‘language’ as a biologically given language faculty, which is more or less the same for all human beings (though minor variation is not excluded), and ‘language’ as specific linguistic systems, which are quite different from each other, and of which there are several thousands on earth. There must have been a time, very long ago, in which the language faculty already existed in the brain of our ancestors, due to some genetic changes in our species, but in which there was no single linguistic system. At that time, no one was exposed to a language: there was no input that our ancestors could learn from. They could not copy an existing system – they had to invent, to create, to construct such systems. And they did.

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(3) There is a net conclusion: the genetically given human language faculty involves at least two quite different capacities: (i) the faculty to copy a linguistic system, and (ii) the faculty to construct a linguistic system. Apparently, these faculties correspond to two types of transition from language faculty to linguistic system: language learning and language creation. And the crucial difference between them seems to be that one of them works on input, and the other one does not. But is this really the true case? No. At best, it is only half the truth. (4) Nobody really knows how our ancestors developed the first linguistic systems. But it seems obvious that the creation of a language also involves a lot of copying. It seems unlikely that, in some idle hours, a particularly talented person among our ancestors thought up the first linguistic system in his or her head and then passed it on to his/her family and his/her best friends. The creation of the first linguistic systems was the result of a fundamentally social process, which of necessity involved a massive amount of mutual copying. On the other hand, the learning of a language, under whichever conditions, is a long process which does not only require copying others, but also involves a lot of construction. Otherwise, we could not explain how rules are learned, at least those rules which are language specific. These rules do not show up in the input, although they underlie it; rather, they are constructed on the basis of input. (5) Again, there is a net conclusion: both language acquisition and language creation are essentially social processes, and both involve the copying faculty as well as the construction faculty. How do these two faculties come together? The answer is very easy in one sense and very complex in another. These faculties come together in communication: someone says something with a certain aim, others understand it and in doing so, gain access to the other’s knowledge. Our ancestors constructed a linguistic system together because they communicated in the absence of a linguistic system, and then with the help of a developing system. Ever since, both children and adults learn an existing language by listening to others and talking to others. So, we have a third type of language faculty which comes into play – the communicative faculty. This faculty must not be confused with the other two, but it interacts with them in complex ways. Communication is possible both with and without a linguistic system. Thus, it makes these systems possible on the one hand, and changes with these systems on the other. We cannot understand language creation or language acquisition, if we do not realise that they are fundamentally social in nature. (6) We are all born with the ability to build and to learn linguistic systems, but there is not a single uniform and well-defined ‘language faculty’. Instead, there is a genetically given set of capacities which may be partly species-specific and partly domain-specific. Other species do not

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construct or copy linguistic systems. This may be due to the fact that one or more of the entire set of capacities is not found in other species, or is inoperative in other domains of cognition. But it may also be due to the particular way in which all of these capacities interact in specific social contexts. It is this interaction, not just one element of the entire set, which brings about linguistic systems. (7) There is no structural resemblance between ‘language’ as genetically given linguistic capacities and ‘language’ as specific linguistic systems. This idea, advocated in theories of Universal Grammar, strikes me as no less bizarre than the idea that there should be a structural resemblance between a cook and the meals which he prepares: the relation between the innate ‘language faculty’ and a ‘linguistic system’ is a relation of production, not of similarity. Therefore, it makes no sense to consider language acquisition as a transition from an initial state of the ‘language faculty’ to a ‘steady state’ of this faculty.

Take the Learner’s Point of View! When nature equipped us with the many properties that are necessary to develop or to copy a language, it did not think of a classroom. In the history of humanity, language teaching is a very late phenomenon, and it is always an intervention into a naturally occurring process. The chances of rendering this intervention successful increase with our understanding of the regularities which underlie the naturally occurring process, that is, the regularities of what is often called ‘untutored language acquisition’, as if tutored language acquisition were the normal case. In fact, there is one sense in which tutored language acquisition is indeed the normal case: by far most work on second language acquisition is devoted to learning in the classroom. This has two massive consequences: (a) the study of second language acquisition is primarily concerned with a very special, quite artificial form of language acquisition, rather than the natural one; (b) it is dictated by the teacher’s perspective, rather than that of the learner. Taken together, these factors result in a particular perspective, which can be described by two key assumptions (Klein, 1998: Section 2.2): (1) There is a well-defined target of the acquisition process – the language to be learned. This ‘target language’, as any ‘real language’, is a clearly fixed entity, a structurally and functionally balanced system, mastered by those who have learned it in childhood, and more or less correctly described in grammars and dictionaries. (2) Learners miss this target by varying degrees and in varying respects – they make errors in production as well as in comprehension, because they lack the appropriate knowledge or skills.

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I shall call this view the target deviation perspective. It is the teacher’s task to erase or at least to minimise the deviations; it is the researcher’s task to investigate which ‘errors’ occur when and for which reasons. As a consequence, the learner’s performance in production or comprehension is not so very much studied in its own right, as a manifestation of his or her learner capacity, but in relation to a set norm; not in terms of what the learner does but in terms of what he or she fails to do. The learner’s utterances at some time during the process of acquisition are considered to be more or less successful attempts to reproduce the structural properties of target language utterances. The learner tries to do what the mature speaker does, but does it less well. But this is not the way things look from the learner’s point of view, especially if he or she has to learn in the manner in which nature itself has designed for language learning. A language is learned by communicating with others. This means that the learners have to learn how to transform their thoughts, wishes and feelings into a well-structured stream of sounds such that others – due to this stream of sound and all the other information available to them in the communicative situation – can reconstruct these thoughts, wishes and feelings. In doing so, structures evolve, which linguists describe as phonemes, words, inflectional paradigms, direct objects, adverbial phrases, sentences, texts and so forth. In other words, learners do not learn linguistic structures, they learn how to solve verbal tasks in cooperation with others, and in doing so, regularities evolve which observers, applying special analytical tools, describe as a particular kind of structure. Typically, this description does not look at what learners factually do at a certain time in a certain context, when they indeed communicate; it is dictated by assumptions about how a ‘real language’ – the target of the acquisition process – is supposed to be. This stands in sharp contrast to a perspective which places the learners and what they do at the centre of observation and analysis. We may call this the ‘learner variety perspective’; it can be characterised by three key assumptions (Klein & Perdue, 1997: 307s): (1) During the acquisitional process, the learner passes through a series of learner varieties. Both the internal organisation of each variety at a given time, and the transition from one variety to the next, are essentially systematic in nature. (2) There is a limited set of organisational principles of different kinds which are present in all learner varieties. The actual structure of an utterance in a learner variety is determined by a particular interaction of these principles. The kind of interaction may vary, depending on various factors, such as the learner’s source language. With successive input analyses, the interaction changes over time. For example, picking up some component of noun morphology from the input may cause the

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learner to modify the weight of other factors to mark argument status. From this perspective, learning a new feature is not adding a new piece to a puzzle which the learner has to put together. Rather, it entails a reorganisation of the whole variety, at times minimal, at times more substantial, where the balance of the various factors successively approaches the balance that is characteristic of the target language. (3) According to this perspective, learner varieties are not imperfect imitations of a ‘real language’ – the target language – but systems in their own right, error-free by definition, and characterised by a particular lexical repertoire and by a particular interaction of organisational principles. Fully developed languages, such as English, German and French, are special cases of learner varieties. They represent a relatively stable state of language acquisition – the state in which the learner stops learning because there is no difference between his variety and the input – the variety of his social environment. According to this perspective, learning a language is not to be characterised in terms of errors and deviations, but in terms of the two-fold systematicity which it shows: (a) the inherent systematicity of a learner variety at a given time, and (b) the way in which such a learner variety evolves into another one. Clearly, it is much more difficult to unveil this two-fold systematicity than to look at how and why a learner misses a set norm. But if we truly want to understand a natural process, we must dare to look at this process as nature designed it. This does not mean that the study of language learning under artificial conditions, be it in the classroom or in the laboratory, is uninteresting or unimportant, quite the contrary: it can be of eminent social importance. It is just something different from the natural process of language acquisition, for which nature has equipped us in the first place.

Be Simple! By nature, linguistic systems are learned through social interaction, just as they come into existence through social interaction. By nature, it is not the aim of such an interaction to create or to learn a language; this is something that happens while people interact, and it is something that continuously changes this interaction, because it makes a new, additional type of communication possible: communication by means of a particular linguistic system. The aim of the interaction is to meet certain individual and social needs: its participants want to express and share thoughts, feelings and wishes, they want to coordinate certain actions, they want to store knowledge in more than one brain. By nature, a second language is acquired because learners want to buy bread, to ask where the station is, to tell or understand a funny or boring

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story, to explain why they emigrated from their home country and so on and so forth. The learner wants to solve certain tasks, as a speaker as well as a listener. In many of these tasks, he or she must express temporal or spatial information. Therefore, all languages of the world have developed means to do this. Second language learners, in contrast to children, make use of such a repertoire. But this is not yet the repertoire of the linguistic systems which they have to learn. Therefore, how do they express time and space if they want to tell a story, for example? There are two ways in which one could try to answer this question. The first is dictated by the ‘target deviation perspective’: examine to what degree and in which ways the learner deviates from a set norm, the temporal devices of English, for example. This is done on the basis of descriptions of the devices that constitute the norm, found in good English grammar books. The second way is much simpler; in fact, it is almost naive: observe how learners proceed when they tell a story, give directions, or try to perform other verbal tasks. No English grammar book is necessary, although it certainly does no harm. There is an enormous body of research on how second language learners learn to express temporality (e.g. Bardovi-Harlig, 2000; Shirai & Li, 2000); the vast majority of studies adopts the first perspective. This line of research has undoubtedly led to remarkable and valuable insights, yet it suffers from three potential shortcomings. (1) The results may reflect the effect of a particular teaching method, rather than the communicative needs and priorities of the learner in the domain of temporality. (2) The results depend on the reliability of the description of the target system. Few semantic phenomena have received as much attention as the expression of time: a rich and continuous research tradition on this topic exists from the Greek grammarians to the present day. Yet, there is no agreement even about very basic facts, such as a precise and generally accepted definition of categories like tense or aspect (see Klein, 2009 for a recent discussion of this tradition). Even for English, which can be considered the best-studied language on earth by far, the precise meaning of the continuous form or the present perfect is a matter of on-going dispute among grammarians and semanticists. Agreement can only be found on the morphological aspect. (3) Even a brief look at real data of second language learners production immediately shows that they are able to tell (or re-tell) stories, to make appointments, to explain what they want to do in the future: they are able to express time. However, typically, they have no functional inflectional morphology at all – unless explicitly taught it in a classroom (see Dietrich et al., 1995). Apparently, the role of morphology for the expression of time is overrated; it also appears that the traditional notions of tense and aspect are overrated, at least in language acquisition.

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The net consequence of the above is: if we really want to understand how temporality is acquired and used by learners, we must look at what they do, and not look for what they miss! If this line of research is consequently adopted, it may reveal that temporality functions very differently from what the linguistic tradition tells us. In many studies of the ESF project (see section ‘Thinking Back’), we have noted that learners, regardless of their source and target languages, develop a relatively stable linguistic system which we called the ‘basic variety’. One component of this system is their way of expressing temporality, which can be roughly described as follows (adapted from Klein & Perdue, 1997: Section 4.3). All utterances in this learner variety typically consist of uninflected verbs, their arguments and, optionally, adverbials. Lexical verbs show up in some ‘base form’, and there is often no copula. Most learners of English tend to use the bare stem as their base form, but V-ing also occurs. Learners of other languages may use the infinitive (German, French) or even a generalised inflected form (as is often the case for learners of Swedish). So, this basic linguistic system lacks the grammatical categories of tense and aspect. But there is a fairly rich repertoire of temporal adverbials, including calendrical adverbials (Sundays, at night), anaphoric adverbials expressing the relation AFTER (then, after) and typically also an adverbial which expresses the relation BEFORE, some deictic adverbials (yesterday, now), a few frequency adverbials (always, often, three times) and a few duration adverbials (typically in bare noun form, such as two hours). Typically, there are also a few boundary markers, which allow the learner to express the beginning and the end of some situation (as in constructions like work finish to indicate ‘after work is/was/ will be over’). So, this linguistic system essentially uses lexical rather than grammatical devices to encode temporality. These means allow the learner to specify temporal relations such as BEFORE, AFTER. In particular, it allows the specification of some time span t (in relation to some other time span s, e.g. the time of utterance). It can also express duration and frequency of time spans. Suppose that some time span t, about which the speaker wants to say something – the topic time (TT) – is introduced. This topic time must be clearly distinguished from the time of the situation (TSit), the time at which the event, process or state obtains in time. The topic time may be ‘100% in the action’, but it can also precede it, follow it or include it. All that the speaker has to do is to introduce TT and, if need be, to shift it and to relate TSit to it. More systematically, the expression of time in a text of the basic variety can be described as follows. (1) In the beginning of the discourse, a time span TT1 is fixed. This can be done in one of three ways: (a) Explicit introduction on the informant’s part; this is usually done by a temporal adverbial in initial position (‘topic position’).

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(b) Explicit introduction on the interviewer’s part (e.g. What happened last Sunday?). (c) Implicitly taking the time of utterance as default; in this case, nothing is explicitly marked. (2) If TTi is given, then TTi+1 is either maintained or changed. If it is maintained, nothing is marked. If it is changed, there are two possibilities: (a) A shift in TT is explicitly marked by an adverbial in initial position. (b) The new TT follows from a general principle of text organisation: unless otherwise marked, the order of mention corresponds to the order of events. This principle does not hold in all discourse types. It is only characteristic of narratives and other texts with a similar overall temporal organisation, texts which answer a question like What next? In other text types, such as descriptions or arguments, the principle of chronological order does not apply, nor does it hold for side structures in narratives, that is those sequences which give background information, evaluations, comments and so on. For those cases, changes of TT must be marked by adverbials. Principles A and B provide the temporal scaffolding for a sequence of utterances, establishing the time spans about which something is said. The time of situation, TSit, is then given by a third principle. (3) The relation of TSit to TT in the basic variety is always ‘more or less simultaneous’. TT can be contained in TSit, TSit can be contained in TT or both TT and TSit are contained in each other. Thus, the various aspectual distinctions often observed in fully fledged languages collapse in the basic variety. However, within this simultaneity, cleverly managed combinations of adverbs and verbal aktionsart allow learners to distinguish habituality from iterativity, for example (e.g. Starren, 2001). Similarly, expressions such as work finish make it possible to mark some action as completed. This system is very simple but extremely versatile. It allows an easy expression of when something happens or is, provided that (a) there are enough adverbials, and (b) it is cleverly managed. Therefore, one way for learners to improve their expressive powers is simply by enriching their vocabulary, especially by adding temporal adverbials, and to perfect their technique with this linguistic tool. If done, this remains a very efficient procedure. In fact, one wonders why ‘real languages’ do not use it more often (in fact, Chinese does). One might even speculate that in principle, languages are like that, that the traditional analysis of temporality leads us to overrate some elements, like grammatical tense and aspect, which are not fundamental to the expression of time, but are only some decorum which we cannot

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dismiss because it is inherited from our ancestors, and we continue to adopt more as an issue of normative correctness than for its functional efficiency.

Sapere Aude! or: Dare to Use Your Own Brain! According to the learner variety perspective, the linguistic systems which learners develop in the course of their acquisitional process are no less manifestations of the human language capacities than are ‘real languages’. The latter are only special cases of learner varieties, those which particularly successful learners, such as practically all children, have copied, under optimal circumstances, to such a degree that they no longer note differences with the linguistic systems used in their learning environment. In this sense, a ‘steady state’ is reached. However, this is not a steady state imposed by the potential of human language capacities. The steadiness of this state is defined in social terms: it mirrors the linguistic system used by the others with whom the learners interact. ‘Real languages’ do not stand out by special structural or functional properties, although they are often more complex than a system like the basic variety, for example. But if a language like English, German or French suddenly lost their inflectional morphology, or at least some of its oddities, then it would be no less a ‘real language’ than before (in fact, they would probably be better languages). This is certainly not the perspective of the language teacher, nor is it the opinion of someone who learns a language in the classroom. But it is the perspective of the ‘naive’ learner, whether a child or an adult, who is not under the influence of abstract reflection on language. It is this perspective that we should adopt, I believe, if we want to understand how human language capacities work and what kinds of systems they produce. In the long run, such a view may also lead to a different understanding of ‘real languages’, which we believe to be well-studied. The logic of most research on second language acquisition is exactly the opposite. The reason is not only that this logic is natural to the teacher’s point of view, it also corresponds to the way in which both traditional grammarians and modern linguists typically consider their object of study: there are ‘real languages’ whose properties are described in grammars and dictionaries, and teachers ensure that these properties are reproduced accurately by their students. One problem with this view is that the target, the yardstick against which deviations are measured, by which errors are counted, is not the language to be learned, but a particular description of it. Such a description may vary in quality. In fact, not many languages are really ‘welldescribed’. The most frequent word by far in the most examined language of the world is the English word the (in this short sentence, it is used five times); but to this day, there is no satisfactory and generally accepted analysis of its meaning. What exactly happens when a word such as only, also or not is added to a sentence? Grammar books and dictionaries have something to say about

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these, but even a brief look at any corpus shows that these descriptions are at best a vague approximation. In the preceding section, we briefly discussed the established views on the expression of time, which are completely dominated by a ‘morphological bias’ according to which two grammatical categories are crucial to the expression of temporality, tense and aspect, both of which primarily expressed through inflectional morphology on the verb (finite or non-finite). This is what tradition tells us, what linguists generally believe, and what results in the familiar descriptions in grammar books. But it may well be that this traditional view, while not entirely false (otherwise it would be odd indeed, given that so many intelligent people have adopted it), misses some essential points. It would be easy to give more examples of this kind. I do not want to belittle the significant work done in linguistics over the centuries. But we should be aware of the fact that this work is, in general, very far from being a satisfactory analysis of even the best-studied languages. Moreover, it is dictated by certain traditions, going back to antiquity, which often obscure a sober and unbiased view at the facts. If our ideas on temporality, but also on grammatical categories such as the subject or the accusative object, had developed on the basis of a language such as Chinese, rather than Greek and Latin, our way of describing the structure of ‘real languages’ might have looked very different from what we now take to be self-evident. In Bertolt Brecht’s Life of Galileo (one of Clive Perdue’s favourite pieces), the eminent astronomer asks a group of traditional scholars who deny the existence of Jupiter’s moons to simply have a look through his telescope; one of them rejects this invitation with the remark: ‘We do not need to look through a telescope; we have read our Aristotle.’ Neither in the study of language acquisition nor in the study of linguistic systems in general should we make ourselves dependent on what we find in the grammar books, or on what modern linguists tell us about the properties of a specific language or of all languages. One of the most promising approaches to language acquisition over the last decades is based on the idea that many structural properties are universal but parameterised within strict limits. Most, if not all, of this work is by now obsolete, not because it was badly done, but because the assumptions about what the parameters look like were abandoned by the theoretical linguists who introduced them. Notions such as the pro-drop parameter or the subjacency parameter, which inspired so many empirical studies, are no longer on the market because the underlying theory has changed. I do not mention this because I am critical of this particular approach (although I am). It is a much more general problem: research on second language acquisition should not be dependent on particular descriptions of linguistic phenomena, be they in traditional grammar books or the product of some theoretical linguistic school of thought. Instead, we should minimise our initial assumptions to the obvious, and

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then carefully look how people, equipped with particular cognitive capacities and faced with a particular social environment, construct and copy linguistic systems.

Envoi Most researchers conduct research because they need a job. Unlike the Greek philosophers, only few of us have slaves who take care of their daily living needs and thus pave their way for the quest of the truth. But a serious researcher also wants to find the truth. Around the time when I first met Clive Perdue, I heard a talk by an eminent scholar who argued that the philosophy of science should not be based on notions such as truth or falsification; research should rather be seen as an economic enterprise, in which the products are not shoes or cars but publications and talks. I thought nothing could be more perverse. Sure, we cannot afford to do research just in order to satisfy our curiosity, and moreover, we all want to become famous, or at least more famous than (some) others. But the former simply cannot be avoided, and the latter is something one should try to fight instead. Now, 30 years after this talk, I see that the laws of capitalism increasingly reign over the world of research. It is a competition in which the number and places of publications are what counts rather than the genuine pleasure of investigating the world around us. With this in mind, I would like to add a final maxim to the four discussed above. Be a scholar, not a salesman! I have no good argument for this maxim; but I am sure Clive Perdue shared it.

References Bardovi-Harlig, K. (2000) Tense and Aspect in Second Language Acquisition: Form, Meaning, and Use. Oxford: Blackwell. Dietrich, R., Klein, W. and Noyau, C. (1995) The Acquisition of Temporality in a Second Language. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Klein, W. (1994) Time in Language. London: Routledge. Klein, W. (1998) The contribution of second language acquisition research. Language Learning 48, 527–550. Klein, W. and Perdue, C. (1997) The basic variety. Second Language Acquisition Research 13, 301–347. Klein, W. and Dimroth, C. (2009) Untutored second language acquisition. In W.C. Ritchie and T.K. Bhatia (eds) The New Handbook of Second Language Acquisition (2nd rev. edn, pp. 503–522). Bingley: Emerald. Perdue, C. (ed.) (1984) Second Language Acquisition by Adult Immigrants. A Field Manual. Rowley, MA: Newbury House.

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Perdue, C. (ed.) (1993) Adult Language Acquisition (Vols. 1 & 2). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shirai, Y. and Li, P. (2000) The Acquisition of Lexical and Grammatical Aspect. Berlin: de Gruyter. Starren, M. (2001) The Second Time. The Acquisition of Temporality in Dutch and French as a Second Language. Utrecht: LOT.

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L2 Input and the L2 Initial State: The Writings of Clive Perdue Rebekah Rast

The internal organisation of learner varieties is not that of the L1, nor of the target language, nor a mixture of both. But the utterances they generate are linguistically as interesting as either Clive Perdue, 2002: 142

Introduction The challenges of the adult language acquisition task were at the core of Clive Perdue’s lifelong work in second language acquisition (SLA).1 A functionalist at heart, he tackled the problem from the perspective of how the learner works on, analyses and negotiates the target language (TL) input so as to gradually appropriate it for communicative means. His work with Wolfgang Klein and others involved in the European Science Foundation (ESF) study of untutored adult language acquisition resulted, among other findings, in the identification of the basic variety, a ‘. . . well-structured, efficient and simple form of language’ (Klein & Perdue, 1997: 301). The study, based on six source languages (SLs) and five TLs (a total of 10 pairs of SL and TL), took language acquisition research well beyond its English-dominant tradition where English generally served as either the SL or the TL in SL–TL pairings. Results of the ESF study suggest that the interaction of a small number of organisational principles and constraints were found to determine the utterance structure of this so-called basic variety, and this was largely, though not entirely, independent of the specifics of SL and TL organisation. Two well-documented examples of such constraints are ‘Controller First’ (the NP-referent with highest control comes first) and ‘Focus Last’ (new information comes at the end of the utterance) (cf. Perdue, 1993, Vol. II: 31–32). Such findings led to further reflection about whether or not such constraints are universal: ‘There is no reason why these constraints, whatever their precise form may be, cannot belong to the genetic endowment of our species’ (Klein & Perdue, 1997: 339). It is not surprising, therefore, that 37

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Perdue entered into the debate on the initial state of the second language (L2) learner’s linguistic capacity, that is, the question concerning what the L2 learner is endowed with when first exposed to a novel TL: ‘This debate can be characterized in a single sentence by the relative importance accorded by language acquisition researchers to the linguistic environment (called ‘input’) to which the learner is exposed’ (Perdue, 1996b: 1).2 The debate is summarised in what follows. A fundamental question about TL input processing concerns the nature of the adult learner’s linguistic capacity. For researchers working within the Universal Grammar (UG) framework, humans have an innate competence for language; the assumption is that learners’ language acquisition cannot be solely based on the linguistic environment because the learners’ input is deficient (the poverty of the stimulus argument, Chomsky, 1980). Therefore, sources other than the input, such as innate knowledge in the form of UG, or the instantiation of UG in the first language (L1) in the case of L2 learners, must constitute the basis for this process (cf. Schwartz & Sprouse, 1996; see also Sprouse, 2009). Although diverse perspectives regarding L2 acquisition exist within the UG-generativist paradigm, this chapter will consider the strong transfer stance only, that is, the view that the adult language learner comes to the acquisition process with full knowledge of the L1 grammar, and that this knowledge will be fully transferred in L2 acquisition (the Full Transfer/Full Access model proposed by Schwartz & Sprouse, 1996).3 ‘This means that the starting point of L2 acquisition is quite distinct from that of L1 acquisition: in particular, it contends that all the principles and parameter values as instantiated in the L1 grammar immediately carry over as the initial state of a new grammatical system on first exposure to input from the target language’ (Schwartz & Sprouse, 1996: 41). The authors go on to explain the role of input in this perspective. If the system cannot assign a representation to input data, then some sort of restructuring will need to occur; it is the TL input that triggers this change to the initial state of the L2 system. As such, each stage of restructuring results in a unique interlanguage grammar. This restructuring may vary in its rapidity and in some cases the restructuring may not occur because of deficient or highly obscure input for example. In the functionalist framework, general cognitive abilities, including organisational principles, explain language acquisition, as is the case with other acquisitional processes specific to the human mind and body. All necessary information is present in the input, and learners use their knowledge and cognitive capacities to analyse this input. Moreover, the input is not only the language of the environment, but also the language constituted by the interlocutors with whom learners negotiate (cf. Giacobbe, 1992). It follows that the way in which a learner processes and uses input is therefore decisive evidence in moving forward in this debate. Perdue adhered to the latter perspective: ‘The functional approach thus attaches great

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relevance to the fact that the L2 learner is required to use the language in order to acquire it, and this poses the problem of what initially is useful knowledge’ (Perdue, 2002: 127). Given these two drastically different perspectives, Perdue acknowledged the lack of empirical research devoted to observing the TL input to which learners are exposed and to how they process this input: ‘The way a learner works on the input is therefore critical for distinguishing between these extreme positions, or rather, for advancing the debate. This debate, we must admit, has been swimming in empirical impressionism for one major reason: but for one exception (Zwitserlood), there has been no systematic attempt to control the input or its processing by the learner’ (Perdue, 1996b: 2).4 Perdue’s writings divulge the need in SLA research to understand not only the extent to which linguistic input plays a role in L2 acquisition and how learners go about processing this linguistic input, but also the knowledge and resources learners bring to the acquisition task and the nature of the adult learner’s language capacity. His writings also express how highly controversial these issues have been. In sum, the existence of such substantial differences in assumptions about the role of input in L2 acquisition and the L2 initial state as those made by the two approaches described above suggests that examining learners’ analysis of the input at the very beginning of the acquisition process was an appropriate next step. This chapter will present research objectives developed by Perdue and his colleagues and will provide a brief description of our study of the acquisition of Polish by French adult learners at the very initial stages of the L2 acquisition process, including selected results that respond to particular concerns articulated in Perdue’s writings. This work is ongoing and in no way implies an absolute generalisation of our modest results to L2 acquisition processes. The goal here is to convey the importance of Clive Perdue’s reflections on these essential issues in SLA and to show how we are progressively nourishing these reflections with empirical data and informed interpretation.

Research Objectives Inspired by Zwitserlood et al. (2000), who studied the first 15 min of exposure to L2 Chinese by Dutch native speakers, Perdue initiated a pilot study to examine the first stages of L2 acquisition by French learners of Polish at the University of Paris 8 (cf. Rast, 1998, 1999). The pilot study was primarily methodological in nature, investigating ways in which we could begin to respond to broad research questions concerning input processing in L2 acquisition: How does an L2 learner process the input of the TL environment? What knowledge is available to adult learners at the very beginning of L2 acquisition that will help them process the input? In what order are the TL items acquired? To what extent does this order reflect characteristics of the input? Our purpose was to identify tasks and means of recording input at this

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early stage of acquisition that would reveal how our learners processed the Polish input. A subsequent study then made use of these methodologies and revealed interesting tendencies about what learners do with their TL input (cf. Rast 2008; Rast & Dommergues, 2003). The initial research objectives for both the pilot study and the subsequent study were as follows: (1) Determine what learners bring to the L2 acquisition process. (2) Characterise the TL input and determine how learners work on it. (3) Characterise the L2 initial state. In the next section, following details about the methodology of the principal study, we will review these objectives through an examination of a selection of Perdue’s observations in an attempt to better understand his thoughts at the origins of this research project. We will then look at what our results can contribute to these objectives and observations.

The Study The data for this study of the acquisition of Polish by French native speakers were collected at the University of Paris 8 in Saint-Denis (suburb of Paris, France) from two distinct types of participants: one group (hereafter ‘learners’) attended a specially designed Polish course (n = 19), and the other (hereafter ‘first exposure’) consisted of participants for whom the only Polish input was that provided during the language task (n = 96). Our learners were students in the French as a Second Language programme, where they were trained to become language instructors and fulfilled the requirement to study an unknown language and observe their own foreign language acquisition process. The ‘first exposure’ participants resembled our Polish learners with respect to gender, age, language background and other socio-biographical parameters, and also had no knowledge of Polish at the time of the study.5 Biographical data were collected by means of a questionnaire intended to identify the native and dominant language(s) of the learners, their previous knowledge of other non-native languages, and their approximate proficiency levels in the respective languages according to their own self-evaluation. All of our participants had native knowledge of French, intermediate or advanced English, and in most cases some knowledge of other languages. The instructor of the Polish course, a native Polish speaker, created a learning environment that simulated as closely as possible that of naturalistic learners, using the communicative approach and avoiding metalanguage or explicit grammar explanation. In addition, learners were asked not to consult dictionaries, grammar books or any outside input concerning Polish for the duration of the data collection period. The class met once a week for two and a half hour sessions over a period of 15 weeks; data collection, however, took

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place during the first six class sessions only, that is, during the first eight hours of exposure to Polish, excluding testing time. Once the data collection period had ended, the Polish classes continued without the input and methodological constraints. The Polish instructor was recorded and this verbal input was thoroughly transcribed in CHAT format of the CHILDES programmes (MacWhinney, 2000). In this way, linguistic exposure could be quantified through word frequencies and occurrences of particular word orders. These transcriptions represent the TL input of this study. We made use of numerous tasks to collect data from our two groups of speakers (learners and first exposure).6 At various time intervals during the overall eight hours of exposure to input our learners were tested on the following: word order, grammaticality judgements, written translations of the grammaticality judgements, oral sentence translations, and sentence repetitions. The word order tests involved reading a sentence that provided context and then putting the scrambled words of the subsequent sentence in order. The grammaticality judgement tests required learners to read a text in Polish, find the ungrammatical forms and correct them. These were immediately followed by written translations in which learners translated the Polish text of the grammaticality judgement tests into French. During the oral sentence translations, they listened to unrelated Polish sentences and translated them into written French. Finally, the sentence repetition test consisted of listening to unrelated Polish sentences and repeating them as best they could. Different first exposure groups also took the oral sentence translation or sentence repetition tests, or an oral or a written version of a word translation test. In the written version of the test, participants were asked to read a list of Polish words and to translate what they thought they understood into written French. In the oral version, participants were asked to listen to the same unrelated words and to translate what they thought they understood into written French.

Objectives and Results Objective 1. Determine What Learners Bring to the L2 Acquisition Process Perdue (1996a: 138) poses the questions: ‘What does the learner bring to the learning task? What initially is useful knowledge?’ He assumes encyclopaedic knowledge, a properly functioning articulatory and perceptual system, and the ability to segment the speech stream and assign meaning to its segments. He suggests that this useful knowledge consists of a partial understanding of the cognitive categories that universally receive grammatical expression in languages, such as temporal anchoring and knowledge of how information is organised in different types of discourse, such as the natural order of chronological events, cause preceding effect, and source

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preceding goal (Perdue, 2002). ‘The first task a learner is faced with is understanding and producing some TL segments. These words are more likely to correspond to the TL open class than closed class words, and may be specific to one learner, or to groups of learners sharing the same SL [source language]’ (Perdue, 1996a: 138). Perdue’s assumptions are for the most part based on what adult learners can already do in their L1s. He assumes that adult learners have the ability to segment the L2 speech stream and assign meaning to its segments because they can do this in their L1s. The interesting question then is how L2 learners manage to segment the L2 speech stream and assign meaning to its segments at the very beginning of the L2 acquisition experience. At this point, as can be extrapolated from the above citation, Perdue is in fact putting forth some hypotheses for us, that is, that certain types of words (i.e. open versus closed class) may facilitate the task, that different learners will perform differently, and that learners will make use of their L1s to accomplish the task.

Results 1. Determine What Learners Bring to the L2 Acquisition Process Results from a battery of tests collected from our learners and first exposure participants suggest that learners bring all of their knowledge to the first stages of the acquisition task. Not surprisingly, we found much evidence of cross-linguistic influence7 (L1 in particular) in tasks involving repetition, translation and grammatical analysis, adding support to the well-established claim that learners use their prior linguistic knowledge in L2 acquisition (cf. Odlin, 1989; Ringbom, 1987). Our learners and first exposure participants, for example, were better able to repeat Polish words that shared formal and semantic features with French words (generally Polish–French cognates, but not always) than those that did not. The first exposure participants who were asked to translate words and sentences in Polish also relied heavily on their L1 and only correctly translated the words that were unmistakably French– Polish cognates (e.g. French informatique and Polish informatyk˛ e, both meaning ‘computer programming/informatics’). Open-class lexical items (e.g. nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs) were correctly translated with more frequency than were closed-class items (e.g. determiners, conjunctions, pronouns). We also observed a role for learners’ other L2s when performing tasks in Polish, which provides support for literature in the fairly new area of L3 or additional language acquisition (cf. Bardel & Lindqvist, 2010; Cenoz et al., 2001; De Angelis, 2007; Rast & Trévisiol, 2006). The Polish word mój, for example, was correctly translated as mon ‘my’ by three of the four participants who had some knowledge of Russian (‘my’ is moj in Russian). Perhaps of most interest, however, are the numerous occasions of cross-linguistic influence that resulted in false hypotheses. Several participants, for example, translated the Polish word mówi ‘he/she speaks’ into French as film ‘film/movie’, suggesting

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that Polish mówi activated the English word ‘movie’, which ultimately led them to the false conclusion that Polish mówi means French film. A similar case was found for those with German as an L2. Several participants translated Polish jeden ‘one’ as chaque ‘each’, applying the German meaning of jeden ‘each’ to Polish. In addition to these lexical examples, we observed activation of morphological knowledge that again resulted in false hypotheses. With regard to the Polish word kolegi (the genetive, masculine, singular form of French collègue ‘colleague’), 18% (of 34 participants) translated it as a plural form, suggesting that participants identified the final -i morpheme with plural. In addition to cross-linguistic influence, other categories of cognitive ability were also observed, such as the use of salient features in the input to accomplish the TL task at hand. Examples of this are found in the results of the sentence repetition tests. Learners and first exposure participants relied heavily on stress to repeat the Polish sentences even though stress is not a prominent characteristic of French. They also relied on position of the word in the sentence, correctly repeating more words in initial and final positions than in medial position. Finally, it became clear in our analyses that learners with the same L1, the same L2s and similar profiles overall do not necessarily work on the TL input in the same way. In sum, learner variability was flagrant in our study. We compared the performance of two learners of the study who had nearly identical linguistic profiles (French L1, English L2), were both male, and were of a similar age (26 and 27). Gilles and Luc were exposed to the same Polish input and this, combined with their similar profiles, led to the expectation that their acquisition processes would look quite similar. This was not the case, however. Gilles, for instance, managed to find and correct errors of verbal morphology after the first one and half hours of exposure to Polish, whereas Luc did not. Luc often translated the error with the correct French equivalent, but he apparently relied on context rather than morphology to do this. Consider the following sentence from the grammaticality judgement test that contains incorrect subject–verb agreement: on równiez˙ *chca˛ zielona˛ sałat˛ e (chca˛ is an incorrect plural form) il-sg aussi *veulent-pl verte salade ‘he-sg also *want-pl green salad’ Luc’s translation: il commande aussi de la salade verte ‘he orders also some salad green’ Although Luc chose a somewhat imprecise translation equivalent for the verb chca˛ (il commande ‘he orders’ instead of il veut ‘he wants’), his translation carries the appropriate third person singular form commande, which agrees with the subject pronoun on ‘he’, and not the erroneous third person plural form commandent. In the case of Gilles’ data, we rarely observed this type of translation. If Gilles provided the correct translation formally speaking, he corrected the error as well.

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Another interesting comparison was to observe how the two learners processed the Polish reflexive pronoun si˛ e, which can either precede or follow the verb. In the first 1h30 of input, these two positions were found in the input at approximately the same rate of frequency. In the word order test, Luc placed the reflexive pronoun si˛ e, as did Gilles, in pre-verbal position, the position required for French reflexive pronouns. In subsequent input, however, the post-verbal position of si˛ e was more frequent. After 3h30 of input, Luc differed from Gilles in that this phenomenon began to trouble him. Whereas Gilles revised his hypothesis at Period 3h30, seemingly guided by the input, and placed all occurrences of si˛ e in post-verbal position from then on, Luc placed si˛ e differently in each sentence. He continued to do this when tested at Period 7h00 as well. Luc’s difficulty could have been at least partly due to conflicting information between the rules of his L1 and the Polish to which he was exposed. After 3h30 of contact with Polish, and even more so after 7h00 of Polish, the order Refl-V (that is found in French) was significantly less frequent in the input than was the order V-Refl, creating a conflict between the L1 structure and the most frequent structure in the input. This seemed to pose less of a problem for Gilles. The information presented above is useful in that it contributes to our description of what learners do when they are initially faced with the new TL at hand. Perdue hypothesised that learners would have an easier time with open-class than closed-class items. This was generally borne out in our results, with the exception of the participants who had studied Russian. They managed to translate some closed-class words correctly, which highlights once again the importance of distinguishing between L2 and L3 acquisition. Perdue also hypothesised that individual learners would perform differently. We found evidence of this in our comparative case studies of Gilles and Luc, two learners with nearly identical profiles. Lastly, Perdue hypothesised that learners would make use of their native languages. Not surprisingly, we found strong evidence of this, namely where lexical items of the open class were concerned. First exposure participants and learners were better able to repeat and translate words that were ‘familiar’, that is, French and Polish words that shared formal and semantic features, most of which were open class items. At present we still know little about what learners bring to the L2 acquisition process and what learners do with their TL input at these early stages. The results discussed here are admittedly based on a limited number of learners and limited occurrences of the features presented; however, they begin to suggest tendencies that need to be further researched with a larger participant set and with a variety of SL and TL combinations.

Objective 2. Characterise the TL Input and Determine How Learners Work on it As early as 1984, Perdue insists that a satisfactory account of the acquisition process must examine, among other aspects, ‘. . . the type and quantity

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of the target-language input, and the subject’s perception of it (what elements are salient, easy, etc. for him) through the filter of the linguistic knowledge he already has – perceived relative ease of acquisition, if you will’ (Perdue, 1984: 26). At a time when TL input was considered to be of secondary importance in much SLA research, notably that being published in North America, Perdue ventured to suggest that we need to know more about the quality and quantity of input and the way learners use their prior linguistic knowledge to perceive and analyse it. In his 1990 article in Linguistics, Perdue writes, ‘Nothing more precise than “source-language expectations” has been proposed in this paper to account for HOW the learner analyzes the target language input. This would need another project’ (Perdue, 1990: 1006). To my knowledge, this is the only explicit mention in a published text by Perdue of a potential input project waiting to be actualised. The citation reflects the general tendency in SLA and in language pedagogy to view the beginning language learner as a product of his/her native language as per the Contrastive Analysis model (Lado, 1957). The fact that Perdue mentions the need for ‘another project’ in order to properly account for how the learner analyses the TL input merits our attention. In 1991, he then continues with, ‘The reason why learners acquire a structure – or rather a bundle of structures – is not first of all because their grammatical knowledge is “ripe” for this organisation, but because, in the state of their grammatical knowledge, learners scrutinize the linguistic input for ways that allow them to better SIGNIFY’ (Perdue, 1991: 151).8 Perdue moves beyond perception and grammatical analysis and hypothesises that the work learners do on their input is closely linked to their need to find and convey meaning, that is to survive in a world where language is the principal tool for communication. This appropriation of the TL for communicative means was at the core of his quest to understand the adult language acquisition task: ‘I am particularly interested in the acquisition of an L2 (second language or foreign language) for the sake of effective communication’ (Perdue, 1997: 1).9 He recognised that the way learners scrutinise their input is a key component of this process.

Results 2. Characterise the TL Input and Determine How Learners Work on it Our project’s initial step in characterising the TL input was to record and transcribe the Polish instructor’s productions. This is a monumental task and one that understandably deters researchers in both first and second language acquisition from attempting to record and document learners’ linguistic exposure. First language acquisition researchers have, nevertheless, succeeded in this endeavour as is evidenced by the documentation of enormous quantities of input addressed to children (cf. MacWhinney, 2000). Perdue believed that L2 research needed this type of documentation as well, and for this reason he

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laid the groundwork for a full-fledged study of TL input. We recorded the Polish instructor’s oral input, and Polish native speakers transcribed the entire 8 hours of input using the CHAT transcription and coding systems of the CHILDES project (MacWhinney, 2000). This allowed us to use programmes and tools such as CLAN to quantify our data in order to describe with precision the input to which our learners were exposed and to observe what they would do with this input. One of the most obvious cases in which we were able to compare input with performance was in observing whether or not participants (first exposure and learners) were able to better perceive and repeat words that were frequent in the input compared to those that were rare or absent in the input. We administered the sentence repetition task to a first exposure group (n = 8) and our learners (n = 8 in the final analysis). Using the CHILDES programming tools, we analysed the frequency scores for each word in the input. We then established the following categories of word frequency based on previous frequency studies in language acquisition (cf. Ellis, 2002; Goldschneider & DeKeyser, 2001; Hintzman, 1988; Trueswell, 1996): ‘absent’ (0 tokens), ‘rare’ (1–20 tokens), ‘frequent’ (21–600 tokens). At first exposure, we found no effect of input frequency on our participants’ ability to repeat the Polish words in the sentences, even in the case of words that had appeared in previous test items. We expected, however, that after four hours of exposure to Polish we would observe an effect of input frequency on our learners’ sentence repetitions as some words had a highfrequency count (208 tokens of dobrze ‘good/well’; 239 tokens of jest third person singular form of ‘to be’). Our prediction was not borne out. It was not until the test administered after eight hours of instruction that a significant effect of frequency was found; words that were frequent in the input (at least 21 tokens) were better repeated than those that were rare or absent.10 It appears, therefore, that the frequency factor or a given degree of storage, as Slobin (1985) refers to it, may take time to show an effect. As we observed with translations at the early stages of L2 acquisition, ‘familiarity’ of some sort helps learners translate words from the TL, and this familiarity tends to manifest itself most obviously in cognate relationships; hence, Polish words that share features with L1 French words prove easier to translate than those that do not. The frequency factor may be related to ‘familiarity’ as well; however, only after a certain number of occurrences, at least in the case of non-cognate words, can this familiarity be established. Observing the effect of word frequency in the TL input exemplifies the type of information we can discover from making the input-learner performance comparison. We know that L1 knowledge plays a crucial role in an L2 learner’s experience; the above observation, however, suggests that factors other than the L1 are also at work. This is what we still know little about. Research comparing the TL input to learner performance is needed to shed

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light on the effect of phenomena other than the L1 on the L2 acquisition process from the very beginning.

Objective 3. Characterise the L2 Initial State Klein and Perdue (1992, 1997) began to specify characteristics of the socalled pre-basic and basic varieties based on production data collected primarily from untutored learners of the ESF project (see also Perdue, 1993). These characteristics differ in many respects from those assumed by Schwartz and Sprouse (1996) for the L2 initial state. For Schwartz and Sprouse, early varieties show a full transfer of abstract grammatical properties of the L1 grammar. For Klein and Perdue, early varieties show structural properties that cannot be explained by a direct appeal to the L1 grammar. Given that the learners of the ESF project had generally been in contact with the TL for some time before the onset of the project, no recordings of their very first productions were made. It follows that Klein and Perdue carefully describe the structure of the basic variety while refraining from making explicit assumptions about its relation to the L2 initial state. It is important to note that generativist SLA research lacks data from the earliest stages of L2 acquisition as well, which naturally poses a problem for any strong claims about the nature of the L2 initial state. The issue of primary interest here, however, lies in the ESF findings that indicate that explaining the structure of early varieties requires more than invoking the L1 and TL grammars. For instance, Perdue (2002) describes verbs found in the basic variety as having no functional verbal morphology and therefore no tense, aspect, agreement, case, number or gender marking. ESF data show, however, that learners are able to communicate quite effectively in spite of the absence of verbal morphology (cf. Starren, 2001). They use their knowledge of how information is organised in coherent discourse (e.g. arranging information in temporal order) to structure their own utterances. He writes, ‘. . . we may say that, from the very beginning of the acquisition process, learners build up a repertoire that is put to use in context in remarkably similar ways across languages, in order to express recurrent communicative functions’ (Perdue, 2002: 133). In contrast to Schwartz and Sprouse’s (1996) claim that the starting point of L2 acquisition is a full transfer of the features instantiated in the learner’s L1, Perdue (2002: 123) claims that, ‘. . . even the most basic user of a second language produces utterances that are recurrent, highly structured, and not to be explained by a direct appeal to the grammar of the first language nor to that of the language being learned/used’. He by no means denies the importance of L1 knowledge nor of the TL input in the organisation of a learner variety. He does, however, insist that other factors have been shown to mediate the way a variety is organised. ‘Thus any attempt to explain the organisation of the learner’s

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variety at a given time, or over time, which appeals only to L1 and L2 factors is inadequate’ (Perdue, 2002: 123).

Results 3. Characterise the L2 Initial State Given that the term ‘L2 initial state’ was first introduced into SLA literature by the generativist school, we attempted to look at the problem partially from a syntactic perspective. We chose to investigate our learners’ preferences for the placement of the Polish negator nie and to observe, in particular, what learners would do when confronted with a structure that was absent (or nearly absent) from the input. Thus, the Polish instructor avoided using nie during the first 1h30 of Polish instruction, producing only seven tokens of clausal nie in this time interval. In Polish, the negator nie precedes the verb, whereas in French the negator pas follows the finite verb.11 Given the consistency of the negator’s pre-verbal position in Polish and the existence of clausal nie in the input, even if minimal, we acknowledge that these seven tokens could have sufficed for learners to ‘notice’ the difference between their French L1 structure and the TL structure. In generativist terms, these few tokens could have sufficed for them to reset the parameter. If ‘resetting’ had taken place, we would expect learners to place nie in pre-verbal position. In contrast, if they were relying on their L1 grammar, we would expect to see nie in post-verbal position. We administered a word order test to our learners (n = 8 in this analysis) after 1h30 of instruction in Polish.12 For each test item a context sentence in Polish was followed by a sentence with scrambled words, also in Polish. Learners were asked to put the words in the appropriate order. Three of the scrambled sentences contained the Polish negative particle nie.13 Before taking the word order test, learners were given some information about the test including the fact that nie is a Polish negator. Obviously we are unable to make any general claims based on the analysis of only eight learners’ responses to three test items; however, the results provide interesting food for thought. Unexpectedly, we found substantial variation in the responses of our eight monolingual French learners.14 Three learners placed nie on each occasion in pre-verbal position, two placed it in post-verbal position, one in sentence initial position and another in sentence final position. The remaining learner never placed nie as he gave no response to these three test items. Setting aside the question of SL and TL influence on learner performance, we highlight the substantial individual variability in these data and point out that this variability is evident after only 1h30 of exposure to identical TL input and with learners of the same L1. Moreover, each learner consistently placed nie in the same position in each of the three sentences. This suggests that our learners developed hypotheses regarding this phenomenon that were not necessarily based on their L1 grammar alone or on the little exposure they had to the TL. Other factors appear to have played a role.

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We administered another word order test to the same learners after 3h30 of instruction and 48 tokens of pre-verbal clausal negation. The negator nie appeared in four of the scrambled sentences. Seven of our eight learners responded in the same way to each of the four sentences, correctly placing nie in pre-verbal position. The remaining learner responded with pre-verbal negation in two of the sentences, but in the two sentences with subject pronouns, she responded with the order nie – subject pronoun – verb as in the following example: nie on lubi Paryz˙a not he likes Paris It is interesting to note that this learner had consistently placed nie in post-verbal position in the first word order test (the expected response of a full transfer hypothesis). It appears that her scrutiny of the TL input led her to reformulate her original hypothesis in the direction of pre-verbal negation, but that the organisation of her interlanguage system allowed for the negative particle to precede something other than the verb. We witness, therefore, a gradual development towards the TL structure as a result of the learner’s analysis of the TL input using the knowledge she brought to the task. A final test was administered after 7h00 of instruction with five sentences in which learners were asked to place nie. All eight learners correctly placed the negator in pre-verbal position in all five sentences. While this brief description of data collection and test results shows the complexity of collecting and interpreting data at first exposure and in the initial hours that follow, it also highlights the importance of collecting data from the very beginning of L2 acquisition. Within only the first seven hours of exposure to Polish, our learners were able to accurately place the Polish negator in a simple sentence. In order to fully understand the first stages of L2 acquisition, we need to grasp these early moments before they are lost to us. Clearly future research can only benefit from more studies of typologically different languages, varied SL–TL combinations, and with data collected from the very beginning of the acquisition process. As Perdue noted in preparation for his plenary talk at EUROSLA 6, ‘The emphasis will be placed on the very early stages of acquisition in an attempt to demonstrate that these stages are crucial for an understanding of the whole process’ (Perdue, 1996c).

Discussion and Conclusion Perdue’s intrigue with the challenges of the adult language acquisition task and his original hypotheses about the role of L2 input and the nature of the L2 initial state led to this study of French learners of Polish at the earliest stages of the L2 acquisition process. By means of a complete control and documentation of the TL input from the moment of first exposure, combined with an investigation into how learners worked on this input, we

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have contributed to the under-researched area of early L2 acquisition. Taken as a whole, results suggest tendencies that are in line with Perdue’s thinking about the L2 acquisition process. In particular, and in spite of much scepticism within the SLA community, our study confirms that the adult learners’ linguistic environment (input) can be carefully studied if done so from the very beginning, and that the way learners analyse this linguistic input can be observed. In fact, when observing what learners do with their input, we witness phenomenally complex and fascinating processes that need to be understood. In sum, we observed that numerous factors appear necessary for explaining L2 acquisition, namely, the relative importance of the input, the L1, other L2s, extra-linguistic knowledge, other cognitive factors, and learner variability, all of which depend on the type of language activity involved and the proficiency level of the learner. Keep in mind that even the difference between 1h30 and 7h00 of exposure affected our learners’ performance, as shown in their placement of nie in Polish sentences. In addition, individual learner variability was prominent in our analyses, a sign that it should not be taken lightly in the development of SLA theories. This approach appears to differ quite drastically from one assuming full transfer of the L1 grammar as the basis of the L2 initial state. By the same token, however, it seems quite likely that adult learners ‘transfer’ full knowledge of their L1 when faced with a task in a novel TL. This L1 knowledge makes up part of the knowledge base that learners bring to the acquisition process. But once again, we return to the questions that we find most interesting: Of this ‘transferred’ L1 knowledge, what aspects of it do the learners actually use? When, why, how and in what contexts do they use it? What other knowledge do learners use? What constraints govern these processes? This takes us back to Perdue’s (1996a) own words, ‘What initially is useful knowledge?’ (138). Studies of TL input beginning at first exposure, like the one presented here, will continue to provide the input (!) needed for the development of a comprehensive theory of L2 acquisition, for which Perdue so brilliantly paved the way.

Notes (1) I wish to thank Marzena Watorek, Sandra Benazzo and Maya Hickmann for their invitation to take part in this special tribute and for their continued support of the work initiated by Clive Perdue. (2) Original French text: ‘Ce débat peut être caractérisé en une phrase par des différences d’appréciation par les chercheurs en acquisition des langues sur l’importance à accorder à l’environnement linguistique (appelé “input”) auquel l’apprenant est exposé’ (Perdue, 1996b: 1). (3) For a detailed discussion of the role of UG and input in L2 acquisition, see Gass (1997) and White (2003). (4) Original French text: ‘La façon dont l’apprenant traite l’input est donc décisive pour trancher entre ces positions extrêmes, ou plutôt, pour avancer dans le débat. Ce débat pêche, il faut le dire, par impressionnisme empirique pour une raison majeure: à une

L2 Input and the L2 Init ial St ate

(5)

(6) (7)

(8)

(9) (10) (11) (12) (13) (14)

51

exception près (Zwitserlood), il n’y a eu aucune tentative systématique pour contrôler l’input, ni son traitement par l’apprenant’ (Perdue, 1996b: 2). Participants were students in the French as a Second Language (FLE) programme at the Université Paris 8, Saint-Denis, the FLE programme at the Université François Rabelais in Tours, and the English Department of the Faculté des Lettres of the Institut Catholique de Paris. For more information about the methodology of the study see Rast (2003, 2008). I refrain from using the word “transfer” when possible. See Rast (2008: 231), ‘The more we know about how learners work on their input, the more we are inclined to say that the “transfer” metaphor is unsuitable for this process. It is not so much a “transfer” of one knowledge base to another, but rather an “activation” of a particular knowledge source that is pertinent and potentially useful for the task at hand.’ Original French text: ‘La raison pour laquelle on acquiert une structure – VOIRE un faisceau de structures – ce n’est pas d’abord parce que ses connaissances grammaticales sont “mures” pour cette organisation, mais parce que, dans l’état de ses connaissances grammaticales, l’apprenant scrute l’entrée linguistique pour des moyens lui permettant de mieux SIGNIFIER’ (Perdue, 1991: 151). Original French text: ‘Je m’intéresse principalement à l’acquisition d’une L2 (langue seconde ou langue étrangère) à des fins de communication effective’ (Perdue, 1997: 1). For details, see Rast (2008: chap. 7). For a brief summary of French negation from a generativist perspective, see Adger (2003). For further detail, see Zanuttini (1997) and Pollock (1989). See Rast (2008) for details regarding methodology and detailed results. A fourth sentence with nie appeared in the test but was eliminated in the final analysis due to technical problems. The term ‘monolingual’ here refers to individuals who use only one language in their daily lives.

References Adger, D. (2003) Core Syntax: A Minimalist Approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bardel, C. and Lindqvist, C. (eds) (2010) International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching. Special issue on the role of background languages in third language acquisition. Cenoz, J., Hufeisen, B. and Jessner, U. (eds) (2001) Cross-Linguistic Influence in Third Language Acquisition: Psycholinguistic Perspectives. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Chomsky, N. (1980) Rules and Representations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Ellis, N. (2002) Frequency effects in language processing: A review with implications for theories of implicit and explicit language acquisition. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 24, 143–188. De Angelis, G. (2007) Third or Additional Language Acquisition. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Gass, S. (1997) Input, Interaction, and the Second Language Learner. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Giacobbe, J. (1992) Acquisition d’une Langue Étrangère: Cognition et Interaction. Paris: CNRS Éditions. Goldschneider, J. and DeKeyser, R. (2001) Explaining the ‘natural order of L2 morpheme acquisition’ in English: A meta-analysis of multiple determinants. Language Learning 51, 1–50. Hintzman, D.L. (1988) Judgements of frequency and recognition memory in a multipletrace memory model. Psychological Review 95, 528–551.

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Klein, W. and Perdue, C. (1992) Utterance Structure: Developing Grammars Again. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Klein, W. and Perdue, C. (1997) The basic variety (or: Couldn’t natural languages be much simpler?). Second Language Research 13, 301–347. Lado, R. (1957) Linguistics Across Cultures: Applied Linguistics for Language Teachers. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan. MacWhinney, B. (2000) The CHILDES Project: Tools for Analyzing Talk, Vol. II: The Database (3rd edn). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Odlin, T. (1989) Language Transfer: Cross-linguistic Influence in Language Learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Perdue, C. (1984) A reply to S. Gass. In A. Davies, C. Criper and A.P.R. Howatt (eds) Interlanguage (pp. 25–33). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Perdue, C. (1990) Complexification of the simple clause. Linguistics 28, 983–1009. Perdue, C. (1991) Les pronoms chez Paula. In C. Russier, H. Stoffel and D. Véronique (eds) Interaction en Langue Étrangère (pp. 141–151). Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’Université de Provence. Perdue, C. (ed.) (1993) Adult Language Acquisition: Cross-linguistic Perspectives (Vols. I and II). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Perdue, C. (1996a) Pre-basic varieties. The first stages of second language acquisition. Toegepaste Taalwetenschap in Artikelen 55, 135–150. Perdue, C. (1996b) Input. Proposition du GdR 113 sur l’acquisition des langues, Université Paris 8. Perdue, C. (1996c) Orders of acquisition in second language acquisition. The Clarion: The EUROSLA 6 Abstracts. Perdue, C. (1997) Problème de la grammaticalisation dans l’acquisition des langues. Papier présenté au séminaire Groupe de recherche en acquisition des langues, La Baume-les-Aix, 14–17 mars. Perdue, C. (2002) Development of L2 functional use. In V. Cook (ed.) Portraits of the L2 User (pp. 123–142). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Pollock, J-Y. (1989) Verb movement, universal grammar and the structure of IP. Linguistic Inquiry 20, 365–424. Rast, R. (1998) Le traitement de l’input dans l’acquisition du polonais par des apprenants francophones. Mémoire de DEA, Université Paris 8. Rast, R. (1999) The first hours of second language acquisition. Acquisition et Interaction en Langue Étrangère (Special Issue) 2, 73–88. Rast, R. (2003) Le tout début de l’acquisition: Le traitement initial d’une langue non maternelle par l’apprenant adulte (Vols. I and II). Doctoral dissertation, Université Paris 8. Rast, R. (2008) Foreign Language Input: Initial Processing. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Rast, R. and Dommergues, J.-Y. (2003) Towards a characterisation of saliency on first exposure to a second language. EUROSLA Yearbook 3, 131–156. Rast, R. and Trévisiol, P. (eds) (2006) L’acquisition d’une Langue 3. [Special issue]. Acquisition et Interaction en Langue Étrangère 24. Ringbom, H. (1987) The Role of the First Language in Foreign Language Learning. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Schwartz, B. and Sprouse, R. (1996) L2 cognitive states and the Full Transfer/Full Access model. Second Language Research 12, 40–72. Slobin, D. (1985) Crosslinguistic evidence for the language-making capacity. In D. Slobin (ed.) The Crosslinguistic Study of Language Acquisition (Vol. II, pp. 1157–1256). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Sprouse, R. (2009) Creoles and interlanguages, conclusions and research desiderata: A reply to Plag. AILE-LIA 1, 283–302.

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Starren, M. (2001) The Second Time: The Acquisition of Temporality in Dutch and French as a Second Language. Utrecht: LOT. Trueswell, J.C. (1996) The role of lexical frequency in syntactic ambiguity resolution. Journal of Memory and Language 35, 566–585. White, L. (2003) Second Language Acquisition and Universal Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zanuttini, R. (1997) Negation and Clausal Structure: A Comparative Study of Romance Languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zwitserlood, P., Klein, W., Liang, J., Perdue, C. and Kellerman, E. (2000) The first minutes of foreign-language exposure. Unpublished manuscript, Max-Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen.

3

Finiteness and the Acquisition of Negation Angelika Becker

Introduction The role of finiteness in second language acquisition has always been a major research topic.1 Many structural phenomena of learner varieties, such as word order, verbal morphology, case assignment or the position of focus particles, have been shown to be associated with finiteness (for an overview, see Gretsch & Perdue, 2007). Clive Perdue has contributed major insights to this line of research, ever since the publication of Klein and Perdue (1992). The findings on negation and finiteness presented here owe a lot to Perdue’s work (e.g. Dimroth et al., 2003; Perdue et al., 2002). The aim of this chapter is to work out constraints for the placement of the negator at different stages of untutored adult second language acquisition. I focus on Italian learners of German, 2 and compare these findings with the results of studies regarding other source/target language combinations. I proceed from the assumption that there are essentially three factors which determine the position of the negator: • • •

The principles of utterance organisation which obtain at different stages of acquisition. The marking of finiteness at these different stages. The semantic relation between finiteness and negation.

In the next section ‘Negation and Finiteness’, I comment on these points. Section ‘Negation in Italian and German’ provides a brief contrastive description of negation in Italian and German. Section ‘The Course of Acquisition’ examines the course of acquisition as observed in the data of three Italian learners of German, which is then compared with cross-linguistic results. The final section is a summary of the results.

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Negation and Finiteness The Notion of Finiteness In the acquisition literature, finiteness has often been understood as a morphosyntactic property of verbs marked by inflection and the position of the inflected verb. However, a number of studies have shown that the logic of the acquisition process can be better accounted for when a distinction is made between the formal marking of finiteness and its semantic function (Dimroth et al., 2003; Giuliano, 2003; Gretsch & Perdue, 2007; Perdue et al., 2002). Morphological finiteness is a property of sentence structure, while semantic finiteness is a property of utterances. Klein (1998, 2006) argues that finiteness is linked to two semantic properties of an utterance. (a) Finiteness marks illocutionary force. In declarative clauses, that is finiteness marks that an assertion is made. (b) Finiteness links the (infinite) descriptive content of an utterance to a ‘topic situation’, minimally a topic time, optionally a topic place, a topic world and a topic entity. In declarative clauses, finiteness marks that some descriptive content is valid for a given topic situation. The speaker claims that a descriptive content, a certain state of affairs, holds for a certain time span, the topic time, and optionally for other topic parameters. Correspondingly, a finite utterance should consist of three components (cf. Table 3.1). Following Dimroth et al. (2003), the topic component serves as an anchoring point for what is asserted while finiteness constitutes a linking operation between a topic situation and the descriptive content which is to be asserted. In German, as in many Indo-European languages, this is expressed by verbal inflection; in a language like Chinese, for example, it is marked by particles (Klein et al., 2000). The descriptive content is minimally realised by a verb and its arguments. It is possible that the descriptive content contributes topic information, for example information about the topic time as in yesterday, John read a book. The category Finiteness only operates over those parts of the descriptive content which are to be asserted and which have focus status, in terms of the background-focus articulation.

TABLE 3.1 Components of a finite utterance Topic component Topic topic topic (topic time place world entity) Source: Adapted from Klein (2006)

Fin

Asserted descriptive content Vs + arguments

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Assertion and Negation Negation does not affect the illocutionary force of an utterance, that is a negated assertion is still an assertion. That means that at some abstract level of representation negation is within the scope of assertion. When a particle like nicht (‘not’) is inserted into a declarative sentence, the meaning of the sentence is transformed into its ‘opposite’ meaning (Jacobs, 1991). How ‘opposite’ is to be understood, depends on the theory of negation adopted. Classically, the function of negation is regarded as truth value reversal. In propositional logic, an operator NEG (‘_’) reverses the truth value of a proposition. If, for example, the content of the sun is not shining is true, then the sun is shining is false, and vice versa. Many authors have shown that this approach poses a number of problems and cannot capture the complex functions of sentential negation in natural languages (see Horn, 1989 for an extensive discussion). One of these problems is examined by Klein (1997). He argues that truth value reversal only holds under the assumption of topic consistency: the topic parameters, time, place, world and entity, have to be kept constant. For example, the two sentences the sun is shining and the sun is not shining could well be true at the same time, if they relate to different places or to a different topic time in the past. In Klein’s framework, an assertion indicates the conviction of the speaker that a particular content holds for a topic situation. A negated assertion indicates that according to the speaker the corresponding positive assertion is false. A second problem is related to the fact that negation is scope-sensitive. The semantic effect of the German negative particle nicht varies with its position and with the element that carries a focus accent. In standard sentence negation in German, the negative particle nicht occupies a position that precedes the infinite verb: (1) John hat das Buch John has the book

nicht not

gelesen. read

This clause indicates that the property of ‘reading the book’ is not valid of John at some topic time in the past. However, the negator in German can also occur in other positions. It can actually precede any constituent which is strongly prosodically highlighted, that is which carries a focus accent, as exemplified below. (2) Nicht JOHN not John

hat has

das the

Buch book

gelesen read

(. . ., sondern . . .) (. . ., but . . .)

(3) John John

nicht not

das the

BUCH book

gelesen read

(. . ., sondern . . .) (. . ., but . . ..)

hat has

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57

In these sentences, different parts seem to be negated. The first sentence gives rise to an interpretation like: ‘somebody read the book, but it was not John’, while the second sentence expresses something like: ‘John has read something, but it was not the book.’ The negator seems to ‘associate with the focus’, an analysis developed by Jacobs (1982) and other authors (see Klein (1997) for a critical discussion). Focus evokes a set of alternatives, and negation marks that focused element as not valid. Utterances like these are often followed by a correction or rectification, introduced by sondern (‘but’). For this reason, this type of negation is called ‘replacive negation’ (Jacobs, 1991; Lang, 2002).

The Integration of Negative Particles in the Utterances of Learners Means of negation are attested at the earliest stages of acquisition. In the course of the acquisition process the negator is integrated into utterances of increasing structural complexity. The integration of the negator depends on the structural organisation of the utterance that obtains at each stage of acquisition. Principles of utterance organisation in adult second language acquisition have been worked out cross-linguistically by Klein and Perdue (1992). They differentiate three stages: •

•

•

Nominal utterance organisation (the pre-basic learner variety): utterances are short and obligatory constituents are often omitted. The lexicon is small, and in particular, does not contain verbs. Utterance organisation is determined by a principle of information articulation: ‘focus last’. Verbal utterance organisation (the basic learner variety): the lexicon is enriched by thematic verbs which appear in a base form, that is, not marked for finiteness. The verb is placed after the first noun phrase. If there is more than one noun phrase, the agent comes first. The principle of ‘focus last’ still holds. Finite utterance organisation (the post-basic learner variety): morphological marking of finiteness is developed. With learners of German, this is achieved in two steps: morphological finiteness is first marked on auxiliaries and modal verbs (post-basic learner variety I), followed by marking on lexical verbs (post-basic learner variety II). The former semantic and pragmatic constraints (‘agent first’, ‘focus last’) are still operative.

In many Indo-European languages, the position of the negator is detemined with respect to the finite or infinite verb (Dahl, 1979). In the early stages of language acquisition, finiteness is not overtly marked. The question then is, what role finiteness plays in the acquisition of the placement of the negator. According to Meisel (1997: 258), learners do not refer to the

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‘[±finite] distinction’ in the acquisition of sentence negation. Whether or not this is true crucially depends on the notion of ‘finiteness’, as shown below.

Negation in Italian and German Negation in German and negation in Italian differ in several respects. The only points mentioned in this chapter are those which pertain to the discussion of learner data (see Becker (2005) for a more comprehensive presentation). Sentence negation in Italian is expressed by the particle non. The particle precedes the finite verb, from which it can only be separated by proclitic pronouns (example 4). In German, on contrast, the particle nicht occupies a position that precedes the infinitive verb (example 5). As German is a verbsecond language, the finite verb occupies the second position in declarative main clauses while the infinitive verb occurs clause-finally. When the sentence does not contain an auxiliary or a modal verb, the lexical verb is raised over the negator to the V2-position (example 6). In subordinate clauses, both the finite and the infinitive verb occur clause-finally, in the order infinitive verb < finite verb (example 7). (4) Gino Gino

non not

è has

venuto. come

(5) Gino Gino

ist has

nicht not

gekommen. come.

(6) Gino Gino

kam came

nicht. not

(7) dass that

Gino Gino

nicht not

gekommen come

ist. has

In predicative constructions, the negator is placed to the left of the predicative complement: (8) Gino Gino

ist is

nicht not

müde. tired

As already mentioned, German has broad possibilities of replacive negation. The negator can precede any constituent which is ‘focusable’, and can thus occupy quite different positions in a sentence. In Italian, alternatives to a preverbal position of the negator are much more restricted (Renzi & Salvi, 1991). For example, in German nicht can precede a focused subject in clause-initial position (example 9) which is not natural in Italian (Schwarze, 1995). In Italian, it is more common to postpose the subject

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59

(example 10) or to use a clefted negation construction (example 11, from Schwarze, 1995: 360). (9) Nicht ICH habe es not me have it ‘It wasn’t me who did it’

getan. done

(10) Non l’ho fatto IO. not it have done me ‘It wasn’t me who did it’ (11) Non sono stato IO a dirglielo. not have been me to tell-them-it ‘It wasn’t me who told them’ If the focused constituent is a verb complement, non can directly precede it (as in example 12, from Renzi & Salvi, 1991: 251). (12) Ci è andata non con MARIA, ci è andata con GIANNA. there is gone not with Maria, there is gone with Gianna

The Course of Acquisition This section deals with the development of syntactic negation in prebasic, basic and post-basic learner varieties of L2 German. The analysis is based on longitudinal data from three Italian learners of German, Angelina, Tino and Marcello. The data stem from the database of the European Science Foundation project on second language acquisition by adult immigrants (Perdue, 1993). The three learners started off at a low level of acquisition. While Angelina made slow progress, Tino and Marcello were fast learners who reached a post-basic level of acquisition during the two years of data collection. There are about 150 examples of syntactic negation in Tino’s data, and about 80 examples in the data of each of the other learners (not counting anaphoric negation and indefinite pronouns).

Nominal Utterance Organisation (the Pre-Basic Learner Variety) Italian-German At this stage, three types of negated utterances are attested, which differ with respect to the part of the utterance affected by the negator: Negation can pertain to the descriptive content which has focus status (type I), it can pertain to the validity of the claim as such (type II), and it can pertain to the topic (type III). The learners use several negative expressions without differentiation (see also Dietrich & Grommes, 1998): nein (target language: anaphoric negation), nee (target language: colloquial variant of anaphoric

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negation), nix (target language: colloquial variant of the indefinite pronoun nichts ‘nothing’), kein (target language: negative quantifier or negation + indefinite article) and nich(t) (target language: sentence negator). Most frequent are negated utterances of type I, which can be illustrated by the following examples: (12) nix gut no good (13) nix bus no bus ‘there is no bus’ (in the village where the informant lives) The learner expresses that some descriptive content does not hold for a topic situation. The topic situation is typically left implicit. The topic time is derived from the context, often from a question of the interlocutor. The descriptive content expressed is prosodically highlighted, sometimes the negator is as well. Less frequent are negated utterances in which only the negator carries an accent (type II). The speaker expresses a contrast between the negated assertion and its positive counterpart. What is highlighted is the mere claim that the situation described by the utterance does not obtain. (14) (context: the interlocutor seems to assume that the learner has schoolaged children; she corrects this misconception:) mein kind nix in schul my child not in school The third type of negated utterances is characterised by a specific intonational contour, which also occurs in the target language and which is called ‘bridge accent’ (Büring, 1995). It is composed of two intonationally marked positions, where the first position carries a rising pitch accent and the second a falling one. (15) (context: the learner is asked whether she has a car) /ich nix\ (. . ..but her husband has a car) I not Such structures, also called ‘I-topicalisation’ (intonational topicalisation, Jacobs, 1997), are common in German. They can appear in the elliptical form found in the learner utterances as well as in full form, like ich habe kein\auto (‘I have no car ’). Intonational topics evoke a double interpretation. They indicate (a) that a given descriptive content does not apply to the topic in question, and (b) that there is some ‘residual topic’

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61

which is at issue in the given context. This is why such utterances often call for a continuation in which the intonational topic is replaced by an alternative one. If one compares the three types of negated utterances, it becomes apparent that the utterance – rudimentary as it is – has a tripartite articulation (Table 3.2). Both topic information and information concerning the descriptive content can remain implicit when they can be derived from the context. The surface position of the negator reflects the relational character of negation: negation serves as a linking element between the topic and what is asserted of the topic. The negator expresses that some descriptive content is not valid of a topic situation. At the same time, the position of the negator is pragmatically motivated: it is in pre-focus position. The three types of negation are differentiated by intonation. Morphological marking of finiteness is excluded as the learners’ lexicon still lacks lexical verbs, modal verbs and auxiliaries. However, in the early data of Angelina, which are representative of the pre-basic variety, some rare occurrences of the seemingly inflected copula is, a colloquial variant of ist (3P.Sg.Pres. of sein ‘be’), are attested.3 (16) mein my

mann husband

is in arbeite is in work

It is questionable whether is carries temporal information at this stage, as the form is also used in contexts which require the past form war (‘was’). It can, however, be assumed that the form is marks assertion, that is that it realises just one of the functions of finite verb forms. The form is never appears in negated utterances in Angelina’s pre-basic variety. The negator constitutes the only linking device between the descriptive content and the topic situation.

Crosslinguistic comparison In recent years, a number of additional studies on negation in adult second language acquisiton differentiate between a pre-basic, a basic and a post-basic stage of acquisition (Bernini, 2005; Giuliano, 2003; Giuliano & Véronique, 2005; Silberstein, 1997). It is therefore possible to compare the results of these analyses with the findings presented above. The studies relate to the target languages French, Italian and English. In Italian standard sentence negation, the negator precedes the finite verb, while in English the TABLE 3.2 Tripartite structure of negated utterances in the pre-basic learner variety Denotation of topic information

Negator

Denotation of asserted descriptive content (focus)

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Table 3.3 Types of negated structures in pre-basic varieties of the TL French, English and Italian l2

L1

Source

Realisation of the structures

French

Spanish

Giuliano (2003) Giuliano and Véronique (2005)

non Xfocus, nepasde Xfocus Xtopic nonfocus

English

Italian

Giuliano (2003) Silberstein (1997)

no Xfocus Xtopic nofocus

Italian

Tigrinya Wú Chinese

Bernini (2005)*

no Xfocus, non Xfocus Xtopic nofocus

*Bernini’s (2005) study also includes German learners of English who were, however, at a more advanced stage of acquisition

negator always follows the finite auxiliary (‘do support’), modal verb or the finite copula. French has the discontinuous negator (ne) . . . pas, which encloses the finite verb. However, in colloquial French, ne is generally omitted. The cross-linguistic comparison shows that at least the following two types of structures are shared by learners at the pre-basic stage: (Xtopic) NEG Xfocus (X = N, Adj, adverbial) Xtopic NEGfocus These structures were attested with learners of the following source/target language combinations (Table 3.3). Giuliano and Véronique (2005) also find the structure Ntopic nonfocus in the data of a very elementary learner of French with L1 Moroccan Arabic. This cross-linguistic similarity seems to indicate that at this early stage of acquisition, the position of the negator is not influenced by the structures of the respective source and target languages, but motivated by the informational structure of the learner variety, which is the determining factor of the utterance organisation at this stage. Furthermore, the negator position can be regarded as semantically motivated, since the negator ‘links’ what is asserted to a topic situation.

Verbal Utterance Organisation (the Basic Learner Variety) Italian–German The negator nein and its colloquial variant nee are now correctly reserved for anaphoric negation, while a consistent differentiation between the other expressions (nich(t), nix, kein) has not yet been established. The advancement

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63

at this level derives primarily from the acquisition of lexical verbs and their argument structure. Therefore, the learner is now in a position to express the descriptive content to be asserted by means of a verb and possibly by an object argument of the verb. This is clearly reflected in negated utterances of type I (examples 17, 18, 19) and type II (example 20). (17) in de in the

nacht nicht schlafen. night not sleep

(18) ich I

nich not

sprechen speak

(19) ich I

nix not

kommen. come

deutsch German

gut. well

(20) (context: the interlocutor assumes that the learner had a job in Italy; she clarifies.) nix arbeite in ital. not work in Italy In all these cases the lexical verb is not morphologically marked for finiteness. The variants (infinitive form, root + schwa) are not functionally differentiated with respect to agreement or tense. Three of the four examples (examples 17, 19, 20) relate to situations in the past. The integration of nonfinite lexical verbs does not affect the position of the negator: as before, the negator precedes the expression of the descriptive content. A second characteristic of the basic variety is the emergence of negated copula constructions. The form is(t) (‘is’) is the earliest – and at this stage the only – verb form in negated utterances which overtly marks at least one function of finiteness, namely assertion. (21) deutschland Germany

is is

nicht not

fatherland

The form is precedes the negator. This is in accordance with the target language and might also reflect relative scope: assertion has scope over negation. In Italian, the source language, the negative particle would precede the copula. The integration of lexical verbs and their arguments also allows for the appearance of a new type of negated utterances, namely replacive negation. In the data, replacive negation only occurs with the complement of the verb, that is with a constituent in focus position. The negator directly precedes the focused constituent: (22) er bringen he bring (=take)

nein no

seine his

tasche, bag

aber die but the

kinde child

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TABLE 3.4 Tripartite structure of negated utterances in the basic learner variety Denotation of topic information

Assertion

Often explicit is(t)

Negator

Denotation of asserted descriptive content (focus)

nix, nich(t)

Vnon finite (+argument)

nix, nich(t)

Predicative (N, Adj)

As could be expected, replacement of a constituent in topic position is not possible at this stage. The following example shows an unsuccessful attempt: (23) (context: the learner describes a car accident; he explains that it was his friend who was driving, not he himself) aber ich nich fahre/ nich , but I not drive not drive I ein mein freund a my friend ‘It wasn’t me who was behind the wheel but a friend of mine’ In standard German, a replacive negation of ich (‘I’) could have been achieved by nicht ich (‘not I’). Such a construction is not compatible with the linearisation principles of the basic variety, in which the topic precedes the negator and cannot carry a focus accent. The integration of non-finite lexical verbs does not change the basic utterance structure previously established. In initial position we find the topic information which is made explicit more often at this stage, the negator occurs in a middle position and in final position we find asserted information, now filled by a verb and its object complement. The copula is(t) (‘is’) appears between the denotation of topic information and the denotation of the descriptive content, as does the negator. This is a ‘plausible’ position, so to speak, as it corresponds to the relational function of the carriers of assertion and negation: both indicate the validity relation between the topic situation and descriptive content (Table 3.4). The only variation in the position of the negator is motivated by replacive negation. Replacive negation only affects one part of the descriptive content, the argument of the verb, which is marked by the position of the negator: It immediately precedes the constituent to be replaced.

Crosslinguistic comparison Learners of French, English and Italian develop the same pattern observed with Italian learners of German: Neg definite articles > indefinite article > attributive adjectives > predicative adjectives > past participles. In her longitudinal study of the development of gender on adjectives and determiners from beginners to very advanced learners in the InterFra corpus, Lindström (2008) confirms earlier results in the literature on gender agreement: a tendency to overuse

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the masculine form, earlier correct gender agreement of the definite determiner than of the indefinite, agreement of adjectives after that of determiners. Lindström’s results speak in favour of continuous, though never complete, slow and variable acquisition of gender in French L2 by Swedish-speaking learners, following, over time, individual paths rather than a linear increasing development (cf. Granfeldt, 2005). Ågren’s study of Swedish learners of L2 French (2008, 2009) indicates that in written L2 French number marking in NP morphology is more complex than in verb morphology. Plural agreement is less correct in the NP in L2 French than number marking in S–V agreement, even though, in Swedish, adjectives also agree in number with nouns. There is ongoing debate about how gender in L2 (and L1) French is learnt. Some studies show that phonological cues to gender in word endings may help acquisition. This is the case with Tucker et al. (1969) for L2 acquisition, and 1977 for native speakers. Other researchers have found that native speakers more often rely on lexical associations (Holmes & Dejean de la Bâtie, 1999). In contrast, Carroll (1999) has found that early L2 learners are sensitive to word endings. Along the same lines, Holmes and Dejean de la Bâtie (1999) show that the L2 learner needs cues, whereas native speakers memorize the gender of nearly all individual words. According to DeKeyser (2003: 330), changes that take place in more advanced stages of L2 learning can often be modelled as a gradual change in sensitivity to different cues. This would not be the case with initial learning. As will be demonstrated in the section ‘Synthesis of Results in the Project “Last Stages in SLA – Morphosyntax and Discourse in Late Oral French L2”’, even near-native learners who have lived in France for 20 years have not automatized gender assignment and gender agreement.

Discourse Organization Connectors and discourse markers Second language research on connectors and discourse markers has followed, grosso modo, one of three main areas of focus: fluency, quantitative approaches and studies of form/function relations. In their psycholinguistic study of advanced French L2, Towell et al. (1996) claim that access to recurrent discourse markers (and formulae) as organizers and fillers is part of procedural knowledge (a production strategy) and thus contributes to fluency. Denke’s (2005) thesis shows interesting differences between NS and NNS in their use of pragmatic markers (you know, well, I mean) in monologic speech: while NS use the markers in a varied way, NNS use them primarily as editing markers (hesitation markers). The quantitative approach is the primary one adopted by the ICLE (International Corpus of English) project. Since 1990, this project has yielded a wealth of studies on connectors and discourse markers such as Granger and

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Tyson (1996), investigating the underuse, overuse and misuse of connectors by French learners of English. The authors suggest that transfer plays a role in overuse, for example the overuse of in fact and indeed could be a transfer of en fait from French. Hancock (2000), in her thesis on connectors and epistemic markers in the spoken French of Swedish advanced learners (the InterFra corpus), found that parce que (‘because’) as an introducer of parenthetical utterances was a property of very advanced spoken French L2. In this form/function perspective, Hancock (2004) also found that donc (approximately ‘thus’) is a typical feature of very advanced French and that it has a role as a marker signalling the speaker’s return, as French natives do, to a higher level of textual structure. More recent studies by Hancock concern the pragmaticalization of certain grammatical categories, in particular modalizing adverbs as in Hancock and Sanell (2009) and Hancock and Kirchmeyer (2009) (vraiment) show that certain nativelike pragmatic uses of these adverbs are not found in late learners.

Discourse and utterance structure Another key issue at high levels of L2 use is that of structuring discourse of speech production. Hancock (2007) also investigated highly frequent modalizing adverbs (peut-être ‘maybe’, vraiment approximately ‘indeed, really’) in NS and very advanced NNS speech showing that these adverbs, as a late feature, appear in the préambule (thematic part of the utterance) in the paragraphe oral ‘spoken paragraph’ (Morel & Danon-Boileau, 1998) following NS preferred patterns. These studies show the interplay between discourse, complex syntax, intonation and information structure (see below, section ‘Synthesis of Results in the Project “Last Stages in SLA – Morphosyntax and Discourse in Late Oral French L2”’).

Perspective Taking, Information Structure and Reference to Entities Discourse organization and information structure are key areas in the study of the advanced levels. Important work in discourse research has been done in the last decade; some of the main papers are included in Hendriks (2005) dealing with the following L2s: German, French, Italian, Spanish, English, Polish and Chinese (see also the recent collection of papers from The Max Planck Institute, Nijmegen, Dimroth & Lambert, 2008). Perspective taking is the aspect chosen in Carroll et al. (2000), Lambert (2006), Lambert et al. (2008) and von Stutterheim (2003). In exploring narratives by very advanced or near-native speakers of L2 English, French and German, compared to NS of the same languages, von Stutterheim and Lambert (2005: 228) examine the ‘decisions’ taken by the learners as to what events to select for verbalization and how to present the selected events.

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Analyses of the selection and structuring of information in L1 English, French and German texts show preferred sets of options for expressions that are influenced by specific combinations of the grammatical means in L1. Comparisons with second language learners show that they tend to maintain the basic selection pattern of their L1. Other studies from this group are Carroll et al. (2000), von Stutterheim (2003) (for L1 Arabic, Norwegian, English, German) and Lambert et al. (2008) (see also Bylund (2007) and (2009) for cross-linguistic differences in Swedish and Spanish concerning grammaticized aspect in spoken French on event conceptualization processes). Left dislocation is an important area in the study of advanced varieties (see the section ‘Synthesis of Results in the Project “Last Stages in SLA – Morphosyntax and Discourse in Late Oral French L2”’ below). Sleeman (2004) looked at dislocation and cleft constructions in a comparative study of, among others, university students with six years of French where the author found that some one-to-one pragmatic/syntactic interface relations (cleft) are more easily acquired than optional, one-to-more interface relations. (For a longitudinal study of dislocation in French interlanguage and TL of the InterFra corpus, see Engel, 2010.)

Synthesis of Results in the Project ‘Last Stages in SLA – Morphosyntax and Discourse in Late Oral French L2’ One of the aims of the HLP programme (see above) is to identify late morphosyntactic and discourse features at very high levels of proficiency in oral French L2. Our empirical findings so far have shown the need for enlarging the Bartning and Schlyter (2004) continuum at the advanced levels (stages 5 and 6). We are trying to find criteria for what could be called advanced – functional bilinguals (see Bartning et al., 2009: 206ff) contrasting with near-native speakers and native speakers. In the HLP programme, the following two definitions are used as a basis for investigations and discussions. ‘By a “near-native” speaker we mean someone who is perceived, in normal oral interaction, as a native speaker, but who can be distinguished from native speakers in some feature when their language is analysed in greater linguistic detail. By an “advanced” second language learner/user we mean a person whose second language is close to that of a native speaker, but whose non-native usage is perceivable in normal oral or written interaction’ (Hyltenstam et al., 2005). For a recent discussion of these notions, see Abrahamsson and Hyltenstam (2009), note 1: ‘[. . .] our definition of near-nativeness [. . .] will be levels of non-nativeness that are non-perceivable in normal, everyday language use’. Although these definitions call for precisions and evidence, they can conveniently be used as a point of departure. In the conclusion I will come back to these stages and

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propose a seventh stage based on results and discussion in this chapter, in Bartning et al. (2009: 206ss) and in Bartning et al. (in press).

The Data In order to better understand the last stages of late acquisition of French, we now investigate a corpus of advanced/very advanced/near-native speakers from three different groups of Swedish-speaking informants, compared to NSs: Group 1.

Group 2. Group 3. Group 4.

Ten non-native speakers of French as a foreign language (FFL) with a length of residence (LOR) of one to two years (university students 4th, 5th term, doctorate students, from stages five and six of the developmental continuum presented in Bartning and Schlyter, 2004, InterFra corpus). Ten non-native speakers of French as a second language (FSL) with a LOR of five to 15 years. Ten non-native speakers of French as a second language (FSL) with a LOR of 15–30 years. Ten native speakers of French (five ‘juniors’, 25–35 years old; five ‘seniors’, 45–60 years old).

Group 1 consists of 10 advanced university students with a LOR of one to three years. It includes advanced semi-formal learners, that is university students from the 4th and 5th terms, doctoral students (19–34 years old) classified as learners of stages five and six of the succession of stages proposed by Bartning and Schlyter (2004), most of whom are InterFra corpus informants. Some of them have been to a French-speaking country for one to three years. Group 2 consists of 10 advanced L2 users, Swedish-speaking young adults 25–30 years old, with a LOR of five to 15 years. Their ages on arriving in France were on average 18–19. Group 3 consists of 10 Swedishspeaking adults who have lived in France (Paris) for 15–30 years. They are 40–55 years old, live in bilingual families and also work in bilingual settings (Swedish–French) and came to France at the age of ~18–19. Group 4 consists of native speakers from two groups (‘Paris NS Juniors’: 15 informants, 25–35 years old, and the ‘Paris NS Seniors’: 8 NS, 45–60 years old). These NS are thus parallel to Groups 2 and 3 in age and background. For the present study two subgroups were chosen: 5 from the Paris NS Juniors and 5 from the Paris NS Seniors in the same type of tasks.

Morphology and Syntactic Complexity: Some Results from Group 3 Our first impressionistic analyses of the very advanced speakers of French in Group 3 show that they all use advanced target language features

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in their oral French, such as complex utterances with a high number of constituents in the ‘preambles’ (the thematic part), before the rhematic part (in bold) is uttered (Non mais moi tu sais question saumon l’Écosse tu vois/c’est ce que je préfère (‘no but I you know when it comes to salmon Scotland you see that is what I prefer’); Morel and Danon-Boileau (1998); for L2 French, see Conway (2005). These informants also have the same repertoire of discourse markers as native speakers (donc ‘thus’, du coup, approximately ‘as a result’, en fait ‘in fact’); they use advanced TMA markers (e.g. pluperfect, subjunctive) and highly complex syntactic and discursive utterances (integrated structures like the gerund and reported speech); they are fluent and use idiomatic expressions (e.g. ça roule tout seul, approximately ‘everything works fine’) (cf. Forsberg, 2008). According to the preliminary operational definitions above, six/seven out of 10 informants in this group all passed as natives, thus as near-natives, in a rapid NS perception test by at least one rater out of five during 30 s of the interviews (Abrahamsson & Hyltenstam, 2009 and Bartning et al. in press for methodological issues; cf. also Muñoz & Singleton, 2007; for the notion of ‘passing as a native’, see Piller, 2002). Such results were not found for recordings of stages 5 and 6, that is our Group 1. What is striking, however, is that these ‘near-natives’ all use some of the ‘steady’ NTL features of the advanced learners of stages 4–6 of Bartning and Schlyter (2004), namely, in S–V agreement and in gender agreement of determiners and adjectives (but see Bartning et al., 2009). Preliminary results are illustrated in the example below. (1) E: et pendant qu’ils sont absents il y a des cambrioleurs qui vient [viennent] ouvrir la porte qui rient bien en pensant: deux pauvres vieux qui sont parties au théâtre (Britt, gr 3) As can be seen, non-target-like S–V agreement forms are produced in complex utterances (as in example (1), in a relative clause). In this respect, they follow earlier results and predictions (cf. also Bartning et al., in press). The cases are, however, still more complex, we think, because they involve the morpho-phonological competitive distinctions that are strongly dependent on input frequency and entrenchment of the users’ systems (cf. Ellis, 2006). Forms such as ils *dit (‘they say’), ils*prend (‘they take’) may be the effect of ‘deeply entrenched rivals’ (cf. Sharwood-Smith & Truscott, 2005: 237). Another typical late feature from this preliminary investigation is the acknowledged difficulty of gender agreement on articles and adjectives: (2) c’est vrai que c’est pas # moi j’ai pas un [une] image très romantique (I:mhm) de ces gens-là (Camilla, gr 3)

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The majority of contexts that attract gender errors require the indefinite feminine determiner in the context of nouns with initial vowels, as in (2). As stated above, we now know that gender on determiners is a problematic feature in French L2, from the very start to late levels, if it is ever learnt at all. But these special contexts have not yet, to our knowledge, been examined in detail. The fact that the elided definite determiners before nouns beginning with vowels (l’école ‘the school’) do not reveal anything about gender may be one of the causes (cf. Holmes & Segui, 2005). In this context, two important facts should be added, as shown in Bartning et al. (2009: 200): first, these very advanced and near-native speakers have more problems with NP morphology than with VP morphology (in fact, twice the number). Second, native speakers (Group 4) just have very few deviances in the two domains, if at all (cf. Bartning et al., 2009: 200).

Discourse Complexity Discourse investigations of Group 3 show the following results. Left dislocation of discourse elements have been highlighted as a frequent and typical property of spoken French (e.g. Conway, 2005; Engel, 2010; Lambrecht, 1994; Morel & Danon-Boileau, 1998; Pekarek Doehler, 2004). Hancock and Kirchmeyer (2009) observe, in the oral production of some of the informants of Group 3, that left detachment with two (or more) modal or thematic elements (c’est vrai que mon mari avec ses copains – il se moque de moi ‘it’s true that my husband with his mates/he teases me’) are more frequent in interviews with native and near-native speakers than with advanced learners. It thus seems that some aspects of left dislocations could be relevant features in characterising discourse complexity at very late stages in French. We can now conclude that the informants of Group 3 are not advanced learners at stages five and six (as in Group 1 above) any longer but rather proficient speakers/users within the very highest ranges of L2 acquisition, to the extent that some NS raters judge some of them as native speakers. In the following section, we pursue the investigations of the resources and obstacles in the near-native productions in greater detail and in parallel with native speaker performance.

The Interaction of Morphosyntactic Deviances, Formulaic Language and Information Structure Our last survey focuses upon a comparison between all the NNS Groups 1–3 and NS Group 4. Bartning et al. (2009) builds on the proposition that there are six developmental stages for spoken L2 French, based on morphosyntactic criteria (Bartning & Schlyter, 2004). In order to investigate developmental stages ‘beyond stage 6’, oral productions of the Groups 1–4 above

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were analysed in terms of resources and obstacles at high-level proficiency. Among the resources, we investigate expected late features such as formulaic language and elaboration of information structure (cf. Forsberg, 2008; Hancock, 2007). It was shown that Lexical formulaic sequences (a selected category of formulaic language) are used to a significantly higher extent by Groups 2 and 3 and natives than by Group 1 and that the mean value of words/preamble is higher for NS than for the NNS groups (Bartning et al., 2009: Table 2: 193 and Table 4: 195). As for number of constituents in the preamble, only NS and Groups 2 and 3 produce preambles composed of more than five constituents. As for Group 1, the limit to the number of constituents in the preambles is five, whereas for Groups 2 and 3 and NSs it can come up to eight constituents (Bartning et al., 2009: 197). Morphosyntactic deviances (MSDs), that is obstacles, were also investigated. MSDs are expected to be virtually absent beyond stage 6 in Bartning and Schlyter (2004). Surprisingly, they continue to be present even at these very high levels. The study showed that there were no significant MSD differences found between the NNS groups. This is surprising, since the LOR is very different between the three groups and it is presupposed in the literature that very advanced learners/users do not produce grammatical deviances. We expected no MSDs in either Group 2 or 3. What was also unexpected was the nature of the NTL forms, namely, they were the same non-grammatical features found in earlier acquisitional stages, typical of oral L2 French of the continuum of stages 4–6 in Bartning and Schlyter (2004).

A Grammaticality Judgement Test We also administered a written grammaticality judgment test (GJ) to one of the groups. It measured important grammatical domains already present in the interviews and narrations of the oral InterFra corpus, namely 54 items of VP agreement, NP agreement, gender in anaphoric linkage, verb constructions (object clitics) and TMA (subjunctive). This test was presented to the 10 informants of Group 3 and it appeared that six of these informants had been judged as natives (thus near-natives according to our preliminary definition above) by at least one native rater out of five in an oral perception test. It also appeared that these six informants were not the same persons in the group who performed best in the GJ test. On the contrary, just one of the NNSs who was judged as a native in the perception test, scored high in the GJ test. There was thus no correlation between oral production and GJ intuition/competence for the other five informants who were taken for natives in the production test. The highest score of the 54 items was 96% correct judgements and the lowest 78%. These results may speak in favour of a non-interface/non-correlation between implicit knowledge (the passing-as-a-native test, a test that probably

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measures phonology, pronunciation and fluency more than grammar) and the GJ test that is supposed to measure explicit metalinguistic knowledge.

Towards a Theoretical Understanding and Discussion Let us return to examples of the NTL forms of S–V agreement and gender agreement (1) and (2) in the section ‘Morphology and syntactic complexity: Some results from Group 3’. Are such examples of verb agreement and gender problems just slips of the tongue? It seems to us that they are too systematic to be so categorized, and, indeed, they are found in several different speakers. They are systematic in the sense that their presence in certain contexts seems predictable, in relation to French interlanguage development (see the section ‘A Survey of Morphosyntax and Discourse at High Levels of Proficiency’), to syntactic complexity and results found earlier in our research (Bartning, accepted for publication; Bartning et al., in press). Could these tendencies be explained by what Birdsong (2005b: 323) calls ‘inevitable reflexes of bilingualism’ where one effect ‘is a specific L1 effect whereby performance in a given L2 is differentially affected by properties of various L1s’. Birdsong’s statement could be applied to these L2 users: Swedish has no S–V agreement and much less complex verb morphology than French. Furthermore, transfer effects take place at all stages in L2 development. Sorace (2003: 144) proposes the notion of ‘optionality’ to explain the divergence between NNS and NS grammars, for example the influence of English L1 on Italian L2 preverbal subjects where near-natives overuse overt subjects in L2 Italian, Italian being a pro-drop language. Ellis (2006: 100) also refers to L1 transfer as a possible late strategy by saying ‘and it is this L1 entrenchment that limits the endstate of usage-based SLA’. Are these findings language-specific features that reveal the impact of the source and target languages involved? Or are they features of universal language behaviour (cf. Hickmann, 2005)? As has been shown in the SLA literature, there are a number of developmental progressions, some of which may be universal while others seem specific to particular languages. Klein and Perdue (1997) proposed the Basic variety for the first phase of development of an SL, and it is supposed to be universal (pragmatic principles, certain information structure devices, reliance on lexical means with no inflection, etc.). Further developments after this initial phase show strong impact of (source and target) language-specific properties during acquisition (Hickmann, 2005), for example in discourse and information structure as the studies by von Stutterheim, Carroll, Lambert, etc. have shown. Having found the domains of late features presented in the sections ‘A Survey of Morphosyntax and Discourse at High Levels of Proficiency’ and ‘Synthesis of Results in the Project “Last Stages in SLA – Morphosyntax and

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Discourse in Late Oral French L2”’ above in the literature and in our own empirical research, it seems to us now that typical features of the advanced and near-native varieties rather show language-specific properties. At the same time, we see that languages with rich morphology, for example the Romance languages, offer the same type of morphosyntactic obstacles to all advanced learners, for example grammaticalization features in time reference, S–V agreement, NP agreement, reference to entities and pronominalization. These are language-inherent features, the development of which depends on their complicated intrinsic relationships and dependencies. These late features lead us to propose two other important factors, namely input frequency and the distinction between implicit and explicit knowledge. First, as we pointed out above, there are areas in very late acquisition that are typically sensitive to frequency effects, namely verb morphology above all, gender distinctions, connectors and discourse markers. As Ellis (2002: 143) says: ‘the acquisition of grammar is the piecemeal learning of many thousands of constructions and the frequency-biased abstraction of regularities within them.’ Second, there is the important distinction between implicit and explicit knowledge (recent works by e.g. De Keyser, 2003; Ellis, 2002, 2005; Paradis, 2004, 2009). As Paradis states: ‘Whenever one speaks of “learning a language late”, one must be explicit as to whether one refers to implicit linguistic competence, acquired incidentally, stored implicitly and used automatically, as is generally the case with L1 [. . .], or whether, in addition to possibly impoverished implicit competence, greater reliance on the use of metalinguistic knowledge in a fluent, albeit controlled manner, are [is, sic] also considered’ (Paradis, 2004: 58) Ellis (2005: 143), who also states that linguistic knowledge is tacit and implicit rather than conscious and explicit in nature, attempts to establish operational definitions of these two constructs. He reports on a psychometric study of a battery of tests designed to provide relatively independent measures of them. The task types were (a) oral narration test, (b) an oral imitation test of grammatical and ungrammatical sentences and (c) a timed GJ tests versus two other tasks: (d) untimed GJ task of the same sentences and (e) metalinguistic knowledge task. All of the tests examined 17 grammatical structures. A factor analysis produced two clear factors. Scores from test (a)–(c) loaded on Factor 1 and scores from (d) and (e) on Factor 2. The two factors were interpreted as corresponding to implicit and explicit knowledge. Correspondingly, in our project, the conversations and narration tasks in a non-formal setting executed by the informants of, for example Groups 2 and 3 above do seem to ‘tap’ spontaneous, online spoken language, revealing, it could be suggested, access to the informants’ implicit knowledge rather than metalinguistic knowledge.

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On the basis of the results in this survey and along the lines of the acquisitional continuum in Bartning and Schlyter, 2004, we propose an additional developmental stage after stage 6, as we did in Bartning et al. (2009: 206): Following this stage we would like to propose an intermediate stage, let us say stage 7, with learners/users called “functional bilinguals” before a stage (8) which then would include “near-natives” as already stated, by a “near-native” speaker we mean someone who is perceived, in normal oral interaction, as a native speaker, but who can be distinguished from native speakers in some feature when their language is analysed in greater linguistic detail (Hyltenstam et al., 2005: 7). A functional bilingual speaker then is a speaker who has a very rich, elaborated L2 – e.g. native-like quantity of formulaic language, constituents of PAs, complex syntax/ discourse, as shown above – acquired during important LORs in the TL country, but who is still perceived as non-native. This last feature would distinguish them from near-natives who are perceived as natives (see above). Features of resources, e.g. formulaic language, important extensions of PA and syntactic complexity, would distinguish the functional bilinguals from the advanced learners (“someone who is perceived by natives as a non-native speaker”). This new stage, functional bilinguals, allows us to tease apart an important group among the ostensible near-natives. It would now be interesting to pursue further research at these levels and administer the perception test used by Abrahamsson and Hyltenstam (2009) to more informants of Groups 2 and 3 to find out whether some would pass as natives. ‘One of the highest aims of a learner/user of an L2 is certainly to become a functional bilingual. If then, she/he is to succeed in passing as a native speaker, special conditions have to be met, for instance, an important exposure to the TL made possible by a considerable LOR in the target language country, probably coupled with a particular aptitude for language, so that even the phonological system matures into nativelikeness’ (Bartning et al., 2009: 207).

Notes (1) I would like to dedicate this chapter to the memory of Clive. He clearly was one of the most inspiring researchers for me in my SLA research. This chapter is a synthesis of several studies executed in the project Late Stages in SlA – The Case of French – Morphosyntax and Discourse, a subproject of High Level Proficiency in SLA, fi nanced by The Tercentary Foundation of the National Bank of Sweden (www. biling.su.se/~AAA): Bartning (2009), Bartning and Hancock (in press), Bartning et al. (2009), Bartning et al. (in press) and Forsberg Lundell et al. (2011).

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(2) Studies that have independently confi rmed the stages proposed in Bartning and Schlyter (2004), in particular the advanced ones, are the following: Bolly (2008), Housen et al. (2009), Labeau (2009) and Ågren (2008).

References Abrahamsson, N. and Hyltenstam, K. (2009) Age of acquisition and nativelikeness in a second language – Listener perception vs linguistic scrutiny. Language Learning 58, 249–306. Ågren, M. (2008) À la recherche de la morphologie silencieuse. Sur le développement du pluriel en français L2 écrit. Études romanes de Lund 84. Dissertation, Lund University. Ågren, M. (2009) L’apprenant avancé est aussi un scripteur avancé. In F. Myles and E. Labeau (eds) The Advanced Learner Varieties: The Case of French (pp. 149–172). Bern: Peter Lang. Andersen, R. (1991) Developmental sequences: The emergence of aspect marking in second language acquisition. In T. Huebner and Ch. A. Ferguson (eds) Crosscurrents in Second Language Acquisition and Linguistic Theories. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Andersen, R. (2002) The dimensions of ‘pastness’. In R. Salaberry and Y. Shirai (eds) The L2 Acquisition of Tense – Aspect Morphology (pp. 79–105). Amsterdam: Benjamins. Bartning, I. (2000) Gender agreement in L2 French – Pre-advanced vs. advanced learners. Studia Linguistica 54, 225–237. Bartning, I. (2009) The advanced learner variety: Ten years later. In F. Myles and E. Labeau (eds) The Advanced Learner Varieties: The Case of French L2 (pp. 11–40). Bern: Peter Lang. Bartning, I. (accepted for publication) Late morphosyntactic and discourse features in advanced/very advanced L2 French – A view towards the end state. In S. Haberzettl (ed.) Processes and Outcomes. Explaining Achievement in Language Learning. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter. Bartning, I. and Schlyter, S. (2004). Itinéraires acquisitionnels et stades de développement en français L2. Journal of French Language Studies 14, 281–299. Bartning, I. and Hancock, V. (in press) Morphosyntax and discourse at high levels of second language acquisition. In K. Hyltenstam (ed.) High Level Proficiency in Second Language Use. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Bartning, I., Forsberg Lundell, F. and Hancock, V. (2009) Resources and obstacles in very advanced French L2: Formulaic language, information structure and morphosyntax. EUROSLA Yearbook. 2009 (pp. 185–211). Amsterdam: Benjamins. Bartning, I., Forsberg Lundell, F. and Hancock, V. (in press/in 2012). On the role of contextual factors for morphosyntax stabilization in high-level L2 French. Studies in Second Language Acquisition. Birdsong, D. (1992) Ultimate attainment in second language acquisition. Language 68, 706–755. Birdsong, D. (2004) Second language acquisition and ultimate attainment. In A. Davies and C. Elder (eds) Handbook of Applied Linguistics (pp. 82–105). London: Blackwell. Birdsong, D. (2005a) Interpreting age effects in second language acquisition. In J. Kroll and A. De Groot (eds) Handbook of Bilingualism (pp. 109–127). Amsterdam: Benjamins. Birdsong, D. (2005b) Nativelikeness and non-nativelikeness in L2A research. International Review of Applied Linguistics 43, 319–328. Bolly, C. (2008) Les unités phraséologiques: un phénomène linguistique complexe? Doctoral dissertation, Louvain-la-Neuve, UC Louvain. Bongaerts, T. (1999) Ultimate attainment in L2 pronunciation: The case of very advanced late L2 learners. In D. Birdsong (ed.) Second Language Acquisition and the Critical Period Hypothesis (pp. 133–159). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

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Bylund, M. (2007) Procesos de conceptualización de eventos en español y en sueco: Diferencias translingüísticas. Revue Romane 43, 1–24. Bylund, E. (2009) Conceptualización de eventos en espanol y en sueco. Doctoral dissertation. Stockholm University. Carroll, S. (1999) Input and SLA: Adults’ sensitivity to different sorts of cues to French gender. Language Learning 49, 37–92. Carroll, S. (2005) Input in SLA: Adults’ sensitivity to different sorts of cues to French gender. Language Learning 55, 79–138. Carroll, M., Murcia Serra, J., Watorek, M. and Bendiscioli, A. (2000) The relevance of information organization to second language acquisition studies. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 22, 441–466. Chini, M. (1995) Un aspect du syntagme nominal en italien L2: Le genre. Acquisition et Interaction en Langue étrangère 5, 115–142. Conway, Å. (2005) Le paragraphe oral en français L1, en suédois L1 et en français L2. Étude syntaxique, prosodique et discursive. Doctoral dissertation, Lund: Études romanes de Lund 73. Coppieters, R. (1987) Competence differences between native and near-native speakers. Language 63, 544–573. DeKeyser, R. (2003) Implicit and explicit learning. In C. Doughty and M. Long (eds) The Handbook of Second Language Acquisition (pp. 313–348). Malden/Oxford: Blackwell. Denke, A. (2005) Nativelike performance. A corpus study of pragmatic markers, repair and repetition in native and non-native English speech. Doctoral dissertation, English Department, Stockholm University. Dewaele, J-M. and Véronique, D. (2001) Gender assignment and gender agreement in advanced French interlanguage. A cross-sectional study. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 45, 275–297. Dimroth, Chr. and Lambert, M. (2008) La structure informationnelle chez les apprenants L2. Acquisition et Interaction en Langue étrangère 26. Special issue, 5–10. Doughty, C. and Long, M. (eds) (2003) The Handbook of Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: Blackwell. Ellis, R. (1994) The Study of Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ellis, N. (2002) Frequency effects in language processing. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 24, 143–188. Ellis, N. (2006) Cognitive perspectives on SLA. The Associative-Cognitive CREED. Association Internationale de Linguistique Appliquee Review 19, 100–121. Ellis, R. (2005) Measuring implicit and explicit knowledge of a second language. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 27, 141–172. Ellis, R. (2006) Researching the effects of form focussed instruction in L2 acquisition. Association Internationale de Linguistique Appliquee Review 19, 18–41. Engel, H. (2010) Dislocation et référence aux entités en fransais L2. Développement, interaction, variation. Doctoral dissertation, Stockholm University. Forsberg, F. (2008) Le langage préfabriqué. Formes, fonctions et fréquences en français parlé L2 et L1. Bern: Peter Lang. Forsberg Lundell, F., Bartning, I., Engel, H., Gudmundsson, A., Hancock, V. and Lindqvist, Chr. (2011) Identifying criteria for new stages in high level L2 French. Paper presented at the workshop ‘Idiomaticity and discourse organisation in high-proficient L2 use’. Stockholm University, February 24, 2011. Granfeldt, J. (2003) L’acquisition des catégories fonctionnelles. Étude comparative du développement du DP français chez des enfants et des apprenants adultes. Lund: Études romanes de Lund, 67.

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Granfeldt, J. (2005) The development of gender attribution and gender agreement in French: A comparison of bilingual first and second language learners. In J-M. Dewaele (ed.) Focus on French (pp. 164–191). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Granfeldt, J. (ed.) (2007) Studies in romance bilingual acquisition – Age of onset and development of French and Spanish. Perles 21, 2007. Lund University. Granger, S. and Tyson, S. (1996) Connector usage in the English essay writing of native and non-native EFL speakers of English. World Englishes 15, 17–27. Guillelmon, D. and Grosjeaan, F. (2001) The gender marking effect in spoken word recognition: The case of bilinguals. Memory & Cognition 29, 503–511. Hancock, V. (2000) Quelques connecteurs et modalisateurs dans le français parlé d’apprenants universitaires. Cahiers de la recherche 16. Doctoral dissertation, Department of French and Italian, Stockholm University. Hancock, V. (2004) L’emploi de donc chez des apprenants avancés: intono-syntaxe et fonctionnements dans la chaîne parlée. Stockholm Studies in Modern Philology 13, 99–121. Hancock, V. (2007) Quelques éléments modaux dissociés dans le paragraphe oral dans des interviews en français L2 et L1. Journal of French Language Studies 17, 21–47. Hancock, V. and Kirchmeyer, N. (2009) Compétence discursive des apprenants avancés et quasi-natifs: étude du marqueur polyfonctionnel de vraiment. Information Grammaticale 120, 1–9. Hancock, V. and Sanell, A. (2009) The acquisition of four adverbs in a learner corpus of L2 French: Focus on late stages. Discours: revue de linguistique, psycholinguistique et informatique. (htpp://discourse.revues.org). Sorbonne, Paris. Hawkins, R. (2004) The contribution of the theory of Universal Grammar to our understanding of the acquisition of French as a second language. Journal of French Language Studies 14, 233–255. Hawkins, R. and Franceschina, F. (2004) Explaining the acquisition and non-acquisition of determiner-noun gender concord in French and Spanish. In P. Prévost and J. Paradis (eds) The Acquisition of French in Different Contexts: Focus on Functional Categories (pp. 175–205). Amsterdam: Benjamins. Hendriks, H. (ed.) (2005) The Structure of Learner Varieties. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Hickmann, M. (2005) Determinants in first and second language acquisition: Person, space, time in discourse. In H. Hendriks (ed.) The Structure of Learner Varieties (pp. 231–262). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Holmes, V.M. and Dejean de la Bâtie, B. (1999) Assignment of grammatical gender by native speakers and foreign learners of French. Applied Psycholinguistics 20, 479–506. Holmes, V. and Segui, J. (2005) Assigning grammatical gender during word production. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 35, 5–30. Housen, A. Kemps, N. and Pierrard, M. (2009) The use of verb morphology of advanced L2 learners and native speakers of French. In F. Myles and E. Labeau (eds) The Advanced Learner Varieties: The Case of French (pp. 41–61). Bern: Peter Lang. Howard, M. (2005) The emergence and use of the plus-que-parfait in advanced French interlanguage. In J-M. Dewaele (ed.) Focus on French as a Foreign Language (pp. 63–87). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Howard, M. (2007) The expression of number and person through verb morphology in advanced French interlanguage. International Review of Applied Linguistics 44, 1–22. Hyltenstam, K. (ed.) (in press) High Level Proficiency in Second Language Use. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Hyltenstam, K. and Abrahamsson, N. (2003) Maturational constraints in SLA. In C. Doughty and M. Long (eds) Handbook of Second Language Acquisition (pp. 539–588). Oxford: Blackwell.

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Hyltenstam, K., Bartning, I. and Fant, L. (2005) High Level Proficiency in Second Language Use. Research program for Riksbanken Jubileumsfond. Stockholm University. http:// www./biling.su.se/~AAA. Ioup, G., Boustagi, E., El Tigi, M. and Moselle, M. (1994) Reexamining the critical period hypothesis: A case study in naturalistic environment. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 16, 73–98. Klein, W. and Perdue, C. (1997) The basic variety or: Couldn’t natural languages be much simpler? Second Language Research 13, 301–347. Labeau, E. (2005) Beyond the aspect hypothesis. Tense–aspect development in advanced L2 French. EUROSLA Yearbook 5, 77–101. Labeau, E. (2009) An imperfect mastery: The acquisition of the functions of imparfait by Anglophone learners. In F. Myles and E. Labeau (eds) The Advanced Learner Varieties: The Case of French L2 (pp. 63–92). Bern: Peter Lang. Lambert, M. (2006) Pourquoi les apprenants adultes avancés ne parviennent-ils pas à atteindre la compétence des locuteurs natifs? In G. Engwall (ed.) Construction, acquisition et communication. Études linguistiques de discours contemporains (pp. 151–171). Stockholm: Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis. Romanica Stockholmiensia 23. AWE International. Lambert, M., Carroll, M. and von Stutterheim, Chr. (2008) Acquisition en L2 des principes d’organisation de récits spécifiques aux langues. Acquisition et interaction en langue étrangère 26, 11–29. Lambrecht, K. (1994) Information Structure and Sentence Form. Topic, Focus and the Mental Representations of Discourse Referents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lindström, E. (2008) Le développement du syntagme nominal chez quatre groupes d’apprenants suédophones (débutants, lycéens, étudiants universitaires, futurs professeurs) – l’accord du genre des déterminants et des adjectifs. Diss. Phil.lic., Department of French, Italian and Classical Languages, Stockholm University. Montrul, S. (2004) The Acquisition of Spanish. Morphosyntactic Development in Monolingual and Bilingual L1 Acquisition and in Adult L2 Acquisition. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Montrul, S. and Slabakova, R. (2003) Competence similarities between native and nearnative speakers: An investigation of the Preterite/Imperfect contrast in Spanish. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 25, 351–398. Morel, M-A. and Danon-Boileau, L. (1998) La grammaire de l’intonation. L’exemple du français. Paris: Ophrys. Muñoz, C. and Singleton, D. (2007) Foreign accent in advanced learners. Two successful profiles. In L. Roberts, A. Gürel, S. Tatar and L. Marti (eds) EUROSLA Yearbook 7 (pp. 172–190). Amsterdam: Benjamins. Paradis, M. (2004) A Neurolinguistic Theory of Bilingualism. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Paradis, M. (2009) Declarative and Procedural Determinants of Second Languages. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Pekarek Doehler, S. (2004) Une approche interactionnelle de la grammaire. Acquisition et interaction en langue étrangère 21, 123–166. Perdue, C. (ed.) (1993) Adult Language Acquisition: Cross-Linguistic Perspectives (2 Vols.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Perdue, C. (2000) Organizing principles of learner varieties. Studies Second Language Acquisition 22, 299–305. Piller, I. (2002) Passing for a native: Identity and success in second language learning. Journal of Sociolinguistics 6, 179–206. Prodeau, M. (2005) Gender and number in French L2. Can we find out more about the constraints of production in L2? In J-M. Dewaele (ed.) Focus on French as a Foreign Language (pp. 135–163). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

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10 Ultimate Attainment and the Critical Period Hypothesis: Some Thorny Issues David Singleton

Introduction Studies investigating the ultimate attainment of additional language (L2) acquirers typically focus on age factors, often with reference to some variety or other of the Critical Period Hypothesis (CPH). This chapter begins by defining what is meant by critical period in this context, offers a brief survey of pertinent evidence and then goes on to address three problematic issues associated with this line of research in the L2 domain: (1) the dubium surrounding the appropriacy of measuring L2 achievement predominantly by reference to native-speaker levels of proficiency, (2) the difficulties posed by variability in the precise terms of the CPH and (3) the narrowing of research horizons occasioned by the hegemony of CPH perspectives on ultimate attainment.

The Notion of Critical Period The term critical period is used in biology to refer to a strictly limited phase in the development of an organism during which a particular competency must be acquired if it is to be acquired at all. An illustrative example often used in this context is that of imprinting in ducklings and goslings, which, for a short time after hatching, become irreversibly attached to the first moving object they perceive – usually their mother – after which they develop a fear of strange objects and retreat instead of following (cf. De Villiers & De Villiers, 1978: 210). Another example sometimes offered relates to the development of binocularity, which has been reported as taking place between weeks 4 and 12 in the cat, weeks 1 and 9 in certain monkeys and years 1 and 3 in humans (Almli & Finger, 1987: 126). 188

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If language acquisition in human beings is constrained by the limits of a critical period on this kind of definition, the implication appears to be that unless language acquisition gets under way before the period ends, it will not happen. There may also be an implication that even if language acquisition begins within the critical period, it does not continue beyond the end of that period.

First Language (L1) Evidence of a Critical Period for Language Acquisition Some researchers cite as evidence for a critical period the cases of feral children who have been brought into contact with language only around the age of puberty, the point at which some researchers claim the critical period for language acquisition ends. Examples of such cases are those of Victor, found running wild in the woods of Aveyron in late 18th-century France (see e.g. Lane, 1976; Lebrun, 1980; Newton, 2002), and Genie, rescued from the isolation imposed by her parents in late 20th-century California (see e.g. Curtiss, 1977; Jones, 1995; Rymer, 1993). Feral children rescued around puberty typically exhibit some post-rescue progress in language development – but of a limited kind. Some researchers see this as ‘first language acquisition after the critical age’ (De Villiers & De Villiers, 1978: 219); others see it as evidence of ‘specific constraints and limitations on . . . language acquisition outside of . . . the critical maturational period’ (Curtiss, 1977: 234). It is worth noting that Lenneberg, the ‘father’ of the CPH, comments that all one can conclude from such cases is that ‘life in dark closets, wolves’ dens, forests or sadistic parents’ backyards is not conducive to good health and normal development’ (Lenneberg, 1967: 142). Another source of L1 evidence often seen as favouring the CPH is the mixed success evinced by late acquirers of sign language. Such evidence comes from studies of deaf subjects who have been deprived of language input in their early years and who then acquire sign language as their L1 at a later stage (see e.g. Curtiss, 1988; Emmorey, 2002; Long, 1990: 258f.; Mayberry & Fisher, 1989; Mayberry et al., 1983; Morford & Mayberry, 2000; Neville et al., 1997; Newport, 1984, 1990; Newport & Supalla, 1987; Woodward, 1973). It is to be noted that such studies do not find that language completely fails to develop after a given maturational point but that some deficits are observable in the language of the later signers. It is arguable that deprivation of language input during the phase in a child’s life when cognitive development is at its most intense is likely to have general psychological/ cognitive effects, and that it may be these general effects that are reflected in later language development. Some research (e.g. Peterson & Siegal, 1995; Schick & Gale, 1997; Woolfe et al., 2002) indicate that deaf children whose access to sign language is delayed have problems in the area of ‘theory of mind’, that is, in the understanding that individuals other than themselves

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have mental states – beliefs, desires, intentions and so forth. The implications of such problems for language development could be far-reaching (see e.g. Lundy, 1999), and, moreover, other general cognitive problems associated with late L1 acquisition could well be revealed by further research. As suggested earlier, a very strong version of the CPH would predict that even if language development starts within the critical period, the process will not continue beyond the end of the period. In a 3-year observational study of 54 Down syndrome subjects, Lenneberg et al. (1964) were able to record progress in language development only in children younger than 14. This was taken by Lenneberg (1967: 155) to indicate that ‘progress in language learning comes to a standstill after maturity’. Alternative interpretations of these data are (1) that what Lenneberg et al. observed was a general developmental halt (widely referred to in the relevant literature), (2) that what was involved was not actually a permanent arrestation but a temporary plateau (again referred to in the literature) or (3) that the cessation of progress was due to the absence of the right kind of stimulation (many researchers holding that systematic teaching is necessary to facilitate progress in individuals with learning difficulties – training that Lenneberg et al.’s subjects did not receive). Moreover, the relevance of evidence from Down syndrome children for normal language development is unclear – especially in the light of the ample indications that normal L1 development continues beyond adolescence (see Nippold, 1998; Singleton & Ryan, 2004: 55–60). All in all, the L1 evidence for a critical period is not conclusive. As we shall see in what follows, the L2 evidence is even less so.

L2 Evidence of a Critical Period for Language Acquisition Interpretations of the CPH in the L2 domain can be summarized as follows: after a certain maturational point, L2 learners (1) are no longer capable of attaining native-like levels of proficiency, (2) and/or need to expend more conscious effort than in earlier second language acquisition, (3) and/or make use of different mechanisms from those deployed in L2 acquisition during childhood; in any case, beyond a particular maturational stage they (4) exhibit a sharp decline in L2 learning potential (different in nature from the more gradual age-related declines in general learning capacity). With regard to (i), Scovel suggests that those who begin to be exposed to an L2 after age 12 cannot ever ‘pass themselves off as native speakers phonologically’ (Scovel, 1988: 185) (a position since slightly modified – Scovel, 2000, 2006). Long (1990: 274) accepts Scovel’s interpretation of the phonological evidence, but goes on to claim that for L2 morphology and syntax to reach native levels exposure to the L2 must begin before age 15 (cf. also Long, 2007). Such claims have been undermined by studies focused on older beginners attaining very high levels of second language proficiency (e.g. Birdsong, 1992, 2003; Bongaerts, 1999, 2003; Bongaerts et al., 1995, 1997, 2000; Ioup, 1995;

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Ioup et al., 1994; Jedynak, 2009; Kinsella, 2009; Kinsella & Singleton, 2008; Moyer, 1999; Muñoz & Singleton, 2007; Palmen et al., 1997; Singleton & Les′niewska, 2009). Hyltenstam and Abrahamsson (2000: 155) affirm that there is no recorded case of a post-pubertal second language beginner behaving in every detail like a native speaker (cf. also Hyltenstam & Abrahamsson, 2003a, 2003b), but they also note that many very early L2 beginners differ too at the level of fine linguistic detail from monoglot native speakers. With reference to the effortfulness of later language learning, Lenneberg (1967: 176) claims that post-pubertal second language learning requires ‘conscious and labored effort’ (cf. e.g. Breathnach, 1993: 44; Hyltenstam & Abrahamsson, 2000: 152). Bongaerts also shows some sympathy for this point of view, commenting that his results may be partly explicable in terms of the very intensive training received by his subjects (e.g. Bongaerts, 1999: 154–155). However, such training may not be indispensable for successful late second language learning. It is noteworthy that one of Ioup’s highly successful adult learners of Arabic was untutored, and that her performance was native-like even in areas of which she was unaware – for example subtle aspects of syntax and morphophonology (Ioup, 1995: 118). Even if later L2 learning is more ‘conscious and labored’, this may have nothing to do with the ending of a critical period for language. After all, the conscious, deliberate dimension of learning increases across the board as cognitive development advances (cf. Feldman, 2009). In relation to the idea that children and adults may have qualitatively different language-learning mechanisms at their disposal, some Chomskyans (e.g. Bley-Vroman, 1989; Schachter, 1988) have claimed that post-pubertal L2 language learning has no access to Universal Grammar (UG) (cf. e.g. Cook & Newson, 2007: 237ff.); the empirical basis for this perspective was never solid (cf. e.g. Flynn, 1987; Martohardjono & Flynn, 1995; cf. also Hawkins, 2001: 353–359), and there is a divergence of views within the Chomskyan paradigm on this issue (see e.g. Mitchell & Myles, 2004: 78ff.). Braidi (1999: 67) notes that ‘second language learners do not seem to exhibit grammars that are not sanctioned by UG’ and much research suggests that post-pubertal L2 learners deal in the same manner as L1 acquirers with linguistic features supposedly having a UG basis (see e.g. Bruhn de Garavito, 1999; Dekydtspotter et al., 1998). Some non-UG-oriented research findings have also been considered in the context of the notion of different mechanisms subserving language learning in later years. Harley and Hart (1997) found that the early beginners’ L2 outcomes ‘were much more likely to be associated with a memory measure than with a measure of language ability’ (Harley & Hart, 1997: 395), whereas the reverse was true of the later beginners, and DeKeyser’s (2000) study yielded broadly similar results: the adult beginners in his study who scored within the range of the child beginners manifested high levels of verbal analytical ability, an ability which seemed to play no role in the performance of the child beginners. DeKeyser’s interpretation of his results is that

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maturational constraints apply only to implicit language learning mechanisms (see also DeKeyser, 2003a, 2003b, 2006; cf. Ortega’s comments – 2009: 158). Harley and Hart for their part point to the possible influence of primary- versus secondary-level instructional styles. A further possibility is that such results reflect cognitive changes which impact not only on language learning but also on other areas of development. Yet another perspective suggests that late language acquisition makes use of different areas of the brain as compared with early acquisition. For example, an investigation of the spatial representation of L1 and L2 in the cerebral cortex of early and late bilinguals during a sentence-generation task carried out by Kim et al. (1997) revealed little or no age-related separation of activity in Wernicke’s area, but did reveal differences in respect of activity in Broca’s area: among the late bilinguals two distinct but adjacent centres of activation showed up for L1 and L2, whereas in the early bilinguals there appeared to be a single area of activation for both languages. Marinova-Todd et al. (2000) point out that Kim et al.’s study did not pay careful attention to the proficiency issue and raise the possibility ‘that the adult learners assessed . . . were poorly selected and do not represent highly proficient adult bilinguals’ (Marinova-Todd et al., 2000: 17–18). In such a case, the neurological divergences observed might simply reflect differences in proficiency level, which some studies have found to be more important than age of onset in determining brain organization in respect of additional languages (cf. Abutalebi et al., 2001; Perani et al., 1998). Turning to the question of whether there is a sharp decline in the language-acquiring capacity, findings from studies investigating ‘naturalistic’ L2 acquisition favour the notion that, while adolescent and adult subjects may have an initial advantage, in the long run, younger beginners are more likely to attain native-like levels of proficiency (cf. Hyltenstam, 1992; Johnson & Newport, 1989; Krashen et al., 1982; Oyama, 1976, 1978; Patkowski, 1980; Snow & Hoefnagel-Höhle, 1978). On the other hand, research into primarylevel L2 programmes in schools where the general medium of instruction is the L1 has long shown that pupils who are exposed early to an L2 and then integrated into classes containing pupils without such experience tend not to maintain a clear advantage for long (see e.g. Burstall et al., 1974; Oller & Nagato, 1974). This may relate partly to blurring effects resulting from mixing non-beginners with beginners in the same classes and/or to differences in exposure time between naturalistic and instructed learners (see e.g. Singleton, 1992; Singleton & Ryan, 2004: Chaps. 4 and 6; Stern, 1983), but Muñoz (2006, 2008) suggests that younger learners may have a fundamentally different (disadvantaging) cognitive relationship with classroom L2 learning as compared with adolescents and adults. In any case: (1) The evidence does not support the simplistic ‘younger = better in all circumstances over any timescale’ optique which underlies some early

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treatments (e.g. Lenneberg, 1967; Penfield & Roberts, 1959; Stengel, 1939; Tomb, 1925). (2) Even the ‘younger = better in the long run’ view is sustainable only as a general tendency; age of first encounter is only one of the determinants of the ultimate level of proficiency attained. As mentioned earlier, even very young L2 beginners may diverge at the level of fine linguistic detail from native speakers (see e.g. Flege, 1999; Hyltenstam & Abrahamsson, 2000: 161). (3) There is a question mark over the notion that any such age-related decline has a so-called ‘elbow’ or ‘7’ shape (Bialystok & Hakuta, 1999; Birdsong, 2004, 2006; Flege, 1999) of the kind that one would expect if a critical period were its cause. Bialystok and Hakuta’s re-analysis of Johnson and Newport’s data (Bialystok, 1997; Bialystok & Hakuta, 1994) suggests ‘that the tendency for proficiency to decline with age projects well into adulthood and does not mark some defined change in learning potential at around puberty’ (Bialystok, 1997: 122); Bialystok and her colleagues (Bialystok & Hakuta, 1999; Hakuta et al., 2003; Wiley et al., 2005) also analysed census data on age of arrival in an English (L2)-speaking environment and reported English proficiency; what emerges from this analysis is a steady linear decline of reported proficiency as age of arrival increases but no indication of a dramatically sharper rate of decline at any point; data on the relationship between L2 accent and age of arrival show a similarly continuous decline (cf. also Flege, 1999). Birdsong (2006) comments that ‘a recurrent finding is that a linear function captures the relationship between AoA [age of acquisition] and outcome over the span of AoA’ (Birdsong, 2006: 12). In sum, it appears that any decline in L2-learning capacity that occurs at the end of childhood varies from person to person, which is not what one would expect if its underlying cause were a critical period. It also appears that any decline in L2-learning capacity with age is continuous and linear, which, again, is not in keeping with the usual understanding of the notion of critical period.

Some Problematic Issues Associated with AgeFocused L2 Acquisition Research Measuring Success in Ultimate Attainment We turn now to the problematic issues adumbrated earlier (cf. Muñoz & Singleton, 2011). The first of these concerns the measurement of success in respect of ultimate attainment. Success in this context has typically been interpreted as a level of achievement indistinguishable from native-speaker proficiency. This approach is questionable. It was pointed out many years

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ago (Hill, 1970: 243ff.) that the notion of native speaker is culture-bound, and that in areas where people speak several languages exhibiting similar phonetic systems, it is not necessarily easy for native speakers of a given local language to recognize non-native users of their language. More recently, Cook (e.g. Cook, 1995, 1999, 2002) and Davies (2003) have further problematized the notion of native speaker, Cook arguing (e.g. Cook, 1999: 185) that L2 users should be focused on in their own right rather than being compared with native speakers, and Davies arguing (Davies, 2003: 213) that ‘the distinction native speaker-non-native speaker . . . is at bottom one of confidence and identity’ (cf. also Piller, 2002). In specific regard to age-related studies of L2 acquisition, as we have noted, the more closely early L2 beginners are studied the more it emerges that, at the level of subtle detail, they, just like older beginners, tend to differ from monoglot native speakers. A number of studies (see e.g. Hyltenstam & Abrahamsson, 2000, 2003a, 2003b) have shown that even very young L2 beginners diverge at the level of lexico-grammatical detail from native speakers. The same seems to be true at the phonological level; Flege (1999, 2002) shows that subjects who begin to be exposed to an L2 in an L2 environment as young children are nevertheless quite likely to end up speaking the L2 with a non-native accent (e.g. Flege et al., 1997; Guion et al., 2000; Piske et al., 2001) and to be less good than monoglot native speakers at vowel and consonant perception in their target language (Flege et al., 1999; MacKay et al., 2001). The maturational issue may be a good deal less important in this connection than the fact of possessing knowledge of another language (cf. e.g. Cook, 1995; Flege, 1999; Grosjean, 1982; Ioup, 2005: 248ff.; Leather, 2002: 10ff.). It seems also be the case that the degree of distance between the L1 and the L2 plays a role (cf. Kellerman, 1995; McDonald, 2000). What the foregoing seems to imply is that the appropriate comparison in the investigation of age-related effects in L2 acquisition is not between later L2 beginners and monoglot native users of the language in question but rather between later L2 beginners and those who begin to acquire an L2 in early childhood. Cook (2002: 6) notes in this connection that, while on every side the L2 user is judged against the native speaker, and ‘ultimate attainment is a monolingual standard rather than an L2 standard’, there is actually no intrinsic reason why the L2 user’s attainment should be the same as that of a monolingual native speaker.

CPH Variability The second problematic issue relates to variation in the CPH. Different versions of the hypothesis set the endpoint – or endpoints – of the critical period at different maturational stages (cf. Singleton, 2005). This means that ‘early learners’ and ‘late learners’ may be differently defined according to the version of the CPH that is in question and the language domain that is under

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scrutiny. Clearly, this has an impact on the interpretation of ultimate attainment data from L2 acquirers with different ages of onset. Penfield suggested that ‘for the purposes of learning languages, the human brain becomes progressively stiff and rigid after the age of nine’ (Penfield & Roberts, 1959: 236) and that ‘when languages are taken up for the first time in the second decade of life, it is difficult . . . to achieve a good result’ (Penfield & Roberts, 1959: 255). Lenneberg (1967), for his part, proposed puberty as the offset point for the critical period, purportedly the endpoint of the lateralization process. With respect to L2 acquisition, he claimed (Lenneberg, 1967: 176) that after puberty ‘the incidence of “language-learning-blocks” rapidly increases’ and ‘[f]oreign accents cannot be overcome easily’. Other researchers have proposed a multiplicity of critical periods with differing endpoints. Molfese (1977: 206ff.), for example, suggests that the phonetic/phonological critical period terminates in the first year of life. Seliger (1978) also argues that the window of opportunity for phonetic/phonological acquisition closes earlier than that for the acquisition of other dimensions of language, although his proposed offset point for the former is puberty, syntax, according to him, being acquirable until later. Diller (1981: 76) claims that authentic L2 accents can be acquired only up to the age of six to eight while cognitive aspects of L2s can continue to be learned into maturity. Scovel (1988: 101) also distinguishes pronunciation from other domains of language, claiming that it is the only area of language which shows age effects because it has a ‘neuromuscular basis’ and that acquiring vocabulary and morphosyntax is fundamentally different because, unlike learning pronunciation, it does not have a ‘physical reality’. As noted earlier, he has asserted that those whose exposure to an L2 begins after age 12 cannot ever acquire a native-like accent in the L2. A further group of L2 researchers take the line that the critical period ends progressively over a number of years, this process beginning around age six or seven. Thus, Johnson and Newport (1989) infer from their study of the attainments in English of immigrants to the USA that there is a specific maturational phase – up to about seven years – which is particularly favourable for language acquisition and a second maturational phase – from about seven years to about puberty – during which the language-acquiring capacity disimproves gradually but subsequent to which there is a sharp and definitive decline. Long (1990) accepts Johnson and Newport’s evidence in relation to an early beginning to the deterioration of the language-acquiring capacity and agrees with Scovel’s proposal of age 12 as the maturational point beyond which a native-like L2 accent cannot be acquired. He himself further proposes, as we have seen, that the prerequisite for the acquisition of L2 morphology and syntax to native levels is exposure to the L2 before age 15. More radically, Ruben’s (1997) review of studies of children who had experienced temporary hearing impairment in their first year of life and who

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subsequently showed deficits in verbal memory and phonetic perception leads him to the conclusion that the critical period for phonetics/phonology ends around the 12th month of infancy. Ruben further interprets the relevant research as indicating that the critical period for syntax ends in the fourth year of life, and for semantics in the 15th or 16th year of life. Hyltenstam and Abrahamsson’s review of the evidence inspires in them a certain dubiousness about the critical period idea, and to state in one publication that the critical period may be ‘une chimère’ (Hyltenstam & Abrahamsson, 2003b: 122). Elsewhere, they follow Ruben in speculating that the language learning mechanism may be ‘designed in such a way that it . . . inevitably and quickly deteriorates from birth’ (Hyltenstam & Abrahamsson, 2003a: 575), and for this reason ‘nativelike proficiency in a second language is unattainable’ (Hyltenstam & Abrahamsson, 2003a: 578). On the profusion of critical period termini argued for in various parts of the research literature – illustrated (far from exhaustively) in the above discussion – Aram et al. comment that ‘the end of the critical period for language in humans has proven . . . difficult to find, with estimates ranging from one year of age to adolescence’ (Aram et al., 1997: 285). The impact of such uncertainty regarding the critical age at which, purportedly, the language acquisition capacity abruptly deteriorates is, first, to undermine the plausibility of the whole notion of a critical period for language acquisition and, second, to deprive the concepts of ‘early’ and ‘late’ L2 learning of any kind of stable reference point and therefore meaning. Thus, with regard to this latter point, if 12 years is taken to be the critical age, L2 learning at age four is presumably ‘early’ learning; if 12 months is taken to be the critical age, on the other hand, then L2 learning at age four is already ‘late’ learning. At the very least, this implies that any comparison of ‘early’ and ‘late’ L2 beginners has to be relativized to a particular siting of the critical age, and that any such comparison risks falling foul of other views on the offset point of the critical period.

The Hegemony of CPH Perspectives on Ultimate Attainment The third thorny issue has to do with the way in which the CPH has dominated the scene in the discussion of ultimate attainment differences. Some researchers have been very vocal in calling for other dimensions than maturation to be taken into consideration. Moyer, for instance, has the following to say: The impact of age should be understood as indirect as well as possibly direct. This requires that we somehow account for other significant factors in the learner’s cumulative L2 experience. (Moyer, 2004: 140; cf. also Dörnyei, 2009: 264)

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Other possible factors have in fact been explored. One such, already adverted to, is the degree of distance between the L1 and the L2. McDonald (2000) found, for example, that learners of English from a Spanish-speaking background who had begun to be exposed to the language before age five were able to perform to native levels on an English grammaticality judgement test, whereas Vietnamese speakers with pre-age-five experience of English were not. Other factors referred to in the literature have included quantity and quality of input, general cognitive and educational variables. Evidence of a role for such factors, as well as further factors such as attitude, motivation and language awareness/aptitude, has been brought to the fore in a number of recent studies (see e.g. Jedynak, 2009; Kinsella, 2009; Kinsella & Singleton, 2008; Moyer, 2004; Muñoz & Singleton, 2007). For instance, Jedynak’s (2009) study found that nine out of 35 postpubertal L2 learners performed to native-speaker levels in terms of pronunciation of their target language, and that the length of learning seemed to emerge as the dominant factor relative to level of attainment. Kinsella and Singleton for their part found that four of their 20 L2 acquirers of French, all of whom were living in France but none of whom had had significant exposure to French before age 20, performed as well as native-speaker controls on a regional accent recognition task; and that the successful subgroup had a higher average length of residence in France than the rest of the sample, that all the successful subjects conducted their social life primarily through French, and that all identified themselves closely with the Francophone community. Despite such findings, however, the very widespread concentration on CPH has tended to marginalize and indeed discourage such research.

Concluding Remarks In this rather brief treatment, we have seen that tracing the connection between the age factor and ultimate attainment is fraught with problematicity. One might add that the problematic areas dealt with here are a very long way from being exhaustive. We have, moreover, seen that the connection between maturation and L2 ultimate attainment itself warrants serious and sceptical scrutiny. This is not to deny the reality of age-related factors in L2 learning, but rather to suggest that a certain loosening of the association between ultimate attainment research and CPH issues would be likely to open the way to a richer perspective on L2 attainment and a fuller harvest of empirical findings and theoretical insights in this domain than has so far been gathered.

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Singleton, D. and Ryan, L. (2004) Language Acquisition: The Age Factor (2nd edn). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Singleton, D. and Les´niewska, J. (2009) Age and SLA: Research highways and byeways. In M. Pawlak (ed.) New Perspectives on Individual Differences in Language Learning and Teaching (pp. 109–124). Poznan´-Kalisz: Adam Mickiewicz University Press. Snow, C. and Hoefnagel-Höhle, M. (1978) The critical period for language acquisition: Evidence from second language learning. Child Development 49, 1114–1128. Stengel, E. (1939) On learning a new language. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 20, 471–479. Stern, H.H. (1983) Fundamental Concepts of Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tomb, J. (1925) On the intuitive capacity of children to understand spoken languages. British Journal of Psychology 16, 53–54. Wiley, E., Hakuta, K. and Bialystok, E. (2005) New approaches to using census data to test the critical period hypothesis for second language acquisition. Psychological Science 16, 341–343. Woodward, J.C. (1973) Some characteristics of pidgin sign English. Sign Language Studies 3, 39–59. Woolfe, T., Want, S.C. and Siegal, M. (2002) Signposts to development: Theory of mind in deaf children. Child Development 73, 768–778.

11 Language Origins, Learner Varieties and Creating Language Anew: How Acquisitional Studies Can Contribute to Language Evolution Research Sandra Benazzo

Introduction One of the main ideas defended by Clive Perdue is that the study of learner varieties can shed some light not only on processes of language acquisition but also on the functioning of full-fledged languages and on the human language faculty itself. This position, which will be further developed in this chapter, is particularly relevant for the debate on language emergence and evolution that is currently under way: given the lack of direct traces for language origins, some researchers have considered that ontogenetic processes can suggest, in an indirect way, the transition to language. In relation to this topic, the first part of this chapter summarizes the exchange published in Linguistics between Bernard Comrie (2000) and Clive Perdue (2006), which revolves around the following question: are there modern-day ontogenetic processes during which language is really created anew? While the former adopts a Bickertonian viewpoint and excludes from analysis protolanguage-like systems, the latter highlights the methodological necessity of taking into account very simple manifestations of the human language faculty (early L2 varieties, homesigns, pidgins, etc.) in order to understand the development of more complex linguistic systems. In the second part, we show the relevance of the ‘simple systems’ perspective, as pointed out by Perdue, by presenting the results of a recent study 204

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on the expression of temporality in early L2 varieties and the homesigns developed by deaf subjects. The comparison highlights some common developmental features for basic semantic operations – anchoring situations in time and giving an aspectual viewpoint on them – that have been used to speculate on the emergence of temporality in early language and to refine current models of protolanguage (cf. Benazzo, 2009a). In the end we point to the contribution that L2 studies can provide on language origins, namely constraining the hypotheses on plausible scenarios of language evolution.

Background: Language Origins, Models of Protolanguage and Empirical Evidence After a long period when the question of language origins and evolution of human language was a research subject officially banned,1 in the last 15 years or so, it has gained a renewed interest: it is the central topic of various international research projects (e.g. the ESF Project The Origin of Man, Language and Languages 2001–2007; NIAS project Windows on Language Genesis 2004–2006), of a biannual international conference (Evolang, since 1996) and of numerous publications (just to cite a few: Botha & Knight, 2009; Christiansen & Kirby, 2003; Givón & Malle, 2002; Heine & Kuteva, 2008; Hombert, 2005; Wray, 2002). The debate covers a wide range of topics, ranging from the discussion on possible subcomponents of the human language faculty – distinction of central versus peripheral features (cf. Hauser et al., 2002 vs. Pinker & Jackendoff, 2005) – on the nature of the process (saltational vs. cumulative), on physiological prerequisites and preadaptations for its emergence, to the causes of its emergence (natural selection vs. spandrel), its relative time of appearance and so on (cf. Johansson, 2005 for a synthesis). One question that is particularly relevant for linguists concerns the ‘transition to language’, that is the modelization of possible intermediary steps from the emergence of elementary early language (also called ‘protolanguage’ after Bickerton, 1990) to the complexity of modern languages. The question is rather speculative in nature, given that the original phenomenon has left no direct traces: as a matter of fact, by the advent of writing, that is around 5000 years ago, we were already dealing with languages which are as elaborate as present-day ones (cf. Jackendoff, 2002: 232). To investigate the evolution of the human language capacity, we must therefore rely on indirect data, such as artifacts (tools, pictures), which represent manifestations of complex cognitive capacities, fossil skulls, which can reveal the evolution of the brain (i.e. the biological substrate enabling their appearance) and the structure of language as we see it today, which is the result of evolution. Modern-day language manifestations may however also contain traces of its past. Following this line of thought, some researchers have turned in

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particular to ontogenetic processes where language is developed, in order to get insights into forms of language that are less complex than fully fledged ones. Bickerton (1990), for example, proposes two main stages in the evolution of human language, namely ‘modern language’ (languages as we know it) and ‘protolanguage’, maintaining that manifestations of ‘protolanguage’ are still present today: it can be seen when language transmission is disrupted – for example in pidgin languages, in agrammatic aphasics, or in Genie’s production (Curtiss, 1977), a child deprived of contact with language from 1.5 to 13 – and when it has to be developed – child language under two years and primates trained to language. It is on the basis of such evidence that he actually describes properties of ‘protolanguage’: a means of communication made of lexical words (mainly nouns and verbs), which are interpreted pragmatically, but ‘lacking any consistent grammar’ and grammatical words.2 According to Bickerton, the crucial element characterizing modern language is syntactic structure. This development would have taken place in a catastrophic way via argument structure: the regular pattern introduced by the obligatory presence of arguments would constitute a template for hierarchical phrase structure and syntactic embedding (cf. Calvin & Bickerton, 2000). According to him, there is no reason to assume any plausible intermediary stage. Jackendoff (1999, 2002) follows Bickerton’s methodological position by looking for traces of early stages in what he calls ‘degraded forms of modern language’ (i.e. most of the situations considered by Bickerton, with the addition of late second language acquisition (SLA)), trying to show that ‘their “fossils” are still present in the grammar of modern language itself’ (Jackendoff, 2002: 236). In his view, for example, exclamations and other situation-specific one-word utterances (shh, yes, no, etc.) would be fossils of the one-word stage of language evolution. Interestingly, although he takes into account most of the empirical sources considered by Bickerton, Jackendoff comes up with quite a different model (see Figure 11.1): instead of one main leap from protolanguage to modern language, he details nine possible intermediary steps, some of which are logically sequential and others logically independent. The language capacity would therefore have evolved incrementally. At this point it is useful to underline that both Bickerton’s and Jackendoff’s reconstructions of language evolution are based on what is stated as the available evidence, although neither of them justifies why some empirical sources are considered and not others, or whether in case of conflict some would be more reliable than others. As Jackendoff puts it: following the lead of Bickerton and many others, I will draw on evidence from child language, late second language acquisition, aphasia, pidgin languages and ape language experiments. It is of course never clear how relevant such evidence is for evolutionary concerns – in particular, to what degree ontogeny really does recapitulate phylogeny. Nevertheless,

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Figure 11.1 Steps in the evolution of language. Taken from Jackendoff (1999: 273) and reprinted with the author’s permission.

this is all the evidence we’ve got, so we just make the most of it, while recognizing that it should be taken with a grain of salt. (Jackendoff, 2002: 237) The exchange between Comrie (2000) and Perdue (2006) does not directly concern the models just described, but, as we shall see, it develops precisely the question about the empirical sources that should/could be taken into account and to what extent they reflect creative features.

The Exchange Comrie (2000)/Perdue (2006) about ‘Creating Language Anew’ The starting point of Comrie’s reflection is to assume that at a certain point in time human beings had the necessary genetic prerequisites to develop language, that is they were endowed with the human language faculty. Taking this moment as reference, Comrie asks the following question: ‘given a human being with such genetically determined linguistic ability, what circumstances are necessary for this ability to be realized?’ (Comrie, 2000: 990). The idea is to look within modern-day ontogenetic

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processes to identify where such a situation is reiterated, that is where language is created anew.

Comrie’s Position: Focus on Language (Not Protolanguage) To answer the above question, Comrie reviews the following five ontogenetic processes during which language arises: first language acquisition, the case of feral children, creoles, deaf sign language and twin language. Ordinary L1 acquisition is rapidly excluded: under normal circumstances, and despite transitory idiosyncrasies, the child successfully develops the linguistic system of the speech community she belongs to. In the long run, nothing is created anew: ‘children do not create their own languages as a long-term solution to the problem of their communicative needs (. . .) normal children cannot help but acquire the language of their speech community’ (Comrie, 2000: 991). Given that in the presence of full input the child conforms to the linguistic model present in the environment, Comrie turns to situations where linguistic input is either absent or restricted. The first condition is fulfilled in feral children: the analysis of a few documented cases leads to the unsurprising statement that the availability of a genetically determined ability to develop language is not sufficient by itself: in the absence of input, language is not developed. But what happens when such feral children integrate a speech community? Genie, for instance, a child who was kept imprisoned from the age of 1.5 to 13 without exposure to language, at the time of her discovery was found incapable of speech, but later acquired it to a certain extent. According to Curtiss (1977), a psychologist describing Genie’s subsequent language development, she seems to have succeeded in acquiring some elementary knowledge of English, although many structures were not grammatical. Bickerton takes her production as an example of protolanguage – roughly a lexicon lacking any consistent grammar – and deals with it on par with pidgins, the production of children under two years and the language of trained apes. Comrie’s conclusion is that late exposure to linguistic input (i.e. after the critical period) leads to the development of protolanguage, not language; but he is not interested in protolanguage. The second situation where linguistic input is restricted corresponds to the case of emergent creoles: for Comrie the process of creolization would be relevant for the above question if Bickerton’s Bioprogram – attributing their creation to children who elaborate their parents’ inconsistent input – could be proven, which is far from being the case. However, a closely related case is represented by deaf sign languages, as ‘they are not derivative of the spoken languages of the same or neighboring communities’ (Comrie, 2000: 996). Specific reference is made to the Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL) because, unlike other sign languages, its emergence is well documented. The NSL arose around 1980 when deaf children were brought together in schools for the

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deaf. In 1986, some researchers started to observe the means of communication they had developed. As it usually happens when a deaf child is deprived of contact with signing speakers, a gestural language is created in order to communicate with hearing people (homesigns, cf. Goldin-Meadow, 2003). Successive cohorts of deaf children entering the Nicaragua school elaborated the grammar of the NSL starting from the raw material of individual systems of communication, that is their homesigns (cf. Kegl et al., 1999; Morford & Kegl, 2000). Deaf sign languages therefore seem to be the best candidate whereby grammar is created anew. The necessary circumstances indicated by Comrie for grammar to be created are: young age, an environment providing the lexicon and a potential large community of speakers. Comrie next examines artificial languages (e.g. Esperanto) and twin languages, which are grouped together under the label of ‘supplementary creation’. While the first case is of no interest here, it is useful to outline some features of twin languages: their lexicon seems to come from the environmental input (despite some substantial phonetic transformations), while their grammar is (at least partially) different. Evidence from twin languages is used to support the previous list of prerequisites: once again, a grammar seems to develop largely independent of the input, if a lexicon is provided and at a young age. It is interesting to note that SLA is not taken into account as a process involving ‘supplementary creation’. One explanation is given in a previous article: Comrie (1992) does not exclude the possibility of obtaining comparable evidence from L2 acquisition, but maintains that, in order to identify creative features, it would be necessary to disentangle both the influence of the L1 knowledge and the influence of the L2 input. Independent of this last consideration, the necessarily short synthesis of Comrie’s (2000) article clearly shows that his interest has shifted from the creation of ‘language’ to the emergence of one of its subcomponents, namely ‘morphosyntax’, hence his intention not to consider protolanguage-like systems. Furthermore, the dissociation of grammar from lexicon leads to an interesting paradox: although Comrie recognizes that the provision of a lexicon is probably the main prerequisite for creating language (‘a crucial catalyst for the realization of that ability’), he thinks that this task does not require the linguistic ability of humans (i.e. it is not ascribed to the human language faculty).

Perdue’s Position: Focus on Protolanguage to Understand Language Perdue (2006) pays tribute to Comrie’s fertile idea, while asserting the necessity of developing it further. He actually reviews each of the processes taken into account by Comrie, pointing to quite different possible conclusions. With respect to the essential prerequisites to create language, Perdue argues against the restriction to young age (reminiscent of the critical period hypothesis), the necessary presence of a potential large community of

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speakers (two speakers could be enough) and the condition of restricted input, while nourishing the reflection about what language is and what can be attributed to the human language faculty. Perdue’s main point, however, is a methodological one: he criticizes the position adopted by Comrie, namely to be concerned with the development of language (in terms of complex morphosyntax) and not considering protolanguage-like systems (in Bickertonian terms, a lexicon lacking any consistent grammar), which constitute the raw material for its elaboration. In other words, he highlights the methodological impossibility of excluding protolanguage-like systems when examining the development of language, and illustrates his point with examples taken from SLA. Given space constraints, in the following, we will focus essentially on these two points: (a) why SLA is relevant for creating language anew and (b) why simple (protolanguage-like) systems should be take into account to understand the evolution toward the complexity of full language.

Adult second language acquisition and creating language anew The case of SLA belongs to the ontogenetic processes considered by Jackendoff (1999, 2002), but is absent from Comrie (2000) and Bickerton. As we said, its exclusion could be justified on the basis of a potential double disadvantage: the possible strong influence of learners’ L1 (previous knowledge of a language) and of the environmental input (the L2). A few observations go against this picture, at least if we consider the initial stages of adult late L2 acquisition. As a matter of fact, adults are notoriously bad imitators. Any subject, be it child or adult, faced with the task of acquiring a conventional language does not merely imitate the linguistic model in the environment. Yet, if the idiosyncratic features present in child language production are transitory, they may well be permanent in adult language acquisition: in contrast to the child, the adult learner very often ends up with a system which is considerably different from the target language, a phenomenon known as fossilization. The initial varieties developed by adult learners do not seem to be strongly determined by their L1 either. Research on untutored SLA (the case of immigrant workers studied in the ESF project, to which Perdue contributed massively) has shown that learners representing different pairings of source and target languages initially develop very similar linguistic systems. A particular stage has been observed, ‘the Basic Variety’ (cf. Klein & Perdue, 1997), where a set of lexemes, taken from the target language but lacking grammatical features, is organized on the basis of pragmatic/semantic principles such as Focus last and Agent first, which are largely independent of the source/target language specifics. The relative impermeability of initial L2 varieties to the grammaticalized features of the languages in contact therefore cancels the potential double

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disadvantage just mentioned. Their principles of utterance organization have in fact been interpreted by Klein (2001) as reflecting creative processes of the underlying language faculty, and by Jackendoff (2002: 249) as ‘fossil principles of protolanguage, that modern languages often observe and frequently elaborate’. As for Perdue’s (2006) position, he underlines that they represent a linguistic organization that is language neutral, precisely because they are present, to different degrees, in most languages. In other words, once the learner has caught some TL-like words from the environment, he has to decide how to arrange them: in doing so, the initial solution is to rely on unmarked word order principles. If one wants to attribute their presence to transfer (for the tenants of its strong presence in early L2 stages), it could be said that: transfer starts from what the learner finds to be most language neutral . . . and the specifics are learnt much later on. . . . Language neutral represents what is shared in most languages, and our learners show a remarkable degree of agreement on this respect. (Perdue, 2006: 860) These results indicate that the initial stages of adult L2 acquisition are not the product of a mere transfer from the L1 (a sort of relexification), nor are they the product of a pure imitation of the environmental model, but constitute communicative systems of their own, where the learner extracts elements from the input and develops a grammar to combine them: one of the creative dimensions of SLA relevant for language evolution concerns precisely the development of a grammar to combine lexemes. The case of SLA, then, leads us to reconsider Comrie’s limitations on both youth and restricted input. By the way, as underlined by Slobin (2005), the capacity to innovate grammar is not specially due to children who, in terms of grammar, tend to over-regularize and not to innovate. To illustrate this point even in contexts of creole emergence, Slobin cites the case of Tok Pisin, a former pidgin which has undergone a process of creolization, showing that new grammatical features have been introduced in Tok Pisin by adult speakers, without the intervention of children (contra Bickerton’s Bioprogram Hypothesis).

Looking at developing L2 varieties Much of Perdue’s work, together with all the researchers in the ESF project, has consisted in analyzing learner’s production in communicative situations: their studies reveal that early L2 varieties are highly structured systems, which can be described in terms of organizational regularities (against the idea of no consistent grammar), but which also present communicative limitations, which are precisely due to their formal simplicity. The Basic Variety, for example, is quite an efficient communicative system in most everyday situations, but a closer look at its functioning in

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discourse allows the researcher to identify where it works and where it fails. Let us consider the classic example of utterance organization. At this level, learners heavily rely on linear position (word order), which reflects both the unequal informative status of utterance constituents (Focus last) and their different semantic status (if reference is made to two entities, the most agentive comes first). These principles are quite efficient to express who does what to whom, at least as long as both constraints apply harmoniously, that is as long as agents are topical. But how is it possible with this system to signal that an agent has a focal status or that a patient is topical? Such a discourse configuration is recurrent in the ESF data in the Modern Times retellings, where it has to be specified that a loaf of bread has been stolen not by Charlie Chaplin, but by a girl. Full languages have different formal devices to encode such discursive configurations (e.g. clefts in French and in English), which are absent from the Basic Variety. Their expression can represent a complex task for the L2 learner, as they imply a conflict between her principles of utterance organization: either one principle has to be sacrificed or new means have to be developed. Now, it is precisely in such complex configurations that new linguistic means appear in L2 production, as attempts to overcome a communicative limitation. The analysis of learner production over time, in terms of communicative possibilities and shortcomings with respect to the repertoire of a certain stage, reveals the starting point and the functional motivation for the development of formal (morphosyntactic) means, namely to express discourse configurations where the previously applied principles fail because they are too broad. The progression from earlier to later varieties reflects a hierarchy of functions receiving linguistic expression, as new linguistic devices allow the speaker to face complex discourse configurations in a more efficient way. Formal elaboration arises then both from the broadening range of communicative functions and from the need to reduce the ambiguity that is inherent in simple systems. This reflects the basic idea, introduced by Corder (1977), that we should ‘treat standard languages as “complicated” forms of a “basic” simple language’. The analysis of simple systems, at work in discourse, therefore allows the researcher to understand the sources of development toward more elaborate systems.

Comparing Simple Systems of Different Nature and Temporality in Early Language At the time when Clive (2006) was writing his article, I was myself led to reflect on the question of language genesis and evolution, namely in the framework of the research project Restricted Linguistic Systems as Windows on Language Genesis. 3 For my personal contribution, I decided to apply the ‘simple systems’ perspective to the domain of temporality: the main

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idea was to look at the expression of temporal relations in simple systems in order to gain insight into possible stages for the expression of time in early language. Temporality is in fact a fundamental category of human cognition, which is encoded in elaborate ways in every modern human language. Any language presents a full array of devices (adverbial, verbal or grammatical) to express the aspectual and temporal properties of a situation, that is broadly speaking to comment on its distribution over time (continuous, iterative, habitual, etc.) and to situate its overall time of occurrence. Conversely, it is usually assumed that early forms of human language lacked a certain number of syntactic properties and were confined to the immediate perceptual reality of the here&now: after all, most of animal communication is considered as situation-specific. Several studies mention the special status of temporality in terms of language evolution (e.g. Hauser et al., 2002; Pinker & Jackendoff, 2005; Victorri, 2005); however, only a few try to identify intermediate stages between the absence of its expression and the complex means referring to it in modern languages. The simple systems considered in my study were, first of all, early varieties of adult untutored L2 learners (data from the ESF project), which present the advantage of being well described (for temporality, see Dietrich et al., 1995). The development observed in L2 has been compared with the expression of temporality in another type of ‘simple code’, namely homesigns, the gestural systems that deaf subjects not exposed to sign languages use to communicate with their hearing (family) environment. Although the study of homesigns represents a very recent field of research, the comparison was made possible thanks to the availability of some studies both on child homesigns (cf. the work of Goldin-Meadow and colleagues) and on adult homesigns (cf. work by Fusellier-Souza, 2001, 2004). Before summarizing the results, it is useful to underline the salient differences that characterize the emergence of the systems taken into account and the subjects involved (cf. Table 11.1). The adult L2 learner is a cognitively mature subject who can take advantage of a linguistic model, present in her environment, as well as of her knowledge of a language that has been previously acquired (her L1). Homesigns represent extremely different situations: deaf subjects without contact with sign languages cannot rely on any antecedent experience of language nor on any linguistic model; a new means of communication has to be ‘invented’ in interaction with (hopefully cooperative) communicative partners, usually by reanalyzing and restructuring the (co-speech) gestures of the hearing environment; this creation process takes place when the deaf subject is still a child, whose cognitive capacities are in development. With respect to different possible ontogenetic processes (pidginization, creolization, L2 acquisition, late L1 acquisition, homesigns, etc.), L2 varieties and homesigns are the most unrelated. Our choice has been made on

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TABLE 11.1 Salient differences between L2 Adult learner and homesigners (child/ adult) Linguistic system

L2

Homesigns

Creators

Adult

Child ---⇒-------------- - Adult

Cognitive capacities

Fully developed

In development ---⇒--- Completed ?

Experience of langage Yes, the source language No Presence of a linguistic model

Yes, the target language

No, but access to gestures of the hearing environment

Expressive modality

Audio-vocal channel

Visuo-gestural channel

purpose, calculating that observing recurrent developmental features, despite salient differences, would represent a more robust empirical basis for speculations on language evolution.

Common Developmental Features The comparison of L2/homesigns development reveals both similarities and differences for the expression of temporality, which will be briefly summarized hereafter (for a more complete description, cf. Benazzo, 2009a, 2009b). The initial stages of the two processes highlight the distance of their creators in terms of cognitive capacities and of (previous) experience of language. For instance, in child homesigns, the realization of any temporal marking is preceded by a stage where the child disconnects gestures referring to entities from their actual presence in the perceptual environment (mere displaced reference, as in L1 acquisition in general). This development is not visible in the adult L2 learners, as they have already developed the symbolic function of language via their L1. Despite such initial differences we noticed a common first step for the expression of temporality. It is the transition, in both cases, from a linguistic system that is context-dependent (lacking any temporal marking) to the development of some devices to mark temporal displacement from the here&now. As for homesigns, after having elaborated a system with gestures referring to entities and predicates, disconnected from the presence of their referents but still linked to the here&now, the deaf children observed by Morford and Goldin-Meadow (1997) start using some markers of temporal displacement: the authors report a pointing gesture to express past reference, a gesture glossed AWAY meaning not here/not now and a gesture glossed WAIT used to introduce the child’s intention (=reference to coming events). In continuity with the previous stage, reference to a deictic now is left implicit. Some children also start telling short narratives where the principle of

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natural order applies, that is mentioning past events in the order in which they happened. Also in L2 varieties temporal displacement is the first temporal operation attested. Calendrical expressions (like Sunday, yesterday or 1970) already appear at the pre-basic variety, that is at a stage preceding the emergence of unambiguous verb forms and therefore called ‘nominal utterance organization’. They are used to localize a situation on the time axis and thus express the time interval for which the assertion is made, when it differs from the time of utterance (a deictic now) or from the time interval set up by the expert interlocutor (cf. Dietrich et al., 1995). The following example illustrates this regularity: temporal reference is displaced from the initial deictic time of utterance to subsequent time intervals (tomorrow and Monday). (1)

(the NS asks about the learner’s husband) * en el * hôpital demain eh permis . . . et lundi à l’hopital

*en el* (=Sp.in the) hospital tomorrow eh permit (to go home) . . . and monday to the hospital

At this stage, learners can also produce short narratives: connectors are usually absent, but their retellings systematically apply the principle of natural order, which allows the interlocutor to infer the relation of succession. Despite the clear context-dependency of pre-basic varieties – lack of verb forms to express the relations between the entities mentioned, lack of connectors – learners quickly develop explicit means to express ‘temporal displacement’, thus overcoming the constraint of having to rely on the contextual here&now or on the expert (native) speaker’s contribution. Subsequent development of time relations in homesigners can be deduced from the work of Fusellier-Souza (2004), who describes in detail the linguistic systems of three adult homesigners. Their linguistic systems come very close to the typical features of the Basic Variety. In both cases, the repertoire includes a large number of lexical expressions to localize situations on time (in a deictic, anaphoric or absolute way) and to quantify their duration or frequency. Some temporal properties of the situations mentioned are inferable by the Aktionsart of verb forms: the lexical content makes it possible to distinguish states from activities, and to express notions such as telicity, punctuality and durativity. In addition, the natural semantics of verbs can be modified with boundary markers: in particular, items meaning finish, very common in both L2 and homesigns, function as perfective markers. The following narrative excerpts illustrate this system (temporal expressions are underlined): (2) twenty seventh junes + right + seventy seven I go to the Kabul . . . Kabulstan I stay + nearly five six months no work there . . . (L2 learner)

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(3) nine o’clock in er + work start half past two finish . . . (L2 learner) (4) (about a football team) before [rotating hand backwards] WIN [sign for win/victory] now [pointing downwards] FINISH (adult homesigner, cf. Fusellier-Souza, 2004: 282) Both cases show the emergence of items equivalent to before and after, which can be used to either localize situations on time or to mark anteriority or posteriority of a situation with respect to another one. Their presence allows the speaker to overrule the constraint of chronological order, which applied at the previous stages in both L2 pre-basic varieties and child homesigns. From the attested development, it is possible to draw a second generalization: explicit means for anchoring situations in time precede specific means to give an aspectual viewpoint on them (or to order them with respect to one another). In both cases, verb forms represent the initial source of information about the aspectual properties of a situation (distinction between states vs. activities; notions such as telicity, punctuality and durativity). The first means used to overrule the natural semantics of predicates are boundary markers, in particular completion markers such as finish: by combining finish with, for example, an activity verb like work, the speaker overrules the natural semantics of the verb, which is atelic. The linguistic systems just described are of course still quite simple in comparison to fully fledged languages, which usually present specific devices to express more sophisticated temporal notions (e.g. simultaneity, past in the past, aspectual viewpoints other than ‘completion’, etc.). Nevertheless, the observation of these first stages is sufficient for our purposes. More precisely, the development attested in the L2/homesigns case: (a) Makes visible the starting point of the three basic semantic operations in the domain of temporality (anchoring situations on time, giving an aspectual viewpoint on them, ordering them with respect to each other). (b) Suggests a relative hierarchy in their realization, which corresponds to priorities in terms of communicative needs: despite salient differences in both processes, the subjects involved seem to agree on the temporal functions that initially receive linguistic expression. (c) Highlights the function of each new means in terms of overcoming the constraints holding at previous stages (devices for temporal displacement to overcome contextual dependency; before/after to overrule the PNO principle; boundary markers to overrule the natural semantics of the predicate).

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Implications for (Models of) Language Evolution The invariants attested for the development of temporality in the L2/ homesigns case,4 as outlined in the previous section, have been used to extrapolate a logical sequence of stages for the expression of temporality in early language. In terms of an evolutionary scenario, it seems reasonable to assume that the emergence of any temporal marking (or the realization of any temporal operation) is preceded by a stage where referential items are simply disconnected from the presence of their referents. (1) Mere displaced reference At this stage a lexicon of symbols referring to situations, entities or speech acts could be combined and interpreted by pragmatic principles. Utterances would correspond to speech acts related to the here&now or close to it, as in (a). Sit.A (a)

-----!----→ S (= Speech Time)

(2) Anchoring situations in time: from contextual dependency to displaced time reference The conceptual category of temporality could display a first basic partitioning between situations referring to the here&now vs. spatio-temporal displaced reference. In continuity with the previous stage, the origin of this deictic system – ‘speech time’ or ‘close to speech time’ – may be left unmarked as it belongs to situational, contextual shared knowledge (present default interpretation). An initial stage of contextual dependence would thus have been followed by the development of a minimal deictic system, where it is possible to mark speech acts for past, present or upcoming temporal spans (cf. b). Sources for their lexicalization could have been natural phenomena, like night/day alternation, or the evocation of different spatial locations. (b)

Sit.A ----[-!-]---→ S

(b’’)

Sit.A -[---]-!----→ S

(b’’’)

Sit.A -----!-[---]-→ S

(3) Giving a viewpoint on situations: from lexical verbs to boundary markers The system just described makes it possible to set a static time reference for a situation still viewed as a whole (such as at time X holds situation A). The next step is probably represented by the development of means giving a dynamic/aspectual perspective on the situation talked about, allowing to

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distinguish its inner constituency. Boundary markers seem to be the best candidate for it: items meaning ‘completion’, such as finish, allow the speaker to overrule the natural semantics of the predicate; at the same time they represent an increase in conceptual structure, as they imply reference to different phases of the same situation (a positive and a negative one) which are oriented on a time scale (cf. c). (c)

Sit. + A/Sit.-A ----[-!-]-----→ S

The use of items for completion (over or finish), inchoativity (begin), or continuation (keep on) could represent the sources of aspectual markers. Once the system includes lexical means for such notions, aspectual categories such as ongoingness or perfectivity can develop by ordinary processes of grammaticalization (cf. Bybee et al., 1994). It is now possible to ask the following question: how does such a sequence fit existing models of protolanguage? Which prerequisites in the complexity of the system (and which specific means) are required to express temporal relations? In other words, which features of the system must co-evolve? Let us take Bickerton’s model. In his view, protolanguage consists of ‘nouns and verbs without modifiers – if adverbs appear, they are usually whole utterance modifiers, not modifiers of single words. If adjectives appear, they are a few of the more common ones’ (Calvin & Bickerton, 2000: 41). Bickerton is rather laconic about temporality: whereas inflections expressing tense, mood and aspect are considered as unlikely candidates for protolanguage (as absent from pidgins and child language), he speculates on the possible presence of means for relative time. He actually remarks that pidgins usually have expressions meaning ‘earlier/completed’ and ‘later’, while reflexes of equivalent items (deriving from verbs meaning finish) are also found in almost all creoles: these devices would represent an ‘analysis of time more primitive then the tense analysis of true language’ (Bickerton, 1990: 183). Victorri (2002), who adopts Bickerton’s bi-step evolutionary model, considers protolanguage to be well adapted for simple communicative acts concerning the immediate perceptible reality, while the need to evoke past or imaginary events would be responsible for the transition to syntactic elaboration and temporal/aspectual marking. Our observation of L2/homesigns leads to question some of the above considerations. If we consider the repertoire mobilized for the expression of temporality up to the Basic Variety, it is perfectly compatible with protolanguage à la Bickerton: it just needs nouns, verbs and a few items with adverbial function. A systems lacking complex morphosyntax is therefore not necessarily confined to the here&now; on the contrary a lexical repertoire makes it

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possible to express rather complex temporal relations (localize situations in time, quantify their duration and frequency, marking completion, etc.). Jackendoff (1999, 2002) elaborates on Bickerton’s model proposing several incremental steps. In his view, the repertoire of protolanguage is made of ‘symbols’ used in a non-situation-specific way and combined by semantic/ pragmatic principles (Agent first, Focus last, Grouping). Grammatical categories and symbols for abstract semantic relations – prepositions expressing spatial relations or temporal items like now, yesterday, before/after – emerge rather late, namely after the development of a Hierarchical Phrase Structure, that is at an intermediary stage between protolanguage and modern language (cf. Figure 11.1). Determining the co-evolution of grammatical categories with respect to temporal operations is not straightforward in L2/homesigns development. If we focus on the first temporal operation attested, child homesigns develop specific markers for temporal displacement after the system presents a formal distinction between nouns (for entities) and verbs (for actions), even if this distinction is semantically based; L2 adult learners realize such semantic operation even before the production of relational items like verbs. Such a mismatch in the empirical sources can be attributed to the specific features of each ontogenetic process: unlike children, a cognitively mature and socially integrated adult subject cannot be confined to utterances limited to the here&now. The divergence in the empirical sources can thus be accounted for in terms of the subjects’ unequal cognitive-social development and communicative needs. Nevertheless, it also raises crucial questions for projections on early language: which empirical source should be considered more relevant for language evolution? Which degree of cognitive development and which kind of communicative needs can we attribute to language creators? Would they resemble adults or children? Both have the capacities to innovate language, but note that, when it comes to the advantage represented by the emergence of language, most of the functional reasons adduced – be it planning joint ventures like sea-crossings (Coupé & Hombert, 2005), foraging (Bickerton, 2002), or regulating social behavior (via grooming for Dunbar, 1996; via narration for Victorri, 2002) – suggest adult-like needs and cognitive capacities. Leaving aside the mismatch homesigns/L2 pointed out above, as well as the specific question of initial creators (which is still open), we can safely say that the analysis of the observed simple systems unambiguously indicate the following two points: •

‘Complex semantic operations’ can be realized with quite ‘simple means’. In particular, it is not necessary to assume a high level of syntactic development as prerequisite for the expression of temporality. The basic operations are compatible with a protolanguage-like repertoire still lacking much of the syntactic features present in fullfledged languages.

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This remark clearly goes against the results of studies which attribute a rich syntax to the communicative systems of hominids on the basis of traces of symbolic behavior (e.g. burial ceremonies or personal decoration as in Henshilwood et al., 2004), but also against the assumption that a protolanguage repertoire made of nouns, verbs and adverbs is confined to the here&now. What seems crucial for temporality is not syntactic complexity, but the preexisting conceptual structure for its representation (cf. Wilkins & Wakefield, 1995) and, we would like to add, the need to express it linguistically.

The Contribution of Acquisitional Studies on Language Evolution Modern-day observable ontogenetic processes are far from representing the circumstances under which early human language emerged: in all cases, for instance, we look at subjects whose cognitive capacities are the ‘product’ of evolution and who interact with other ‘experimented’ speakers. However, their observation contributes to nourish the reflection on the evolution of language in many ways. First, it leads to investigate on the determining factors for a linguistic system to develop and on the impact of specific circumstances on such a process (cognitive development, expressive modality, etc.). The functional convergence attested in L2 and homesigns as for the expression of temporal relations, for example, can be related to the pressure of similar hierarchy of communicative needs, which, in a favorable environment (=interaction with cooperative partners) and in the presence of relatively sophisticated cognitive capacities, push the language faculty toward the same direction. Incidentally, following Morford’s (2002) observations on homesigns vs. sign language, we can say that if a large community seems to be necessary for the grammaticalization of a ‘simple’ linguistic system, two communicative partners are enough for its emergence. Second, looking at simple systems and their development over time allows the researcher to gain insights on language before ‘formal complexity’ and the motivation to develop it: in other words, what you can and can not do with a given system, how new means increase its communicative power. Under this perspective we have seen the starting point of three basic semantic operations for temporality, which (like for utterance organization) provide plausible scenarios of early language stages. Third, intermediary stages noticed in acquisitional processes can be used to refine current models of protolanguage, further constrain the hypotheses and raise new questions.

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Notes (1) In 1866, the Linguistic Society of Paris expressively prohibited papers on the origins of language. (2) More precisely, Bickerton (1990) lists the following properties of protolanguage: nouns and verbs without modifiers, absence of any consistent word order, absence of null elements, arguments can be missing, absence of syntactic embedding, lack of function words (although it may include negation, question-words and quantifiers). (3) This project has been coordinated by R.P. Botha at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies (NIAS) in 2004–2006. For more details on the project, see http:// www.nias.knaw.nl/language_genesis/ and the volume edited by Botha and de Swart (2009). (4) It would of course be useful to test such invariants by looking also at other simple systems.

References Benazzo, S. (2009a) The emergence of temporality: From restricted linguistic systems to early language. In R. Botha and H. de Swart (eds) Language Evolution: The View from Restricted Linguistic Systems (pp. 21–57). Utrecht: LOT. Benazzo, S. (2009b) Acquérir une langue/créer un système communicatif: l’expression de la temporalité in L2 et dans les Homesigns, AILE-LIA n°1, 195–226. Bickerton, D. (1990) Language and Species. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bickerton, D. (2002) Foraging versus social intelligence in the evolution of language. In A. Wray (ed.) The Transition to Language (pp. 207–225). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Botha, R.P. and de Swart, H. (eds) (2009) Language Evolution: The View From Restricted Linguistic Systems. Utrecht: LOT. Botha, R.P. and Knight, C. (2009) The Prehistory of Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bybee, J., Perkins, R. and Pagliuca, W. (1994) The Evolution of Grammar. Tense, Aspect, and Modality in the Languages of the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Calvin, W.H. and Bickerton, D. (2000) Lingua Ex Machina: Reconciling Darwin with the Human Brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Christiansen, M. and Kirby, S. (eds) (2003) Language Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Comrie, B. (1992) Before complexity. In J. Hawkins and M. Gell-Mann (eds) The Evolution of Human Languages (pp. 193–211). Redwood City, CA: Addison-Wesley. Comrie, B. (2000) From potential to realization: An episode in the origin of language. Linguistics 38, 989–1004. Corder, P. (1977) ‘Simple codes’ and the source of the learner’s initial heuristic hypothesis. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 1, 1–10. Coupé, C. and Hombert, J-M. (2005) Les premières traversées marines: une fenêtre sur les cultures et les langues de la préhistoire. In J-M. Hombert (ed.) Aux origines des langues et du langage (pp. 118–161). Paris: Fayard. Curtiss, S. (1977) Genie: A Linguistic Study of Modern-Day ‘Wild Child’. New York: Academic Press. Dietrich, R., Klein, W. and Noyau, C. (eds) (1995) The Acquisition of Temporality in a Second Language. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Dunbar, R. (1996) Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language. London: Faber & Faber.

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Fusellier-Souza, I. (2001). La création gestuelle des individus sourds isolés, Acquisition et Interaction en Langue Etrangère n°15, 61–95. Fusellier-Souza, I. (2004) Sémiogenèse des langues des signes. Etude de langues de signes primaires (LSP) pratiquées par des sourds brésiliens. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Université Paris 8. Givón, T. and Malle, B. (eds) (2002) The Evolution of Language out of Pre-Language. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Goldin-Meadow, S. (2003) The Resilience of Language. What Gesture Creation in Deaf Children Can Tell Us about How All Children Learn Language. New York: Psychology Press. Hauser, M., Chomsky, N. and Fitch, W.T. (2002) The faculty of language: What is it, who has it, and how did it evolve? Science 298, 1569–1579. Heine, B. and Kuteva, T. (2008) The Genesis of Grammar: A Reconstruction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Henshilwood, C.S., d’Errico, F., Vanhaeren, M., van Niekerk, K. and Jacobs, Z. (2004) Middle Stone Age shell beads from South Africa. Science 384, 404. Hombert, J.-M. (ed.) (2005) Aux origines des langues et du langage. Paris: Fayard. Jackendoff, R. (1999) Possible stages in the evolution of the language capacity. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 3, 272–279. Jackendoff, R. (2002) Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Johansson, S. (2005) Origins of Language. Constraints on Hypotheses. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Kegl, J., Senghas, A. and Coppola, M. (1999) Creation through contact: Sign language emergence and sign language change in Nicaragua. In M. DeGraff (ed.) Language Creation and Language Change: Creolization, Diachrony, and Development (pp. 179–237). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Klein, W. (2001) Elementary forms of linguistic organization. In J. Trabant and S. Ward (eds) New Essays on the Origin of Language (pp. 81–102). Berlin: De Gruyter. Klein, W. and Perdue, C. (1997) The basic variety. Or: Couldn’t natural languages be much simpler? Second Language Research n°13, 301–347. Morford, J.P. (2002) Why does exposure to language matter? In T. Givón and B. Malle (eds) The Evolution of Language out of Pre-Language (pp. 329–341). Amsterdam: Benjamins. Morford, J.P. and Goldin-Meadow, S. (1997) From here and now to there and then: The development of displaced reference in Homesign and English. Child Development 68, 420–435. Morford, J.P. and Kegl, J.A. (2000) Gestural precursors to linguistic constructs: How input shapes the form of language. In D. McNeill (ed.) Language and Gesture (pp. 358–387). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Perdue, C. (2006) ‘Creating language anew’: Some remarks on an idea of Bernard Comrie’s. Linguistics 44, 853–871. Pinker, S. and Jackendoff, R. (2005) The faculty of language: What’s special about it? Cognition 85, 201–236. Slobin, D. (2005) From ontogenesis to phylogenesis: What can child language tell us about language evolution? In S.T. Parker, J. Langer and C. Milbraith (eds) Biology and Knowledge Revisited. From Neurogenesis to Phylogenesis (pp. 155–287). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Victorri, B. (2002) Homo narrans: le rôle de la narration dans l’émergence du langage. Langages 146, 112–125. Victorri, B. (2005) Les ‘mystères’ de l’émergence du langage. In J.-M. Hombert (ed.) Aux origines des langues et du langage (pp. 212–231). Paris: Fayard. Wilkins, W. and Wakefield, J. (1995) Brain évolution and neurolinguistic preconditions. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 18, 161–182, 205–226. Wray, A. (ed.) (2002) The Transition to Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

12 Multiple Perspectives on the Emergence and Development of Human Language: B. Comrie, C. Perdue and D. Slobin Ivani Fusellier-Souza

Introduction Throughout his career, Clive Perdue was interested in questions relating to non-standard acquisition and their impact on the function of languages and on the language faculty in general. While most of his work focuses on the learner’s language (LL), in the last 10 years of his life, he outlines some pertinent points with respect to sign language (SL) and the connections between the two, particularly between the learner’s basic variety and the early stages in the emergence and development of SL. Perdue first became involved in SL research in the 1990s, when he directed Pasquereau’s (1993) study on the deaf child and the learning of a foreign language, as well as the work of Fusellier-Souza (1998, 1999, 2004) on the expression of tense and aspect in Brazilian SL, and later on the creation and development of emerging SLs1 by adult deaf/hearing pairs. The latter study drew Perdue’s attention to questions regarding the emergence of human language and the linguistic principles that govern it. A prevalent assumption of his latest research consisted of postulating the existence of common organisational principles (specific to the faculty of language) that govern the structure of the basic variety and of emerging SL. Among his writings is a study, Early Learner Varieties: A Window on Language Genesis (2006), that was originally presented at a seminar in Wassenaar in 2003, in which he discusses his initial thoughts based on Comrie’s (2000) reflections on the origin of human language, outlined from 223

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a formalist innateness approach. At the same time, Slobin (2004) also reflects on the evolution of language, using scenarios similar to those considered by Comrie and Perdue. Both Slobin and Perdue base their studies on the same functional–conceptual approach, without knowing of each other’s work. Both authors set out to show that our understanding of the emergence and evolution of human language necessitates not only considering biological factors but also, and even more so, cognitive, social and communicative principles. This chapter contrasts and compares the views of these scholars on the emergence and development of human language as presented in these three articles (Comrie, 2000; Perdue, 2006; Slobin, 2004). The scenarios explored by these authors will first be presented and discussed in terms of their approaches, followed by a discussion of each position through the authors’ own perspective on the emergence and structuring of language: the impact of input and of the critical period (Comrie), the impact of cognitive and linguistic development (Perdue) and the impact of social and communicative processes (Slobin). Finally, Perdue’s and Slobin’s positions will be discussed and supported through the contribution of two studies, one focusing on the organisation of narrative activity in emerging SL (Fusellier-Souza, 2001, 2004) and the other on the development of temporal relations in simple language systems: emerging SLs and learner languages (Benazzo, 2009a). The conclusion presents a synthesis of the discussion and opens questions for future research.

Understanding the Origins and Evolution of Human Language: Interests and Diversity of Scenarios and Approaches The hypotheses proposed by Comrie, Perdue and Slobin are founded on empirical material derived from various situations of acquisition and language development. Comrie, whose approach focuses on the significance of the quantity of input and its impact on the phylogeny of human language, begins by setting out two extremes: ordinary children, who undergo a natural process of language acquisition, and wild children, who have suffered from a process of communicative deprivation and were denied what would seem to be a normal acquisition process. The comparison of these two extremes is appealing at first sight, yet one must be aware that most cases of the so-called wild children reported in the literature (Curtiss, 1977; Malson, 1964) remain mysterious and raise many unanswered questions. These children have endured living conditions, or rather conditions of bare survival, that are so ‘atypical’

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that it is difficult to draw valid conclusions about their language faculty. Comrie proposes two additional cases that are relevant for consideration: (a) subsidiary systems created from the input of a language already there – the language of twins and Esperanto and (b) languages emerging ‘without structured input’ – pidgins/creoles and SLs. The latter are relevant for the study of the emergence of language, as clearly demonstrated in Comrie’s analysis, however simplified. SLs are particularly interesting in this respect since these languages enable us to observe and study a process of emergence and evolution in the present, and examine it both in ontogenetic and phylogenetic terms (Fusellier-Souza, 2006). Thus, the creation and evolution of these languages in overcoming congenital deafness can be considered a powerful analyser of human language (Cuxac, 2000). Perdue examines the same scenarios listed by Comrie, and proposes a new situation for analysis: unguided acquisition by adults2 and the emergence of the so-called learner’s language. Perdue’s approach is to show that the initial acquisition varieties (the pre-basic and basic levels) form a system with its own internal organisation, independent of the source/target languages. Through this scenario, Perdue adds relevant data to the discussion: (a) the emergence and structure of language are not exclusively a question of quantity of input during a specific period of human life and (b) adults have sophisticated cognitive and communicative faculties that enable the ad hoc creation of a linguistic system.3 Slobin begins by questioning the role of the child in the evolution and complexification of language. His arguments develop along three lines of questioning: (a) whether linguistic ontogeny can recapitulate phylogeny, (b) whether diachronic linguistics can recapitulate ontogeny and (c) whether children create grammatical forms. His discussion of these issues is primarily based on three or four scenarios: the acquisition of language by children (in contrast to primates trained by humans), the emergence of pidgins and the structuring of creoles and the different stages in the construction of SLs. One of Slobin’s general conclusions matches Perdue’s, namely, that the process of emergence and structuralisation of human language is not exclusively limited to the child. However, the two authors diverge in their views on the early stages of language evolution. Slobin accepts, to some extent, the hypothesis of a protolanguage (Bickerton, 1990) possessing some structural principles, but condemned to fossilisation due to sociolinguistic factors (the absence of a broad linguistic community, for example). Perdue pushes the discussion a step further and proposes to consider reduced linguistic registers (such as the learner’s language, emerging SLs and pidgins) as separate linguistic systems that form a structural starting point for a system that can evolve and become more complex, depending on various factors. This point will be developed further below.

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Language and the Genesis of Structures: The Impact of Input and the Critical Period Comrie’s reasoning is built on the appealing concept of ‘creating language anew’. His argumentation is based on the innateness paradigm putting forth: children’s biological capacity to create linguistic structures, the amount of input they receive in a given period of life and therefore the fundamental significance of the critical period. Comparing different acquisition situations, Comrie concludes that ‘normal’ child language acquisition is not a good scenario for observing the phenomenon of ‘creating language anew’, since children receive the language of their linguistic environment through structured input and therefore do not follow a process of creation. Consequently, Comrie proposes his first principle: in order to ‘create language anew’, one must be exposed to an environment of limited input. The analysis of wild children leads him to conclude that the absence of input and linguistic development during the critical period renders the child incapable of acquiring human language in all its complexity, leaving only a limited, rudimentary protolanguage (in Bickerton’s terms). Comrie therefore proposes a second principle: in order to ‘create language anew’, one must be young enough. In his analysis of the emergence of pidgins and creoles, Comrie summarises the two central assumptions found in the scientific literature: the grammar of creole languages emerges either from contact phenomena with substrate languages (pidgins) or from children’s ability to ‘create language anew’. Based on the second assumption, Comrie postulates that the set of languages spoken by adults give children access to a common lexical stock, but cannot provide a stable grammar. This mixture of languages, or pidgin, is therefore a protolanguage without a structured grammar. The same reasoning is generalised to the emergence of SLs. Comrie relies on the most documented case in the literature, that of the Nicaraguan SL (Kegl et al. 1999). He incorporates the authors’ analysis and suggests that the lexical signs of this SL emerged through contact (these speakers were the first deaf children schooled in groups), and served as the raw material for the construction of a grammatical system that has been further developed by later generations of children. Comrie believes that the SL case is the best candidate to validate the idea of ‘creating language anew’, since this case is well documented and presents no controversy, contrary to the process of creolisation. Comrie’s conclusions are in line with the model proposed by Senghas (1995): ‘certainly in the case of deaf sign languages, and perhaps in the case of creoles, grammar is created anew’ (Comrie, 2000: 997). However, Comrie’s analysis does not offer much reflection on the nature of emerging SL for the first generation of deaf children. For this account, he adopts Bickerton’s concept of protolanguage, in the sense that emerging SLs are

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considered to be rudimentary systems of communication in which the relation between sign and signified is not necessarily arbitrary.

Language and its Structuralisation: The Impact of Cognitive and Linguistic Development In his argumentation, Perdue emphasises that adult language acquisition is the only ontogenetic process not mentioned by Comrie. Based on the concept of simple codes, puts forth Corder (1978) to characterise certain reduced registers of language, Perdue proposes that ‘early learner languages should be approached and understood as unknown languages’ (Perdue, 2003: 7). This proposal forms the theoretical background for all research based on a conceptual approach to linguistic analysis of LL varieties (Perdue, 1983; Klein & von Stutterheim, 1991; Watorek, 1998). According to this approach, LL, as a linguistic system, displays organisational principles at various levels (structural, semantic, informational). Given its inherent instability (although the fossilisation process can stabilise it, to some extent), this system becomes more complex thanks to the learner’s ability to exceed his/her communicative limits. The process of language acquisition is therefore seen as a complex interaction of three sets of factors: (1) the cognitive and communicative capacities of adult learners, (2) the linguistic environment in which language is acquired and (3) the learner’s own motivation. Perdue’s main criticism of Comrie’s premises is that they are grounded in biologically based theoretical models of innateness (Bickerton, 1990). Within these models, simple forms of communication (pidgins, gestures, homesigns) are considered to be raw material. These are marginal forms for proper linguistic systems and are characterised only by the presence of a stock of lexicalised elements and the absence of ‘any consistent grammar’. Perdue raises four key questions not addressed by Comrie in his analysis of the emergence of the Nicaraguan SL: (1) the iconic aspects that affect the formation of SL lexicon (Cuxac, 2000); (2) the absence of data and analysis concerning the emerging SLs used by deaf children in Nicaragua before their institutional grouping; (3) studies on the linguistic organisation of emerging SLs/homesigns (Fusellier-Souza, 2001, 2004; Goldin-Meadow, 1991; Yau, 1992) and (4) the important source of input that is to be found in gestures produced by Spanish-speaking hearing Nicaraguans in their contacts with deaf children (Coppola & So, 2006; Senghas et al., 2004). Perdue proposes his own scenario for the phylogenetic emergence of human language, based on three principles. First, the creative process of human language may emerge beyond the critical period. Second, a language is defined by a gradual development motivated by the need for linguistic communication. Consequently, the community is not a prerequisite for the emergence of language. This aspect can be reduced to a minimal sphere of

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communication, as small as two interlocutors, in which communicative and linguistic activity takes place. Third, simplified languages cannot be reduced to a protolanguage. It is essential to carefully study the process whereby these types of language develop and to identify their organisational principles. There is no reason to distinguish the morphosyntactic level from other levels of linguistic organisation. This distinction prevents the precise understanding of the means allowing the organisation of formal mechanisms to develop.

Language and its Complexification: The Impact of Social and Communicative Processes Slobin’s arguments partly correlate with Perdue’s: the process of evolution and development of human language is not exclusively limited to the child. Through solid argumentation, Slobin attempts to provide negative answers to three questions involving the absolute role of the child in the process of language evolution and development. Regarding the first question – whether linguistic ontogeny can recapitulate phylogeny – Slobin argues that the process of child language acquisition is not helpful in the study of language emergence and evolution. The ontogeny of present-day human language is based on already-existing languages. Therefore, there is no credible evidence for a universal form of young children’s language that could be supposed to represent a biologically structured protolanguage. The second question – whether diachronic linguistics can recapitulate ontogeny – is considered in studies of developmental psycholinguistics, revealing historical changes in existing languages. Slobin convincingly demonstrates that the more complex innovations observed in child language do not come from preschool children, as one might expect, but from children in more advanced stages of schooling. In other words, language seems to transform itself more in use than in early acquisition. As for the third question – whether children create grammatical forms – the author’s argumentation is based on three lines of research on the birth of a language. Concerning the emergence of creole languages, the author agrees with the fact that children exposed to these languages (particularly to pidgins) can contribute to the structuring process, leading to a more regular and automated grammar. Yet, he believes that these children do not seem to be the innovators of system rules. Concerning the creation of emerging SLs, the author argues that deaf children who communicate primarily through the visual-gestural channel, with no access to the input of a SL community, are capable of creating a gestural system, homesigns, that form the structural beginnings of a language. However, the structuring and evolution of these systems are constrained by the absence of use due to the absence of a signing

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community. Therefore, these languages cannot develop into ‘full human languages’. The study of the Nicaraguan SL is based on Senghas (1995), who argues that three types of grammatical forms are already present in the first generation of deaf children using emerging SLs. Based on these data, Slobin concludes that there is no real evidence that the phenomenon of innovation/ creation comes exclusively from the group of younger children of the second generation. The competence of these children is expressed by the fact that they use, in a more efficient and automated way, linguistic forms derived from the input of an existing, albeit more basic, linguistic system. Slobin concludes with three assumptions. First, it is essential to consider the interaction between the emergence of linguistic structures in the process of communication and in the capacity of human individuals to learn and use these structures. Second, the structure of language manifests itself in two diachronic processes: biological evolution and the continuous process of communicative interaction. Finally, the complexification of human language from a phylogenetic perspective can be considered a process of social production.

Emerging Sign Languages among Adult Deaf/Hearing Pairs: From Language Creation to Complexification Fusellier-Souza (2001, 2004) provides a detailed description of the linguistic means used in emerging SLs by three deaf Brazilian adults in the interaction with hearing interlocutors. The three deaf informants have had no contact with other deaf people or with each other, yet they have achieved some level of integration in their hearing environment. This study reveals a process of complexification in the linguistic evolution of the three emerging SLs. The proposed analysis, based on a model of semiogenetic emergence of SL (Cuxac, 2000), postulates links between SLs, both in ontogenetic and phylogenetic terms.

Emerging Sign Languages: Insights into the Ontogeny and Phylogeny of Sign Language In ontogenetic frame, emerging SLs display structural similarities and form a continuum with the properties of the systems created by deaf children as described in Goldin-Meadow (1991): (a) a stabilised lexicon consisting of signs of nominal, verbal, adjectival, and quantificational values, (b) highly iconic structures4 and (c) multi-functional informational pointing. Adult emerging SLs differ from child SL systems in the structural and functional complexity of expression in the domain of reference (people, space, time) and in the more refined use of SL parameters and components (i.e. eye gaze,

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Figure 12.1 The semiogeny of sign languages (in Cuxac & Pizzuto, 2010)

pointing, the signing space, bodily posture). Two factors seem to affect these differences: the cognitive development of successful adults and their social integration. In phylogenetic frame, emerging SLs display truly linguistic structures that are attested on the evolutionary level of all SLs. These structures are based on what is called a process of iconicisation of experience, 5 which constitutes the common cognitive core from which the shared linguistic units of SL develop. A unique aspect in the organisation of SL lies in the fact that this process does not disappear in the diachronic evolution of SL; rather, it seems to gradually become structured as part of its structuring. The most revealing example of this aspect is the relative ease of exolinguistic communication between deaf foreigners.6 Figure 12.1 illustrates the operation of SL semiogeny: a shared base from which individual SLs (including their own variations) are represented as separate iconic columns.

The Complexification of Emerging Sign Language: The Role of Cognitive and Social Factors Fusellier-Souza’s (2004) results reaffirm several principles proposed by Perdue and Slobin. The linguistic structures of SL seem to emerge and become more complex not only as a result of biological factors, but primarily as a result of cognitive and social processes which the deaf individual undergoes through interactions with a hearing environment. However, the data challenge Slobin’s assumption that the development of an emerging SL into a ‘full’ language is constrained by the absence of use in a signing community. Indeed, this study shows that emerging SLs can be structured and become more complex over time provided they are used by the deaf speaker in interaction with a hearing environment that is non-hostile to the use of this communication system. The three emerging SLs analysed were structured primarily through

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prolific daily exchanges in paired communicative situations between deaf and hearing adults.7 Consequently, the data are more consistent with Perdue’s position, according to which a language is defined through the gradual development it undergoes because of the need for linguistic communication in the linguistic interaction among two or three individuals. This principle also accords with Arbib’s (2009: 22) proposal for the study of adult SL.8 In light of the importance of social factors, Arbib argues that ‘an “emerging sign language” is better thought of as a “dyadic sign language” (DLS) to reflect the fact that it is the product of a community at least two, but not necessarily more than two, people within their own lifetime’ (Arbib, 2009: 154).

Emerging Sign Languages and Learner Languages: Parallel Linguistic Principles in the Organisation of Narrative Activity Fusellier-Souza’s (2004) study is primarily based on the analysis of a video corpus of deaf informants telling life stories.9 A detailed analysis of the temporal macro-structure of two life stories is provided. In one of the fragments analysed (duration 1:21 minutes), the deaf speaker (Jo) tells his hearing interlocutor (Manoël) about an accident, a real event which Jo had personally witnessed. The fragment contains some 27 utterance sequences (consisting of one or two sentences), 8 of which characterise the enunciation (speech act) and 19 focus on the propositions (act narrated)10 and narrative structure. The interactive situation contributes to the organisation of narrative: dialogical utterances help to construct links between the time of speech and the time of the event. Questions posed by Manöel (1, 7, 19) help to guide Jo in the organisation of his story. Three of these questions relate to three distinct moments of the situation in the story. The narrative organisation is fairly coherent. The time of narration emerges from the interactive situation and the dynamics of eye gaze: the mention of an event (the accident) transposes the speaker (Jo) and addressee (Manoël) away from the time of speech. Narrative time (that composes the frame) is primarily conveyed through structural transfers from various perspectives (a wide angle with zoom on entities). The semantic properties expressed by the parameter of motion also contribute to a coherent construction of the sequence of events. The analysis also shows that eye movement formally marks the back and forth movement between the two levels (speech and proposition). The analysis highlights three temporal principles that shape the narrative between Jo and Manoël: • •

the aspectual-temporal perspective clearly marked by person transfer; the movement parameter that can formally mark aspectuality (bounded or non-bounded);

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the semantic aspectual-temporal properties of events and propositions (aktionsart).

These three principles promote the emergence of a fairly elaborate temporal narrative structure in the emerging SL of these adults. Examining of the third principle brings to light possible similarities with the narrative structure of learner languages. Stutterheim (1991) hypothesises, in light of the analysis of spontaneous discourse between two Turkish workers in Berlin,11 that learners at the base level use (temporal) semantic properties inherent to their utterances in order to organise the narrative structure of discourse. The example below illustrates how Jo and a Turkish worker in Berlin use analogous principles based on the semantics of events in order to tell the story of an accident between two vehicles. Comparison of these sequences reveals clear similarities on the functional level: the chronological order of events (the narrative frame) expressed by the telicity of events (bounded) and the backgrounded narrative structure characterised by atelic events (unbounded). These similarities corroborate the hypothesis that the construction of human language involves common properties on the semantic and discourse levels. On the formal level, the author notes that, due to the impact of the visual-gestural modality, Jo’s statements reflect more of the linguistic structure of SL: the temporal perspective (the time of event) is explicitly marked through aspectuality by the parameter of movement: se choquer contre ‘bump against’ or avoir un accident ‘have an accident’ (this does not seem to be the case in spoken language with Stutterheim’s speaker). These results support the idea that the process of second language acquisition, and probably also the creation of an SL by adults, could be triggered through a limited number of organisational principles (semantic, pragmatic and contextual). In the referential domain, particularly in the construction of temporal references, some authors (Klein & von Stutterheim, 1991) hypothesise that the expression of temporality in L2 acquisition proceeds through different mechanisms, going from the functional to the formal (Figure 12.2). Figure 12.2 may also apply to the creation and complexification of SL. However, the boundaries between the different linguistic levels deserve to be considered again, taking into account the impact of the visual-gestural

Pragmatics, discursive principles

Lexicon, temporal adverbs

Grammar, verbal morphology

Different stages in the acquisition process

Figure 12.2 Different stages in second language acquisition

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modality on the emergence of grammatical forms (i.e. the grammatical expression of event aspectuality through the movement parameter). The preliminary considerations raised by Fusellier-Souza’s (2004) study lead to a consideration of temporality, a complex category of human cognition that is encoded in all languages, as a fruitful way to understand the processes involved in the emergence and complexification of language. The examination of the linguistic means used in the expression of temporal relations has emerged as an ad hoc field in the study of correlation between L2 varieties and emerging SLs. Benazzo’s (2009a,b) pioneering study in this field offers a subtle analysis based on the initial stages of unguided L2 acquisition and their comparison with emerging SLs in children (through the work of Goldin-Meadow) and in adults (through the work of Fusellier-Souza).

Variance, Invariance and Development in the Expression of Temporality: A Comparative Study of Learner Languages and Emerging Sign Languages In order to provide a more consistent empirical basis to speculations on temporality in the evolution of language, Benazzo (2009a,b) proposes to examine the existence of developmental variance and invariance in the process of emergence and structuring of two distinct linguistic systems, L2 learner languages and emerging SL. The proposed analysis is based on a solid review of the data provided in the literature of these linguistic systems. The comparison is relevant since it allows the identification of certain constant facts in the developmental processes involved and the examination of varying factors that differentiate the two systems. The study aims at tracing the potential paths in which the expression of temporality develops in both systems and to discuss the differences and similarities in the processes between L1 and L2 on the one hand and between emerging SLs in children and adults on the other. The initial step in this comparative approach is the definition of two types of invariance present in the two systems: both develop through

TABLE 12.1 Speech act or enunciation process and its protagonists, and the acts narrated 1: Tu lui racontes le cas du vélo? ‘You tell him about the bicycle?’

The situation in its entirety

The accident between two vehicles

7: Tu as vu? ‘You saw?’

Focalisation on the consequence of the event

The police findings

19: Le type est mort? ‘The Focalisation on the accident guy was dead?’

The condition of the victim

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interaction in order to meet communicative needs, and in both, the creators/ learners have the basic cognitive capacities to process and handle language. Several varying parameters are also proposed: with respect to child and adult language, developing cognitive maturity in the early stages of the process for the child and its already-developed state in the adult; with respect to adult subjects, the learning of an L1 or an L2 has a pre-existing linguistic model from the outset, while the deaf language creator must go through a process of language invention without having an already-established model and without prior experience of language. In analysing the process of L2 acquisition, the author offers three progressive stages that enable the description of the developmental progress in the expression of temporality. In the pre-basic variety, the learner relies on context dependence and pragmatic inferences. In the basic variety, the learner goes through a process of language creation, relying both on lexical methods, to construct aspectual-temporal cues, and on discursive and pragmatic principles. Finally, in the post-basic variety, the learner enters the advanced level of the process, when he or she can match the target language in the grammatical encoding of tense and aspect through the integration of grammatical methods. Different paths are evident in the analysis of emerging child and adult SLs. The deaf child begins with a massive use of pointing, initially to point to its immediate environment, then to refer to absent entities and eventually to situations displaced in time and space (displaced discourse). In contrast, adult deaf/hearing pairs use various more complex methods (lexical, morphological) to locate situations in time or to create calendar expressions. The author shows that adult speakers use predicates to describe static or dynamic

TABLE 12.2 Potential similar organisational principles existing on LA and on SL creation

*For further discussion of proforms and classifiers, see Sallandre (2003, 2007)

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situations (telic/atelic), specific signs to indicate temporal properties of situations (accomplished, indefinite duration, habitual). The principle of natural order is also attested in narrative activities. A significant contribution of this study is to show that the systems under consideration show significant differences (especially between children and adults) as well as remarkable similarities (especially between the basic variety and the SL of adult deaf/hearing pairs). The convergence between the systems is also evident on the formal level and discourse levels. The analysis shows that both the basic variety and emerging SLs employ linguistic means to locate situations on the temporal axis, to quantify their duration and frequency, to signal boundaries (especially in accomplishments) and to mark the relative sequence between situations. In his discussion of the emergence of human language, Benazzo (2009b) provides convincing data proving that simple means can be used to express complex functions of language. Two principles are thus shown: (a) high syntactic development is not a necessary prerequisite for the expression of complex temporal relations and (b) it is not the complexity of syntactic development that is fundamental for the expression of temporality in the emergence of language, but rather the prior existence of conceptual structure for temporal representation and the need to express temporal relations in innovative linguistic ways.

Conclusion and Challenges for Future Research The aim of this chapter has been to compare the views of three authors regarding the emergence and development of human language, highlighting the differences and similarities between the various perspectives and scenarios proposed by these authors. This section summarises some of the principles deemed essential for further consideration of the emergence of language within the framework of more dynamic theoretical models. •

•

•

Although every human being must possess biological language faculty (Comrie, 2000), it appears that restrictions such as the critical period are not necessary prerequisites in the process of language creation. Rather, this creative process can function beyond the period of childhood (Perdue, 2006). The structure of language manifests itself in two diachronic processes: biological evolution and the continuous process of communicative interaction. It is therefore essential to consider the role of interaction in the emergence of linguistic structures, in the communicative process and in the capacity of human individuals to learn and use these structures (Slobin, 2004). In phylogenetic terms, the complexification of human language must be seen as a process of social production (Amstrong et al., 1995; Wilcox, 1999)

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•

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like so many other achievements of human society arising from the evolution of material technology (Slobin, 2004). Languages seem to evolve and increase in complexity more through use than through a process of early acquisition. This principle is confirmed by studies of the linguistic production of children older than three years (Hickmann, 2000) and in later stages of schooling (Slobin, 2004). A language is defined through a gradual development generated by the need for linguistic communication. However, the community aspect is not an obligatory prerequisite for the emergence of a language. This aspect can be reduced to a limited communicative sphere of two, in which communicative and linguistic activity takes place (Perdue, 2003). Simple codes should not be reduced to a ‘protolanguage’. It is essential to carefully study the process whereby these linguistic systems develop and to identify their organisational principles. There is no reason to distinguish the morphosyntactic level from other levels of linguistic organisation (Benazzo, 2009a). This separation prevents the clear understanding of the ways in which the organisation of formal mechanisms develops (Perdue, 2003). It is equally important that the functional forms and values specific to human language be taken into account, as revealed in the study of the organisation of life stories in emerging SLs (Fusellier-Souza, 2004). In fact, narrative activity enables individuals to construct and share representations (evocation in absentia of scenes, stories and inferences), some functional features of which are crucial for the emergence and development of human language (Victorri, 2002).

By refocusing the discussion on the emergence and evolution of SL, the inclusion of these principles promotes the rejection of the minimising view that the deaf individual prior to institutionalised grouping is a human being ‘without language’ (interviews of Sacks, 1996 and Kegl, 1997). Indeed, the study of emerging SLs within a semiogenetic approach challenges the assimilationist innateness approach (in spoken languages) to the emergence of SL. The undeniable contribution of this model, based on an approach to the emergence of SL that is simultaneously conceptual, functional and formal, is to demonstrate that the iconicity of SL is not incompatible with the emergence of highly linguistic structures (Cuxac, 2005). This view is validated by the results reported by Fusellier-Souza (2004) and Benazzo (2009a,b) that show to what extent linguistic production in emerging SL already indicates functional and structural complexity. Further study must be dedicated to the impact of emerging SLs on the development of institutional and community SLs. Some lines of investigation have already been initiated, as shown in the developmental and acquisitional studies conducted by Morford (2003). Morford offers a less clear-cut approach regarding the structural links between the different types of SL in

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the development process of Nicaraguan SL, noting that ‘the process of language emergence in this community is better described as a process involving grammaticisation rather than innovation. Homesigners started with inconsistent gestures as input, and innovated structure. Nicaraguan signers started with structured input (i.e., homesign) and grammaticized elements of the input’ (Morford, 2003: 331). This view is repeated and confirmed by Slobin, who offers another interpretation of Senghas’ (1995) results on the evolution of NSL: contrary to claims in the literature and the media – linguistics structures were not the invention of the ‘second cohort’. Rather, what seems to have happened was that signers – that is, those who entered a community that already had a developing communication system – use the existing grammatical elements more frequently and more fluently. (Slobin, 2004: 170) This new distinction between the process of invention and the process of automatisation through use calls for more prominence to the communicative and interactional aspects in the evolution of SL. Thus, the consideration not only of semiogenetic aspects but also of sociolinguistic aspects (Garcia & Derycke, 2010) is a major prerequisite in future research into the emergence and development of SL. This dynamic reflection on the evolution of human language cannot leave us indifferent to its implications for the study of language acquisition, particularly of SL. In France, the acquisition of SL is a recent, but growing, field of study.12 Pioneering research has already provided evidence supporting some assumptions discussed in this chapter. For example, data from Jacob (2007) on the acquisition of SL validate the fact that languages seem to evolve and become more complex through use more than through early acquisition. Jacob shows, through the analysis of narratives produced by deaf children aged 5–11 years, that stories in French SL became more detailed with increasing age. Not only was there a rise in the number of sequences and events mentioned, but a similar rise was noted in the number of forms used to refer to the two characters. Another promising area of research relates to the delayed acquisition of an institutionalised SL by deaf youngsters or adults who have developed an emerging SL. Morford’s (2003) study of this subject raises several problematic issues: • • •

the question of the critical period and the inability to develop linguistic competence during adolescence; the question of the invariability of individual linguistic development: there are many different levels of performance and competence in both sign language and spoken language; the impact of the visual-gestural modality on the acquisition process in production/comprehension.

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These issues lead us to the threshold of a larger problem that goes beyond the theoretical questions raised in this chapter, and relates to the important field of SL teaching (for child and adult learners, both deaf and hearing). Admittedly, this field is under the domain of applied linguistics, but it merits much attention from scientific research. The consideration becomes more pertinent given the various SLs that emerge and develop officially all over the world. The challenges standing before us in developing this field are many among which, the most important one is the survival of SLs with respect to its structures and its creators, the Deaf population.

Notes (1) These gestural communication systems are known in the literature as ‘home-signs’ (cf. Goldin-Meadow, 1991, 2003). (2) The ESF was a longitudinal cross-linguistic research project on SL acquisition in adult immigrants, coordinated by Wolfgang Klein and Clive Perdue (1983). (3) This position is also supported by Arbib, who argues that adult cognitive faculties are influenced by social schemas: ‘the cellular architecture of the adult brain reflects not only the underlying genotype but also the social milieu as refracted through individual experience, and this architecture includes not only the shape and connections of the individual cells and the larger structures they form, but also the very chemistry of specific cells’ (Arbib, 2009: 135). (4) These linguistic structures have been described in Cuxac (1996, 2000). For further details, see Sallandre (2003, 2007). (5) According to the semiogenetic model (Cuxac, 2000; Fusellier-Souza, 2004), this process is linguistically structured through operations called transfers. In the emerging sign languages studied, three basic types of transfer have been attested so far: transfers of form and size (TFS ‘transferts de forme et de taille, TTF’) take into account the gestural description of objects, places and people; situational transfers (ST ‘transferts situationnels, TS’) express the movement of an event participant in relation to a stable localiser; people transfers (PT, ‘transferts de personne, TP’) allow the speaker to take on the role of the subject of the utterance. (6) Cuxac and Pizzuto (2010) note that deaf foreigners soon give up the use of lexical units of their own sign language, which are supposedly inaccessible to their addressee, in favour of transfers, and show little variation between communities due to the trans-cultural perceptual and practical basis of their form. (7) The three deaf informants in this study share some biographical elements: adults with profound deafness, no schooling, active professional or social integration, use of the language with a privileged interlocutor. Fusellier-Souza stresses the importance of the deaf/hearing pair in the co-construction of emerging sign languages. (8) Notably by Fusellier-Souza. (9) The author notes that during data collection, the three informants were more productive in tasks involving life stories. Productivity in life story task is anchored in the real world and based on the participants’ personal experience. (10) Following Jakobson’s (1963) model. (11) Workers living in Germany for seven years without ever receiving guided language teaching. (12) Currently, a national project in France is conducted in order to constitute and analyse video data of deaf children SL http://www.creagest.cnrs.fr/.

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References Arbib, M.A. (2009) Invention and community in the emergence of language: A perspective from new sign languages. In S.M. Platek and T. Shackelford (eds) Foundations in Evolutionary Cognitive Neuroscience (pp. 117–152). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Armstrong, D., Stokoe, W.C. and Wilcox, S. (1995) Gesture and the Nature of Language. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. Benazzo, S. (2009a) The emergence of temporality: From restricted linguistic systems to early human language. In R.P. Botha and H. de Swart (eds) Language Evolution: The View from Restricted Linguistic Systems (pp. 21–57). Utrecht: LOT Occasional Series. Benazzo, S. (2009b) Acquérir une langue/construire un système communicatif: le développement de la temporalité en L2 et dans les Homesigns. AILE-LIA 1, 195–226. Bickerton, D. (1990) Language and Species. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Comrie, B. (2000) From potential to realisation: An episode in the origin of language. Linguistics 38, 989–1004. Coppola, M. and So, W.C. (2006) The seeds of spatial grammar: Spatial modulation and coreference in homesigning and hearing adults. In D. Bamman, T. Magnitskaia and C. Zaller (eds) Proceedings of the Boston University Conference on Language Development 30 (pp. 119–130). Boston: Cascadilla Press. Corder, S.P. (1978) ‘Simple Codes’ and the source of the second language learner’s initial heuristic hypothesis. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 1, 1–10. Curtiss, S. (1977) Genie: A Psycholinguistics Study of a Modern-Day ‘Wild-Child’. New York. Academic Press. Cuxac, C. (1996) Fonctions et structures de l’iconicité des langues des signes, PhD dissertation, René Descartes University, Paris V. Cuxac, C. (2000) La Langue des Signes Française (LSF) – Les voies de l’iconicité. Revue Faits de Langues. Cuxac, C. (2005) Des signes et du sens. In J.-M. Hombert (ed.) Aux origines des langues et du langage (pp. 196–211). Paris: Fayard. Cuxac, C. and Antinoro Pizzuto, E. (2010) Emergence, norme et variation dans les langues des signes: vers une redéfinition notionnelle. Langage et Société 131, 37–53. Fusellier-Souza, I. (1998) La représentation du temps et de l’aspect par les différents sujets de l’énonciation dans les activités narratives en langue des signes. Analyse descriptive de trois récits en LS Brésilienne. MA thesis, University of Paris 8. Fusellier-Souza, I. (1999) Quand les gestes deviennent une ‘proto-langue’. Développement du langage chez les personnes sourdes en situation d’isolement. Postgraduate (DEA) dissertation in Sciences of Langage, University of Paris 8. Fusellier-Souza, I. (2001) La création gestuelle des individus sourds isolés. De l’Édification conceptuelle et linguistique à la sémiogènese des langues des signes. AILE 15, 61–96. Fusellier-Souza, I. (2004) Sémiogenèse des langues des signes. Etude de langues de signes primaires (LSP) pratiquées par des sourds brésiliens, Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Paris 8. Fusellier-Souza, I. (2006) Emergence and development of signed languages: From diachronic ontogenesis to diachronic phylogenesis. Sign Language Studies 7, 30–56. Garcia, B. and Derycke, M. (eds) (2010) Introduction. Sourds et Langues des signes. Norme et variations. Numéro spécial de la revue Langage et Société (Vol. 131, pp. 5–17). Paris: Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme. Goldin-Meadow, S. (1991) When does gesture become language? A study of gesture used as a primary communication system by deaf children of hearing parents. In K.R. Gibson and T. Ingold (eds) Tools, Language and Cognition in Human Evolution (pp. 63–85). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Goldin-Meadow, S. (2003) The Resilience of Language. Essays in Developmental Psychology. New York: Psychology Press. Hickmann, M. (2000) Le développement de l’organisation discursive. In M. Kail and M. Fayol (eds) L’acquisition du langage. Le langage en développement. Au-delà de 3 ans (pp. 83–115). Paris: PUF. Jacob, S. (2007) Description des procédés linguistiques référentiels dans des narrations enfantines en Langue des Signes Française: Maintien et réintroduction des actants. Doctoral dissertation, University of Paris 8. Jakobson, R. (1963) Essais de linguistique générale. Minuit: Paris. Kegl, J. (1997) Silent Children, New Language. Video documentary on sign language birth in Nicaragua. Produced and directed by Judith Bunting (1997). Horizon. British Broadcasting System. Kegl, J., Senghas, A. and Coppola, M. (1999) Creation through contact: Sign language emergence and sign language change in Nicaragua. In M. Degraff (ed.) Language Creation and Language Change: Creolization, Diachrony, and Development (pp. 179–237). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Klein, W. and Von Stutterheim, Ch. (1991) Text structure and referential movement. Spache und Pragmatik, 25, 175–200. Langer, J., Parker, S. T. and Milbrath, C. (eds) (2004) Biology and Knowledge revisited: From neurogenesis to psychogenesis. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. [Draft 23 July 2002] Malson, L. (1964) Les enfants sauvages. Paris: Éditions bibliothèques 10/18. Morford, J.P. (2003) Grammatical development in adolescent first-language learners. Linguistics 41, 681–721. Pasquereau, F. (1993) L’enfant sourd et l’apprentissage d’une langue étrangère. MA thesis, Sciences du langage, University of Paris 8. Perdue, C. (1983) Adult Language Acquisition. Cross-Linguistic Perspectives. Volume 1. Field Methods; Volume 2. The Results. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Perdue, C. (2003) Early learner varieties: A window on language genesis. Paper presented at the NIAS Seminar on ‘Windows on Language Genesis’, 7–8 November, 2003, Wassenaar. Perdue, C. (2006) Creating language anew: Some remarks on an idea of Bernard Comrie’s. Linguistics 44, 853–871. Sacks, O. (1996) In Search of Lucy Doe. Video documentary on languagelessness, produced for Arte TV, France by Rosetta Pictures. Produced and directed by Christopher Rawlence; co-produced by Emma Crichton-Miller. First broadcast by Arte TV, November 1996. http://www.oliversacks.com/media/drama.html. Sallandre, M-A. (2003) Les unités du discours en Langue des Signes Française. Tentative de catégorisation dans le cadre d’une grammaire de l’iconicité. Doctoral dissertation. University of Paris 8. Sallandre, M.A. (2007) Simultaneity in French sign language discourse. In M. Vermeerbergen, L. Leeson and O. Crasborn (eds) Simultaneity in Signed Languages. Form and Function (pp. 103–125). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Senghas, A. (1995) Children’s contribution to the birth of Nicaraguan Sign Language. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, MIT. Senghas, A. Kita, S. and Özyürek, A. (2004) Children creating core properties of language: Evidence from an emerging sign language in Nicaragua. Science 305, 1779–1782. Slobin, D. (2004) From ontogenesis to phylogenesis: What can child language tell us about language evolution? In S.T. Parker, J. Langer and C. Milbraith (eds) Biology and Knowledge Revisited. From Neurogenesis to Phylogenesis (pp. 155–187). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Starren, M. (2001) The Second Time. The Acquisition of Temporality in Dutch and French as a Second Language. Utrecht: LOT.

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Victorri, B. (2002) Homo narrans: le rôle de la narration dans l’émergence du langage. Langages 146, 112–125. Von Stutterheim, Ch. (1991) Narrative and description: Temporal reference in second language acquisition. In T. Heubner and C. Ferguson (eds) Crosscurrents in Second Language Acquisition and Linguistics Theories (pp. 358–403). Amsterdam: Benjamins. Watorek, M. (ed.) (1998) Structure des Lectes des apprenants. AILE 11. Wilcox, S. (1999) The ritualization and invention of language. In B. King (ed.) The Origins of Language: What Nonhuman Primates Can Tell Us. Santa Fe: SAR Press. Yau, S. C. (1992) Création Gestuelle et début du Langage – Création de langues gestuelles chez les sourds isolés. Hong Kong: éds Langages Croisés.

Part 2 L1 and L2 Acquisition: Learner Type Perspective

13 Child Language Study and Adult Language Acquisition: Twenty Years Later Dan I. Slobin

Introduction

In 1988, the final research reports of a massive and innovative project on second language acquisition by adult immigrants were submitted to the European Science Foundation. That project is described elsewhere in this volume. I had the pleasure of participating in the project’s Steering Committee, which was ably coordinated by Clive Perdue. He invited me to contribute a chapter to the two volumes he was editing for Cambridge University Press (Perdue, 1993), and a few years later that chapter was published as ‘Adult language acquisition: A view from child language study’ (Slobin, 1993). Now, as we look back on Clive’s great contributions, and as we continue to learn from the data of the project, I return to the themes of that chapter. What have we learned in the intervening decades about first language acquisition that is relevant to the topic? We have learned a good deal, and much of it had already been anticipated by Clive and Wolfgang Klein, his collaborator throughout the research. My goal here is to return to the points I made earlier and to briefly sketch out some recent research and current directions at the interface between these two areas of language acquisition research. The 1993 chapter begins with the following paragraph, which is still a useful way to orient the issues: The learners described in these volumes face a formidable task. They have to fashion a new communicative system while they are struggling to communicate, using whatever information they can glean from their TL [target language]1 interlocutors. Those interlocutors are not likely to be patient and supportive, nor are they at pains to tailor their speech to the level of competence of the learner. At the same time, the communicative tasks are often vitally important: the learner seeks employment, 245

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social services, refuge – and strives to maintain face under conditions of unavoidable asymmetry and inequality. The capacity of human beings to learn under such circumstances is impressive. (Slobin, 1993: 239) The following schematic lays out six key comparisons between adult and child language learners. These comparisons provide the framework for the 1993 chapter and the current return visit. ADULT LEARNER (1) Biological disadvantage of age (2) Complex and vital communicative needs (3) Communicative intentions beyond capacities (4) No protracted languagelearning period (5) Source language filter (6) Existing sociocultural norms and expectations

CHILD LEARNER Biological advantage of youth Simple and non-vital communicative needs Communicative intentions close to capacities Protracted language-learning period No source language filter Acquisition of sociocultural norms together with language

Klein has provided an apt contrast between the two learning situations: ‘One might say that the adult’s motive is “understand others and make yourself understood for concrete purposes”, whereas the child’s motive is “become – with little differences – like the others”’ (Klein, 1996: 249). As a consequence, there are major linguistic differences between early phases of adult language acquisition (ALA) and first language acquisition (FLA).

The Basic Variety Compared with Early Child Language Let us begin with ‘The Basic Variety’, which is Klein and Purdue’s major linguistic discovery and analytic insight, based on speech productions of immigrant workers across a range of source and target languages. Their orientation was bottom-up, as in the successful child language studies of the era (Bloom, Braine, Brown, Ervin-Tripp, Karmiloff-Smith): The approach we take here does not look at the acquisition process from the end – the alleged properties of the target language – but rather at the internal structure of a learner variety at a given point in time as a system in its own right. (KP: 5)2

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On the basis of detailed analysis, they conclude: ‘There is a limited set of organisational principles of different kinds which are present in all learner varieties’ (KP: 4). The interaction of these principles accounts for systematic patterns of early utterance structures. Most of these patterns are different from early FLA. On the level of grammatical morphology, the Basic Variety has none. Therefore, there is no overt case marking, no agreement and none of the phenomena of finiteness. By contrast – in many different types of languages – early child language exhibits some of the morphological marking and categories of the input language, therefore dealing from very early on with such issues as case marking, grammatical and semantic agreement and various categories of tense, aspect and modality – depending on the availability of perceptually salient and frequent forms in the language. Even in English, with its sparse morphological marking, present progressive and plural are productive in the first stage of development (Brown, 1973). In Turkish, with rich and transparent agglutinative morphology, there is productive morphology even at the one-word stage, developing rapidly in the two-word stage (Aksu-Koç & Slobin, 1985; Küntay & Slobin, 1999). For example, a child of 18 months produced the following two-word utterance consisting of six morphemes: (1)

kazağ -ım -ı at -tı -m sweater -my -ACCUSATIVE throw -PAST -1ST PERSON ‘I threw my sweater.’

Early morphological complexity is also found in polysynthetic languages such as Inuktitut (Allen, 1996). For example, an Eskimo child of 2;6 produced the following verb, which expresses a full proposition: (2)

ma -una -aq here -VIALIS -go ‘I’m going through here.’

-si -PROSPECTIVE ASPECT

-junga -PARTICIPIAL 1st PERSON SING.

Nothing like this is found in the Basic Variety. Indeed, the discovery and mastery of grammatical morphology is an arduous process in ALA. There are some ways, however, in which early phases of ALA and FLA are similar. Utterances in both varieties are characterized by a predominance of content words along with a few functional elements. In the Basic Variety, these elements tend to be free morphemes, such as determiners, personal pronouns and forms of copula and negation. This is true of FLA as well, though there are also early bound morphemes, as in the Turkish and Inuktitut examples above. Both varieties – child and adult – are filled with many rote forms, including fixed expressions and word-specific formulae. However, children work naturally and efficiently at tasks of analysis and recombination of such

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forms (Lieven et al., 1997; Tomasello, 2003a). These tasks may be both more difficult for adults and less pertinent to their communicative needs.

What the Two Language-Learning Processes have in Common Perdue and Klein pointed to a number of key parallels between ALA and FLA. In so doing, they focused on variables that are centrally important today in the field of child language research: statistics and pragmatics of learning situations, cognitive and perceptual processes, the nature of change and the rate of change. These factors were enumerated 20 years ago by Klein: The order of acquisition, and hence the structure of the acquisitional process, may vary considerably, depending on factors such as frequency of occurrence, communicative importance of certain forms and constructions, the ease with which they are perceptually or cognitively processed, and perhaps others. (Klein, 1996: 250) The nature of change in both learning situations is now understood as gradual and developmental, rather than characterized by saccadic shifts as new linguistic principles come into play. Post-Chomskyan or nonChomskyan child language research in recent years reveals slow changes in the use of structural principles. The pattern is one of increasing knowledge, both in detail and in scope – more like learning to play a musical instrument than a sudden restructuring of a theory. The rate of change is typically slow in both ALA and FLA, extending over a considerable period of time. As Klein and Perdue noted in the project’s summary publication: The entire process of first language acquisition extends over at least 10 years. If there are strong differences between first language acquisition and second language acquisition, speed is not the likeliest place to look. (KP: 24)

Ways in which the Two Language-Learning Processes Differ A major difference between child and adult learners lies in the social interactional contexts of language learning and use. Children are generally nurtured by caregivers who are at pains to understand and communicate with them, and (in many cultures, at least) accommodate their speech to the child’s level of competence or just beyond. In most circumstances, little children can count on attention and support. This is hardly the interpersonal world of the unskilled adult migrant laborer. As Perdue and Klein put it, adult learners ‘have a constant struggle to make meaning in a negative learning environment’ (PK: 254).

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As a consequence, there are important differences in the communicative procedures employed by learners. The adults in the project work at getting their point across and at finding out how the language works. Again, Perdue and Klein state: ‘Successful procedures involve using explicit means of clarification through metalinguistic questions, reprise and best-guessing . . .’ (PK: 255). These strategies are not characteristic of the communicative development of children. The end-state of acquisition is, with few exceptions, quite different as well. It is normal for all children to become fluent native speakers of one or more primary languages, and it is just as normal for adult learners – even the most fluent – to end up on a plateau or on successions of plateaux; or, to use another metaphor, to end up with ‘fossilized’ language skills. Incomplete learning is not an issue for normal children, but ‘Non-acquisition in adult language acquisition is as important to understand as successful acquisition’ (KP: 250). A large amount of research on second language acquisition concerns itself with source language (SL) influences, discussed under a variety of rubrics, negative and positive, such as interference, transfer, interlanguage, mixed language and more. The child, as first learner, naturally has no such influences. Language-learning predispositions are available to infants and toddlers without prior language input. It is a truism, however, in ALA that ‘analysis of the input is more or less facilitated by source language expectations’ (PK: 263). And although the degree of transfer or interference has been much debated, Klein is quite firm in concluding that it is always present: ‘one general finding seems beyond doubt: the fossilised language even of the advanced adult learner typically shows distinct traces of the first language’ (Klein, 1996: 260). At a deeper level – not explored in detail by the ESF project – each SL has pervasive cognitive effects, along with the cultural expectations of the adult learner. (The child, of course, learns the ambient language and culture in tandem.) These ideas go back at least to Wilhelm von Humboldt early in the 19th century. The title of his great work, published posthumously in 1836, lays out a perspective that is again on center stage in international cognitive science: Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluss auf die geistige Entwicklung des Menschengeschlechts (on the diversity of human language structure and its influence on the mental development of the human race). He applied his ideas clearly to our topic: Die Erlernung einer fremden Sprache sollte daher die Gewinnung eines neuen Standpunkts in der bisherigen Weltansicht seyn, da jede das ganze Gewebe der Begriffe und der Vorstellungsweise eines Theils der Menschheit enthält. Da man aber in eine fremde Sprache immer mehr oder weniger seine eigne Welt – ja seine eigne Sprachansicht hinüberträgt, so wird dieser Erfolg nie rein und vollständig empfunden. (von Humboldt, 1836: 59) (To learn a foreign language should therefore be to acquire a new standpoint in the world-view hitherto possessed, since every language contains

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the whole conceptual fabric and mode of representation of a portion of humanity. But because we always carry over, more or less, our own world-view, and even our own language-view, this outcome is never purely and completely experienced.)

Directions in FLA Since the Completion of the ESF Project In the 1980s and 1990s, Perdue and Klein provided insightful comparisons of ALA and FLA, based on the detailed analyses of the pathbreaking research of the ESF project, with full attention to the child language literature available at the time. Looking back in the 2000s, we have access to a rich and expanding research literature in the field of child language study. Current directions reinforce Perdue and Klein’s attention to characteristics of input to learners, to discourse pragmatic factors and to comparative typology. The following sections present thumbnail sketches of advances in understanding (a) statistical learning, (b) item-based learning, (c) socialpragmatic learning, (d) discourse-level factors and (e) language typology. Much of this work is part of the broad current interest in what has come to be called ‘usage-based linguistics’. The consequences for diachronic theory – in both individual and historical language development – were eloquently spelled out by Joan Bybee in her Presidential Address to the Linguistic Society of America: ‘Grammar is built up from specific instances of use which marry lexical items with constructions; it is routinized and entrenched by repetition and schematized by the categorization of exemplars’ (Bybee, 2006: 730).

Statistical Learning Controlled studies of infant and toddler attention to speech have demonstrated an early sensitivity to frequencies of occurrence and co-occurrence of linguistic elements in the input to the learner (see Marchman & Fernald, 2006). At the same time, new directions in usage-based linguistics and corpus linguistics underline the key role played by frequency of use in patterns of language and language change. Joan Bybee has devoted an entire book to these issues: Frequency of Use and the Organization of Language (Bybee, 2007). She situates frequency in broader frameworks of cognitive psychology and emergent systems models generally: In such theories repetition of actions brings about the formation of structures; thus in language, too, we see that repetition is a necessary component of grammar formation (Haiman 1994). The reason frequency or repetition plays a role in grammar formation is that the mind is sensitive

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to repetition. This is a domain-general principle; that is, it does not apply just to language but to other cognitive domains as well. (Bybee, 2007: 8) Tomasello, in The New Psychology of Language: Cognitive and Functional Approaches to Language Structure, also places frequency centrally in psychology and linguistics: It turns out that both the type and token frequency with which particular constructions are used makes an enormous difference both in their historical fate and in the way they are understood, acquired, cognitively represented, and used by contemporary speakers of a language. (Tomasello, 2003b: 12) He devotes a book to the exploration of FLA from a usage-based perspective (Tomasello, 2003a), making use of both naturalistic and experimental data. Great advances in understanding FLA have been facilitated by detailed calculations of input statistics, using large-computer-based corpora of childcaregiver discourse, often applying new statistical models. We lack comparable quantitative data of the speech that is addressed to adult learners, though members of the ESF research team were attentive to input factors in general terms. The experimental method has not been applied to immigrant worker populations, but the child language literature provides many applicable methods, setting up situations in which people learn various sorts of linguistic systems. For example, with regard to frequency of occurrence in the input, Tomasello (2003a: 173–175) discusses the familiar finding that passive constructions are a relatively late acquisition in English. This has been attributed, by generative linguists, to maturation of a component of innate grammar. However, as Tomasello notes, passives are early acquisitions in many languages where they are highly frequent (Inuktitut, K’iche’ Mayan, Sesotho, Zulu). He and Brooks verified this effect in an experiment (Brooks & Tomasello, 1999). English-speaking three-year-olds heard a number of full passive sentences in a half-hour of meaningful interaction. Ninety percent of these children could produce full passives with a nonce verb – one or two years earlier than the norm. Such findings suggest that formal ‘complexity’ cannot be taken as a determining acquisitional factor in itself. Tomasello concludes: ‘Input frequency and structural complexity interact in complex ways in the developmental process’ (Tomasello, 2003a: 175). It has also been possible for psycholinguistic experimenters to design artificial languages with various frequency patterns, conducting learning experiments with both child and adult subjects. Some of these studies present stimuli that vary only in form, whereas others include both form and meaning.

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An example of the first type is a study by Saffran (2001) on ‘the use of predictive dependencies in language learning’. Saffran asks: ‘How might dependencies serve as a cue to phrasal units?’ (Saffran, 2001: 495). She answers with a statistical learning account that could apply to both FLA and ALA: If one form class never occurs without another, then this predictiveness signals that the two classes are linked. This connection may be represented as membership in a single unit, such as a phrase. Because form classes can predict one another without being immediately adjacent, a learner attuned to predictive dependencies could, in principle, detect relationships between form classes when other material intervenes (as is typical in natural languages). Thus, the availability of dependencies in the input might lead learners to group form classes together into phrases, even in the absence of other cues correlated with phrase boundaries. (Saffran, 2001: 495) In her experiment, adults and 7-year-olds learned an artificial language consisting of patterns of statistical distribution of spoken nonsense words. The language was composed of six word classes and four phrase-structure rules. For example, consider combinations of two word classes: Category A words – biff, hep, mib, rud, and Category B words – klor, pell. The grammar was designed such that every sentence must contain at least one A word. Thus, mib sig dupp was an acceptable sentence, but *sig dupp was not. Furthermore, no sentence could have more than one A word; so mib pell jux cav was acceptable, but *mib biff pell jux cav was not. And there was a co-occurrence rule: If there is a D word, then there must be an A word. Consequently, rud pell neg dupp sig was fine, but *pell neb dup sig was not. This all seems quite difficult, especially since the input consisted of only a stream of auditory syllables. Furthermore, in one critical condition, participants were given a task of coloring on a computer, while the artificial language was heard in the background. This incidental learning condition was a stringent test of people’s ability to abstract grammatical regularities without direct attention. On two consecutive days, with half-hour sessions, participants heard a tape of 50 sentences four times. They were then tested on their ability to distinguish grammatical from ungrammatical sentences and sentence fragments. Children aged seven succeeded in grammatical learning in this complex task. And – most relevant to our purposes – adult learners performed even better than children. Saffran concludes that ‘human learning mechanisms possess the computational power needed to derive the beginnings of hierarchical structure from the statistical relationships between form classes and can do so via incidental learning mechanism’ (Saffran, 2001: 509). Background attention to purely formal linguistic patterns should be available to the second language learners studied in the ESF project as well, though there are no relevant experimental data on this sort of population. Note, too, that this is just one example of a large and growing collection

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of experimental, computational, and theoretical studies – all pointing to the possibility of the emergence of grammar from an interacting set of skills and processes, without needing to postulate an a priori and innate universal grammar. These directions are consistent with Perdue and Klein’s theoretical and methodological approach to ALA. Hudson Kam and Newport (2005) created artificial languages in which both form and meaning vary. These languages had both syntactic regularities and irregular morphology. The research casts new light on continuing debates about a critical period for language acquisition. The researchers compared adults with children in the 5–7-year-old age range, in an extended series of trials in which participants listened to and learned to understand and use one of a set of languages. The languages varied in the proportion of sentences with missing determiners, and in the patterns of co-occurrence of determiners and nouns. The task details are not important here; what is relevant is the discovery that, although both adults and children learned such languages, they differed in the ways in which they dealt with inconsistencies – and these differences may well have consequences for natural ALA as well. Adult learners matched inconsistent patterns in the input – that is, they did not create categorical rules, but attempted to use irregular patterns in the proportions in which they occurred in the input language. By contrast, the children tended to regularize the language, imposing patterns that were not the same as those in the input. Hudson Kam and Newport summarize: ‘Children are very likely to produce consistent patterns, even when receiving inconsistent input; adults, however, are not. Adults are systematic when their input is consistent and variable when their input contains variation’ (Hudson Kam & Newport, 2005: 181). In a sense, the child’s task is easier than the adult’s: ignore inconsistencies and make the language consistent. Adults, perhaps, are swamped by conflicting sub-patterns. Significantly, the researchers propose that such age differences in learning are not specific to language, but appear across a range of non-linguistic studies of probability learning. In psychological experiments on probability learning, using a range of stimulus types and probability distributions, adults fairly quickly move toward matching exposure probabilities, whereas children impose consistency on probabilistic stimuli. In addition, short-term memory increased in efficiency with age, facilitating adult ability to keep track of statistical distributions over time. Thus, to the extent that there is a critical period for language learning, it may be a reflection of more general developmental changes in cognitive processes, rather than a biologically preprogrammed language faculty.

Item-Based Learning Before child learners can discover consistent patterns across linguistic items, they have to acquire, store and compare a large number of

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items – whether they be grammatical morphemes, words or syntactic structures. Much research in the past 20 years has made it clear that children accumulate a number of rather restricted patterns before forming generalizations. This may well be true of adult second language learners as well. Tomasello has focused attention on item-based learning, beginning with his pathbreaking study on the first verbs in his daughter’s speech (Tomasello, 1992). He found that each verb carried its own set of arguments and word order; for example bite only occurred in two-word utterances with something that can be bitten in second place (‘bite apple’, ‘bite finger’); hit occurred in two-word utterances with either a preceding hitter (‘Maria hit’) or a following recipient of the hit (‘hit ball’), or, occasionally, all three (‘Maria hit me’). Tomasello summarized this stage in terms of ‘The Verb Island Hypothesis’: ‘Young children’s early verbs and relational terms are individual islands of organization in an otherwise unorganized grammatical system’ (Tomasello, 2003a: 107) In many following studies with colleagues (see Tomasello, 2003a), it has been established that children do not quickly generalize patterns beyond the lexical items in which they have encountered them. Lieven and her colleagues have provided precise learning data on item-specific patterns and their slow generalization in several languages (see Lieven, 2008). Early on, Lieven et al. presented data underlining this position: ‘The establishment of frames with slots in them may account for more of early multiword structures than is usually accepted. . . . A lexically-based positional analysis can account for the structure of a considerable proportion of children’s early multiword corpora’ (Lieven et al., 1997: 261). Findings of this sort, along with growing attention to the role of frequency, cast doubt on the previously dominant Chomskyan position that child learners (and only child learners) are equipped with a ready-made, innate universal grammar that should, in principle, enable rapid generalization from limited exemplars. The implication for ALA research would be that it is more fruitful to carry out detailed analysis of individual learning patterns and age-linked cognitive abilities than to interpret age differences on the basis of a putative biological program. The statistical and item-based approach, of course, is consonant with the program of Perdue and Klein.

Social-Pragmatic Learning Tomasello has highlighted the central importance of interpersonal attention and understanding in the development of language. In his 2003 book, appropriately titled Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition, he sets out a perspective of language and learning which is in direct contrast to the sorts of innate grammar and constraint mechanisms that were dominant at the time of the ESF project: The most basic point that differentiates social-pragmatic theory from constraints theory is the recognition that human linguistic

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communication can take place only when there is some ‘common ground’ (joint attentional frame) between speaker and listener, which sets the context for the reading of the specific communicative intentions behind a word or utterance. (Tomasello, 2003a: 89) This guiding principle was a major component of the ESF project. Perdue and Klein, in summarizing the work of the project, clearly provide the same perspective: The context of acquisition is discourse activity, in which the successful learner does not remain passive. . . . What emerges is the importance of collaborative meaning building: the input is not simply a stream of sounds to segment and analyse, and the successful learner strives to reduce the asymmetry of the encounter and to achieve a level of collaboration where shared knowledge may be overtly established. (KP: 255–256) Investigations of discourse development in children in the past 20 years or so reveals a long developmental trajectory, clearly documented in studies of elicited narrative across ages and languages, as well as a range of conversational skills. A brief overview of the narrative research, from two international research teams, shows the relevance of more recent FLA studies to the well-established studies of narrative and conversation in the ESF project.

Discourse-Level Factors All the studies of linguistic devices that are required for coherent and cohesive discourse show slow development. Basic discourse organizing tools show gains after the consolidation of basic grammar and lexicon, sometime after about age six, and there is continuing development throughout childhood and into at least early adolescence. This was already pointed out by Perdue and Klein in 1993, as noted earlier, on the basis of available child language data. Since then, numerous studies have appeared, some of them in book-length publications (see Berman & Slobin, 1994; Hickmann, 2003; Strömqvist & Verhoeven, 2004). Berman and Slobin (1994), with an international team of researchers, gathered elicited narratives using a wordless picture-story book, Frog, Where Are You? (Mayer, 1969). The narrators were children in the 3–9 age range and adults, producing ‘frog stories’ in languages that contrast on a number of typological dimensions: English, German, Spanish, Hebrew, Turkish. Strömqvist and Verhoeven (2004) later added a wider range of languages. Language typology will be discussed in the following section; here the focus is on discourse skills. Berman and Slobin went beyond the mastery

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of grammar and lexicon to consider ‘becoming a proficient speaker’. They concluded: Our youngest children have mastered the essentials of the ‘core grammar’ of their native language. They use coordinate and subordinate syntactic constructions, voice alternations, pro-forms, and almost all of the tense/aspect forms provided by their grammars. [This is, of course, not true of untutored ALA of the sort studied in the ESF project. – DIS] However, they are far from the ‘end-state’ of a proficient speaker or proficient narrator. Indeed, our 9-year-old subjects have still not arrived at that end-state, as indicated by comparison with the adult narrators. (Berman & Slobin, 1994: 609) Hickmann (2003) carried out a comparable series of studies of pictureelicited narrative, studying children aged 4–10 acquiring English, French, German and Mandarin. She also notes the protracted course of development: The findings across domains [space, time, reference-tracking] show that discourse-internal uses of linguistic devices are a rather late development, which emerges at about six to seven years of age and continues to evolve until at least ten years of age or even thereafter. (Hickmann, 2003: 324) In the light of the adult narratives analyzed by Perdue and Klein, one may conclude that children – possessing considerable linguistic knowledge – lack the necessary social cognitive skills to take account of the needs of the listener and to make use of linguistic tools to engage in successful narrative discourse. The adult learners presumably have these skills in their native languages, and are faced with the challenge of finding the necessary second language tools to fashion coherent narratives. The children, by contrast, have the basic tools but are faced with the challenge of deploying them successfully in discourse-level tasks – what Hickmann calls the mastery of ‘discourse-internal uses of linguistic devices’. For example, her data show that children have difficulty with obligatory newness markers and adequate spatial and temporal grounding of narrative events.

The Role Of Language Typology in FLA Both Berman and Slobin and Hickmann found that narratives varied from language to language in ways that could be attributed to general characteristics of each language in domains such as time, space, agency and causality. As Berman and Slobin put it, in addition to become ‘a proficient speaker’, the child learner becomes ‘a native speaker’ – not only of a particular language, but also of a particular type of language. A native speaker must attend to the

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grammaticized semantic distinctions of the language along with the ways in which grammatical forms are deployed in the construction of connected discourse. After studying hundreds of stories in five languages, they reported: ‘We were repeatedly surprised to discover how closely learners stick to the set of distinctions that they have been given by their language’ (Berman & Slobin, 1994: 641). Hickmann came to similar conclusions in studying the organization of person, space and time across a set of four languages. Language-based influences on conceptualization have been documented in depth by Bowerman and her collaborators at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen – the same site as the earlier ESF project. Comparing a large range of typologically diverse languages, and attending to domains of space, motion and causality, they have shown considerable linguistic relativity from the very earliest periods of language learning. (See papers in Bowerman & Levinson, 2001.) Experiments on early comprehension and categorization show that, from very early on, children are more like adults who speak the language they are learning than they are like comparable children learning other languages. Slobin has proposed a sort of ‘typological bootstrapping’ in FLA (Slobin, 1997). The emerging language gradually organizes itself along the lines of the overall system. Certain patterns of semantic and formal organization become more and more familiar, and, to use an old term, habits are established. This is possible because of the fact that languages naturally develop into coherent systems of various types. In the process of learning various pieces of the system, they come to interrelate because of inherent typological factors. (Slobin, 1997: 315) In this sense, FLA is aided by the systematicity inherent in the language that is being learned. As a consequence, children come to formulate experience into linguistic utterances in different ways, depending on the type of language they are learning. These habits are not just established routines of morphology, syntax and word choice, but also require attention to the content of the constructions and lexicon of the language. Consider, for example, the well-studied domain of motion events (Slobin, 2006). In some languages, like Spanish, Hebrew and Turkish, paths of motion tend to be encoded in verbs, such as ‘enter’ and ‘exit’ (Talmy’s ‘verb-framed’ languages: Talmy, 1991). In these languages, manner of motion must be expressed in some adjunct expression, such as the equivalents of ‘enter running’ or ‘exit on the tips of the toes’. Other languages, like English, German and Russian, tend to encode paths in directional particles (‘satellites’) associated with verbs (Talmy’s ‘satellite-framed languages’), for example ‘go in’, ‘go out’. In these languages, the main verb is available for manner expressions, without additional syntactic complexity,

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for example ‘run in’, ‘tiptoe out’. Numerous studies have shown that speakers of satellite-framed languages pay more attention to manner of motion, in speaking, understanding, and some contexts of attention to event components. Slobin suggests that each language contributes to its own modes of ‘thinking for speaking’ (Slobin, 1996). Such patterns have been detected in the many studies of elicited narrative, in which children not only structured discourse in terms of the particular language, but in ways that are characteristic of languages of the same linguistic type as the input language.

The Role of Language Typology in ALA In learning a second language, one brings one’s patterns of thinking for speaking established in the first language. As von Humboldt pointed out, ‘we always carry over our own language-view’ (Humboldt, 1836: 59). In one’s native language, thinking for speaking is habitual, automatized and below the level of consciousness. Even if the second language is typologically similar to the first, form–function mappings require concerted attention during learning, but the learning lies in discovering fine-grained details, such as whether to use one preposition or another. But if the languages are organized differently, familiar strategies are unavailable and some accommodation must be made. For example, what is a Turkish learner of German to make of prepositions, when his native model uses postpositions? The ESF finding is that Turkish immigrant workers to Germany omit prepositions far more frequently than Italian workers. The detailed reports of the ESF project show numerous examples of SL influence that can be understood in broadly typological ways. (Of course, as pointed out above, there is no question of SL in FLA.) For example, Italian learners of English can continue their native thinking for speaking in terms of tense. This is because both languages are ‘tense-prominent’ – that is, every finite clause has to be grammatically marked to show its relation to speech time. Early on, Italian immigrant workers acquire English past-tense forms and use them to construct narratives – as in Italian – in which past events are seen from the perspective of the present. The genius of the design of the ESF project was to contrast learners with differing types of SLs in each TL situation. Thus, Punjabi immigrants were also studied as they acquired English. Punjabi is an ‘aspect prominent’ language, and Pakistani immigrants made heavy use of the progressive aspect, rather than the past tense, allowing them to narrate events from the perspective of the protagonist, along lines of narrative uses of the Punjabi imperfective. These research lines have been reinforced in recent years by von Stutterheim, Carroll, and their colleagues, studying second language users of German in a range of narrative, descriptive and perceptual tasks (Carroll & von Stutterheim, 2003, 2006). Their focus is on the meanings of grammatical patterns: ‘Learners have to uncover the role accorded to grammatical meanings

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and what their presence, or absence, entails in information organization’ (Carroll & Lambert, 2003). For example, German does not organize events along lines of imperfective grammatical aspects, such as the progressive, but rather from an external perspective on bounded events, expressed by the perfect. In narratives in the two languages (von Stutterheim & Carroll, 2006), German speakers tend to present events holistically, attending to end-states, whereas English speakers present ongoing events from an internal, unbounded perspective. In one experiment, people were asked to narrate filmed events in which an endpoint could be inferred, such as the end of a path, but was not reached in the ongoing event to be narrated. As expected, German L1 speakers made more frequent mention of endpoints than did English L1 speakers (and their eye movements revealed more attention to the end of the path). L2 speakers did not pattern like the TL, but rather like the SL. That is, German learners of English made far more mention of endpoints than did native English speakers, and English learners of German made far less mention of endpoints than native German speakers. In such situations the challenge to learners is to reorganize or reorient habitual patterns of attending. In FLA, by contrast, the challenge is to establish those habitual patterns.

Conclusions The conclusions that I arrived at in my chapter in Perdue’s volumes are still valid. I reproduce them here: • •

•

•

For the child, the construction of the grammar and the construction of semantic/pragmatic concepts go hand in hand. For the adult, construction of the grammar often requires a revision of semantic/pragmatic concepts, along with what may well be a more difficult task of perceptual identification of the relevant morphological elements. Child learners obsessively fine-tune their language over time, whereas adult learners appear reluctant to deal with detailed phonological, morphological, and syntactic distinctions. [In this way, the naturalistic second-learning settings of immigrant workers contrast with the laboratory learning of artificial languages reported above. More attention needs to be paid to task variables in comparisons of FLA and ALA, naturalistic and focused laboratory acquisition, and so forth.] Adult second language learning requires metalinguistic effort. What little children do unthinkingly, adults can only achieve with some degree of care and attention. (Slobin, 1993)

Perdue and Klein and their many collaborators created an innovative and monumental comparative study that provided data that are still being profitably analyzed and discussed in many countries. Their work set forth

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materials and perspectives that make it possible to systematically compare ALA and FLA. Open questions remain, of course, stimulating further research and thinking. In conclusion, I briefly list four such open questions: • • • •

Adult and child learners have different patterns of strengths and weaknesses, and face different sorts of obstacles. We need to know much more about these critical differences. Why are some domains more subject to SL influence than others? Some adults do attain near-native mastery of at least some components of a second language. What factors and processes are involved? Why do most adults fossilize, or move from plateau to plateau without ever reaching the summit where all normal children end up?

To the end, Clive Perdue was thinking creatively about such problems. Future progress will build on his foundations.

Notes (1) Abbreviations: TL = target language, SL = source language, FLA = first language acquisition, ALA = adult second language acquisition of the untutored sort studied in the ESF project. (2) All quotes indicated by KP and a page number refer to Klein and Perdue (1993); PK refers to Perdue and Klein (1993).

References Aksu-Koç, A.A. and Slobin, D.I. (1985) Acquisition of Turkish. In D.I. Slobin (ed.) The Crosslinguistic Study of Language Acquisition: Vol. 1. The Data (pp. 839–878). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Allen, S.E.M. (1996) Aspects of Argument Structure Acquisition in Inuktitut. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Berman, R.A. and Slobin, D.I. (1994) Relating Events in Narrative: A Crosslinguistic Developmental Study. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Bowerman, M. and Levinson, S.C. (eds) (2001) Language Acquisition and Conceptual Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brooks, P. and Tomasello, M. (1999) Young children learn to produce passives with nonce verbs. Developmental Psychology 35, 29–44. Brown, R. (1973) A First Language: The Early Stages. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bybee, J. (2006) From usage to grammar: The mind’s response to repetition. Language 82, 711–733. Bybee, J. (2007) Frequency of Use and the Organization of Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Carroll, M. and Lambert, M. (2003) Information structure in narratives and the role of grammatical knowledge: A study of adult French and German learners of English. In C. Dimroth and M. Starren (eds) Information Structure and the Dynamics of Language Acquisition (pp. 267–287). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Carroll, M. and von Stutterheim, C. (2003) Typology and information organisation: Perspective taking and language-specific effects in the construction of events. In A.G. Ramat (ed.) Typology and Second Language Acquisition (pp. 365–402). Berlin: de Gruyter.

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Haiman, J. (1994) Ritualization and the development of language. In W. Pagliuca (ed.) Perspectives on Grammaticalization (pp. 3–28). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Hickmann, M. (2003) Children’s Discourse: Person, Space and Time across Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, UK. Hudson Kam, C.L. and Newport, E.L. (2005) Regularizing unpredictable variation: The roles of adult and child learners in language formation and change. Language Learning and Development 1, 151–195. Klein, W. (1996) Language acquisition at different ages. In D. Magnusson (ed.) The Lifespan Development of Individuals: Behavioral, Neurobiological, and Psychosocial Perspectives: A Synthesis (pp. 244–264). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Klein, W. and Perdue, C. (1993) Utterance structure. In C. Perdue (ed.) Adult Language Acquisition: Cross-Linguistic Perspectives. Vol. II: The Results (pp. 3–40). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Küntay, A. and Slobin, D.I. (1999) The acquisition of Turkish as a native language. A research review. Turkic Languages 3, 151–188. Lieven, E. (2008) Building language competence in first language acquisition. European Review 16, 445–456. Lieven, E., Pine, J. and Baldwin, G. (1997) Lexically-based learning and early grammatical development. Journal of Child Language 24, 187–220. Marchman, V. and Fernald, A. (2006) Language learning in infancy. In M.J. Traxler and M.A. Gernsbacher (eds) Handbook of Psycholinguistics (2nd edn) (pp. 1027–1071). Amsterdam: Elsevier. Mayer, M. (1969) Frog, Where Are You? New York: Dial Press. Perdue, C. (ed.) (1993) Adult Language Acquisition: Cross-Linguistic Perspectives. Vol. I: Field Methods. Vol. II: The Results. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Perdue, C. and Klein, W. (1993) Concluding remarks. In C. Perdue (ed.) Adult Language Acquisition: Cross-Linguistic Perspectives. Vol. II: The Results (pp. 252–272). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Saffran, J.R. (2001) The use of predictive dependencies in language learning. Journal of Memory and Language 44, 493–515. Slobin, D.I. (1993) Adult language acquisition: A view from child language study. In C. Perdue (ed.) Adult Language Acquisition: Cross-Linguistic Perspectives (pp. 239–252). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Slobin, D.I. (1996) From ‘thought and language’ to ‘thinking to speaking’. In J.J. Gumperz and S.C. Levinson (eds) Rethinking Linguistic Relativity (pp. 70–96). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Slobin, D.I. (1997) The origins of grammaticizable notions: Beyond the individual mind. In D.I. Slobin (ed.) The Crosslinguistic Study of Language Acquisition: Vol. 5. Expanding the Contexts (pp. 265–323). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Slobin, D.I. (2006) What makes manner of motion salient? Explorations in linguistic typology, discourse, and cognition. In M. Hickmann and S. Robert (eds) Space in Languages: Linguistic Systems and Cognitive Categories (pp. 59–81). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Strömqvist, S. and Verhoeven, L. (eds) (2004) Relating Events in Narrative: Vol. 2. Typological and Contextual Perspectives. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbauw Associates. Talmy, L. (1991) Path to realization: A typology of event conflation. Proceedings of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 17, 480–519. Tomasello, M. (1992) First Verbs: A Case Study of Early Grammatical Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tomasello, M. (2003a) Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tomasello, M. (ed.) (2003b) The New Psychology of Language: Cognitive and Functional Approaches to Language Structure (Vol. 2). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

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von Humboldt, W. (1836) Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluß auf die geistige Entwickelung des Menschengeschlechts. Berlin: Dümmlers Verlag. von Stutterheim, C. and Carroll, M. (2006) The impact of grammatical temporal categories on ultimate attainment in L2 learning. In H. Bymes, H. Weger-Gumthart and K. A. Sprang (eds) Educating for Advanced Foreign Language Capacities: Constructs, Curriculum, Instruction, Assessment (pp. 40–53). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.

14 The Derivation of Mixed DPs: Mixing of Functional Categories in Bilingual Children and in Second Language Learners Nadine Eichler and Natascha Müller

Functional Categories and Language Mixing Bilingual first language learners as well as adults have been reported to mix the two languages. Code-mixing is the use of elements from the two languages in one utterance (intra-utterance mixing) or between utterances (inter-utterance mixing). The amount of code-mixing differs individually in children (Vihman, 1998 among others) as well as in adults (Poplack, 1980). The reasons for why children code-mix are still discussed in the literature (cf. Lanza, 1997a; Meisel, 1994; Müller & Cantone, 2009; Paradis et al., 2000 among others for a discussion of the issue). One important finding is that bilingual children mix more in the language in which they are less proficient (sometimes called ‘weak language’, cf. Deuchar & Quay, 1998, 2000; Genesee et al., 1995; Lanvers, 2001; Schlyter, 1993, 1994). For lexical elements, this has been explained by the assumption that mixing serves to fill a lexical gap in the less proficient language. However, balanced bilinguals also code-mix, and therefore, the lexical gap-filling strategy cannot be the only explanation for the occurrence of code-mixing. Some researchers have further argued that bilingual children code-mix in order to fill a grammatical gap. Evidence for the grammatical gap-filling strategy comes from Bernardini and Schlyter (2004), Gawlitzek-Maiwald and Tracy (1996), Lanza (1997b) and Petersen (1988). These authors report that bilingual children mix function words and inflectional morphemes from 263

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their more proficient language into their less proficient language while they speak the less proficient language. In other words, function words from the more proficient language are combined with content words from their less proficient language, but rarely vice versa. This strategy has been defined as Bilingual Bootstrapping by Gawlitzek-Maiwald and Tracy (1996) and as Ivy Hypothesis by Bernardini and Schlyter (2004). In both studies, the young bilingual children mix not only separate functional categories such as articles, but also syntactic patterns, from their more proficient language into their less proficient one. They do so in order to bootstrap or develop these patterns in their less proficient language. Gawlitzek-Maiwald and Tracy (1996) observe that some grammatical domains develop separately while the bilingual child uses language A to bootstrap some aspects of the syntactic system of language B for other aspects. What does ‘bootstrap’ mean in this context? Gawlitzek-Maiwald and Tracy analyze the utterances that were produced by Hannah, a bilingual EnglishGerman child, comparing those that were monolingual (containing only elements of the language which is that of the context) versus mixed. On the basis of the respective monolingual utterances, they find that German is much more advanced than English with respect to lexical and syntactic aspects of temporal and modal auxiliary verbs. In order to ‘help herself out’ when speaking English, Hannah produces mixed utterances of the following type: (1) Kannst du move a bit? (Hannah, 2;4–2;9, Gawlitzek-Maiwald & Tracy, 1996: 915) Can you move a bit? In example (1), the left periphery comes from German, while the lexical verb and the adverb are in English. Until the English system of modal and temporal auxiliaries has been fully acquired by the child, she will fill in lexical material from German, a strategy which may also help the child to instantiate the English system: ‘Something that has been acquired in language A fulfills a booster function for language B’ (Gawlitzek-Maiwald & Tracy, 1996: 903). The situation can be reversed for other grammatical phenomena. If, for example, some other grammatical property is more advanced in English than in German, the bilingual child will use the more developed grammatical property when speaking the language with the less developed one (cf. also Paradis & Genesee, 1996 for the Inflectional Phrase (IP), which is acquired earlier in French than in English and may therefore lead to codemixing in the IP-domain). Bernardini and Schlyter (2004) study the simultaneous acquisition of Swedish and Italian/French and propose that unbalanced bilingual children use the more developed language in order to build sentences in the weaker language. The authors assume that children benefit from language dominance (due to e.g. more input in the dominant language) by filling gaps with

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265

material from the dominant language while speaking the weaker language. In contrast to Bilingual Bootstrapping, language dominance in Bernardini and Schlyter’s study refers to whole language systems and not to single grammatical phenomena in the respective languages. This is due to the children they study since they are all clearly unbalanced. Some examples from Bernardini and Schlyter’s study are the following: (2) Var är la mucca? (Lukas, 2;3, Bernardini & Schlyter, 2004: 60) Where is the cow? Dom ska äta la coda? (Lukas, 2;3, Bernardini & Schlyter, 2004: 60) They shall eat the tail? Jag ska ta quella patatina. (Lukas, 2;5, Bernardini & Schlyter, 2004: 60) I will take that potato. Jag ritar un trompe. (Paul, 3;1, Bernardini & Schlyter, 2004: 62) I draw a trunk. In the example (2), the left periphery of the clause comes from Swedish, the stronger language of the child, while the rest of the clause, a DP, comes from Italian/French, the less proficient language. Interestingly, it is not the case that only functional elements are mixed into the weaker language but the best description would be that whole parts of functional structures are used from the stronger language in the weaker language. If analyzed as a strategy, Bilingual Bootstrapping and the Ivy Hypothesis make the prediction that mixing is uni-directional during a particular stage of language development and that unbalanced children mix more in their weak language. Both predictions are not corroborated by the data analyzed by Cantone (2007) who looks at the mixing of functional and lexical categories. She observes that there are bilingual (German-Italian) children who mix a lot in both languages (Aurelio), others only in one language (Marta), and still other children do not mix at all or very rarely (Jan). Moreover, mixing does not necessarily affect the weaker of the two languages (Cantone & Müller, 2005). As an example, Müller and Cantone (2009) mention the case of two German-Italian-speaking children studied in Cantone (2007). The child Aurelio, whose stronger language is Italian, produces 564 mixed utterances out of 1102 utterances during the Italian recordings (one-hour recordings were collected every fortnight in both languages) until the age of approximately 2;2, which results in 51% of mixed utterances in the context of the stronger language. The child Marta also mixes codes until the age of 2;4. Marta clearly mixes a lot more in the German recordings with the German interviewer: 90 out of a total of 614 utterances are mixed (15%). In the Italian language context, she produces one mixed utterance out of a total of 947 utterances (0.1%); mixing is nearly completely absent. According to Arencibia Guerra (2008), Marta is one of the most balanced child analyzed. In sum, language mixing does not seem to be a developmental stage. Figure 14.1, borrowed from

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100 Alexander Ger. Amélie Ger. Arturo Ger. Aurelio Ger. Carlotta Ger. Caroline Ger. Céline Ger. Jan Ger. Lukas Ger. Marta Ger. Alexander Fr. Amélie Fr. Céline Fr. Caroline Fr. Juliette Fr. Aurelio It. Carlotta It. Jan It. Lukas It. Marta It. Juliette It. Arturo Sp.

90

all code-mixing in %

80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10

3; 0 3; 1 3; 2 3; 3 3; 4 3; 5 3; 6 3; 7 3; 8 3; 9 3; 10 3; 11 4; 0 4; 1

1; 6 1; 7 1; 8 1; 9 1; 10 1; 11 2; 0 2; 1 2; 2 2; 3 2; 4 2; 5 2; 6 2; 7 2; 8 2; 9 2; 10 2; 11

0

age

Figure 14.1 Intra- and inter-utterance mixing of bilingual children

Arencibia Guerra’s (2008) work, is based on 11 bilingual children with the language combinations German-Italian, German-French and GermanSpanish, collapsing intra- and inter-utterance mixings for the period from 1;6 to 4;1,15.1 The figure clearly shows that mixing differs strongly individually. It also shows that it can reappear after an age span between 3;0 to 3;2, where all children have reached a stage during which mixing has nearly disappeared (cf. Arencibia Guerra & Müller, 2009). Arencibia Guerra (2008) further shows that only inter-utterance mixing correlates (negatively) with language dominance (according to Pearson, p < 0.01); the more the children mix between utterances the less proficient they are in the respective language. Intra-utterance mixing is independent of language dominance. MLU is treated as one reliable measure for language dominance. However, this research does not differentiate between mixing of functional categories and mixing of lexical categories. Therefore, it is not directly comparable with Bilingual Bootstrapping and Ivy Hypothesis, and can only be used to point out the problems of mixing as gap-filling in general; it cannot falsify the gap-filling hypothesis. The gap-filling strategy is also problematic for adult code-mixing. Already Poplack (1980) mentions that very proficient bilinguals (in her case Spanish-English adults) also do code-mix. Interestingly, Bentahila and Davies (1983: 326ff.) report for their Arabic-French bilingual adults that there is a tendency for speakers to resort more to Arabic than to French for grammatical items or function words, such as determiners, pronouns, prepositions and conjunctions. Even when they are speaking

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267

mainly in French, they often use Arabic for such items, and also for the kinds of parenthetical clause used as fillers or discourse markers. On the other hand, when speaking mainly Arabic, they seem to resort to French for lexical items, particularly for nouns, far more frequently than they have to resort to Arabic lexical items when speaking mainly French. [. . .] These patterns of usage may perhaps be related to the fact that for all these bilinguals, Arabic is the first language, acquired in the earliest years, in the home, whereas French is learned at a later date, in school. Again, it seems that the stronger language (often the L1 in second language learners) plays a role in code-mixing in that it functions as donor of the grammatical items, whereas the weaker language (mostly the L2 in second language learners) provides the lexical items. However, what we can also deduce from the literature is that code-mixing is not a developmental stage in second language acquisition either. In sum, we question the idea that code-mixing is a strategy used by the bilingual or second language learner in order to compensate for ‘gaps’ (from a competence-oriented perspective) in grammar. In contrast, the analyses below test the hypothesis that mixing of functional categories is an effect of language performance, that is automatic access of the functional skeleton of a language.

The Data Our research is based on the language development of six GermanFrench, two German-Spanish, seven German-Italian and two Italian-French children. All children were recorded longitudinally every fortnight.2 The children were interacting with a monolingual adult of the respective language during the recordings; therefore, a monolingual context was created in which code-mixing was generally not expected of the child. Table 14.1 shows that for Julie and Siria no French recordings were available for analysis. This is so because the data were not yet transcribed. Amélie, Céline, Alexander, Julie, Teresa, Arturo, Marta, Aurelio, Lukas, Jan, Carlotta and Luca were raised in Germany with a German-speaking and a Romancespeaking parent. Emma and Marie were raised in France, with a Germanspeaking mother and a French-speaking father. Valentin lives in Italy with his German-speaking mother and his Italian-speaking father. Juliette and Siria are the two Italian-French children. Juliette was born in France and Siria in Italy. Both are raised by a French-speaking mother and an Italianspeaking father. Table 14.1 also shows the age span of the analyzed data and the number of DPs in the total corpus. The last column contains the number of DPs with code-mixing in the respective language.

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TABLE 14.1 The bilingual children Child

Recording Recording Age

Basis DP

Switches DP

Amélie

Ge 69

Fr 69

1;6,12–5;0,16

4001 (Ge)/ 5517 (Fr)

116 (Ge)/ 102 (Fr)

Céline

Ge 57

Fr 57

2;0,9–5;4,14

3555 (Ge)/ 1252 (Fr)

5 (Ge)/ 119 (Fr)

Alexander Ge 50

Fr 50

2;2,6–5;2,21

1754 (Ge)/ 4005 (Fr)

110 (Ge)/ 72 (Fr)

Emma

Ge 64

Fr 32

1;4,1–4;0,12

2082 (Ge)/ 554 (Fr)

82 (Ge)/ 1 (Fr)

Julie

Ge 52

–

1;7,28–4;0,9

2303 (Ge)

–

Marie

Ge 28

Fr 27

1;9,19–4;1,24

212 (Ge)/ 2183 (Fr)

49 (Ge)/ 51 (Fr)

Teresa

Ge 40

Sp 43

1;5,29–3;10,13 1222 (Ge)/ 580 (Sp)

8 (Ge)/ 12 (Sp)

Arturo

Ge 35

Sp 35

2;3,23–4;1,5

1145 (Ge)/ 568 (Sp)

33 (Ge)/ 99 (Sp)

Marta

Ge 52

It 52

1;6,25–4;0,13

1301 (Ge)/ 2192 (It)

92 (Ge)/ 45 (It)

Aurelio

Ge 42

It 42

1;10,10–4;0,28 786 (Ge)/ 1511 (It)

60 (Ge)/ 151 (It)

Lukas

Ge 63

It 46

1;8;14–5;0,2

2869 (Ge)/ 1228 (It)

44 (Ge)/ 263 (It)

Valentin

Ge 54

It 55

1;11,3–4;0,7

170 (Ge)/ 1775 (It)

93 (Ge)/ 26 (It)

Jan

Ge 31

It 31

2;0,11–4;0,14

1031 (Ge)/ 569 (It)

7 (Ge)/ 46 (It)

Carlotta

Ge 47

It 47

1;8,28–4;1

1408 (Ge)/ 1627 (It)

55 (Ge)/ 40 (It)

Luca

Ge 52

It 45

1;6,5–4;0,5

1381 (Ge)/ 721 (It)

16 (Ge)/ 22 (It)

Siria

Fr –

It 54

1;6,12–4;0,7

2687 (It)

17 (It)

Juliette

Fr 36

It 36

1;8,16–4;0,14

3203 (Fr)/ 1938 (It)

11 (Fr)/ 70 (It)

In order to compare these data to L2 acquisition we have analyzed a corpus of a second language learner. The L2 corpus is based on recordings of the spontaneous interaction between Berta, a Spanish-speaking learner of French, and a monolingual speaker of French. Berta has been interviewed at regular intervals for a period of 29 months under the direction of Colette

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269

Noyau in Paris. The interviews were transcribed by native speakers of French. The transcriptions are mostly orthographic. Phonetic transcriptions were made when the pronunciation was target deviant or when words were incomprehensible. The transcripts contain non-linguistic contextual information, which facilitates the interpretation of pronouns. The corpus consists of 18 audio recordings and a total of 3327 utterances, all of which we analyzed. Berta acquired French in a naturalistic setting. Her age at the first recording, which took place six weeks after her arrival in France, was 31 years. Berta is from Chile and immigrated to France with her family in February 1983. During the first recording period (February through October 1983), she did not have any job. She then started to work in a restaurant, where she spoke French all day. One year after her arrival in France she attended a language course for a period of four months (480 hours). Berta has three children. Her mother and sister live in France. During the interviews, Berta mainly talked about her job and family life. Berta’s interviewer was a native speaker of French. The interviewer’s reactions to Berta’s Spanish utterances during the French interview suggest that she could understand Berta well even if Berta occasionally mixed some Spanish words into her French.

Code-Mixing within DP Eichler (2010) has analyzed all DPs with a code-mixed element in the corpora. We chose the DP for our study because it has been repeatedly mentioned in the literature on code-mixing that mixing within DP accounts for the vast majority of mixing in bilingual children. Figure 14.2 shows the number of code-mixed DPs in the Romance context, that is, during the Romance recording when the child was expected to speak the Romance language. Figure 14.3 shows the same for the German context. The figures indicate percentages on the y-axis and absolute numbers in the columns. Figure 14.2 nicely shows for the Romance context that the GermanItalian children nearly all use the noun (the lexical category) in German and the determiner in Italian, when they speak Italian. In other words, they mix a German noun into an otherwise Italian DP. This is also true for the German-French children, although it can be observed that the use of a German determiner and a French lexical noun is twice as frequent (6.5%) in the German-French than in the German-Italian children. The picture is different in the German-Spanish children. Although the children mix the lexical noun more often than the determiner, mixing of the functional category is also very frequent. The high number of mixing of the functional category is due to one child, Arturo, who will be discussed further below. His data account for 43 mixes of D (out of a total of 47) in the context of the Romance language.

270

Par t 2: L1 and L2 Acquisit ion 574

100

318

90 80 70 64

60 50

47

40 30 20 10

22

19

0 Dger + Nit

Dit + Nger

Dger + Nfr

Dfr + Nger

Dger + Nsp

Dsp + Nger

Figure 14.2 Determiner + Noun in the context of Romance language (bilingual children with German)3

Figure 14.3 shows mixing within the DP in the German context. The comparison of Figures 14.2 and 14.3 indicates that the children mix less in the German context (770 mixes in the German context against 1044 mixes in the Romance context). The German-Spanish children mostly mix the noun and not the determiner when they are supposed to speak German. The German-French and the German-Italian children also mix nouns much more 100 35

90 282

80

258

70 60 50 40 109 30

80 6

20 10 0 Dit + Nger

Dger + Nit

Dfr + Nger

Dger + Nfr

Dsp + Nger

Dger + Nsp

Figure 14.3 Determiner + Noun in the context of German (bilingual children)

The Der ivat ion of Mixed DPs

271

frequently than determiners in the German context, but Figure 14.3 also shows that mixing of the determiner is very frequent in these children. Mixing of the functional category is mainly due to one child, Marie, whose mixing of determiners accounts for 38 cases (out of 80). As for the German-Italian children, the mixes of Aurelio and Valentin account for 103 (out of 109) cases of mixing of functional categories. We will discuss some of these children further below. Let us now turn to the two French-Italian bilingual children. Figure 14.4 shows, for the Italian context, that both children mix the noun and not the functional category. Figure 14.5 indicates the same for the French context, but the absolute number of mixes is too low to draw any safe conclusions.4 More French-Italian children have to be included in the study. At least, we can conclude so far that the French-Italian data do not contradict the general trend drawn for the German-Italian, German-French and German-Spanish data, namely that bilingual children generally mix the noun, the lexical category, to a higher degree than the determiner, the functional category. Figure 14.6 shows the same analysis for Berta, our adult second language learner of French (see Note 3). Interestingly, Berta behaves as expected from the literature, namely she mixes the determiner more frequently, that is, the functional category, than the noun, the lexical category. We will now present the results of the bilingual children who also mix the functional category more often. The bilingual children who account for the vast majority of functional category mixing in our data all develop the language for which the higher percentage of functional category mixing occurs as a weak(er) language. 83

100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10

4

0 Dfr + Nit

Dit + Nfr

Figure 14.4 Determiner + Noun in the context of Italian (bilingual children without German)

272

Par t 2: L1 and L2 Acquisit ion

100 90

9

80 70 60 50 40 30 20

2

10 0 Dit + Nfr

Dfr + Nit

Figure 14.5 Determiner + Noun in the context of French (bilingual child without German)

Figure 14.7 shows the MLU of the relevant bilingual children in the two languages. According to Arencibia Guerra (2008), MLU is a reliable measure for language balance. It is important for reasons of comparison to illustrate all children in one graph: black lines indicate the strong language, grey lines the weak one. All weak languages pattern lower than the strong languages in the children. We can conclude that MLU development is slower in the weak language as compared with the strong language if age is considered. 100 90

226

80 70 60 50 40 30 20

35

10 0 Dsp + Nfr

Dfr + Nsp

Figure 14.6 Determiner + Noun in the context of French (adult second language learner)

The Der ivat ion of Mixed DPs

273

6 5 Céline ger.

MLU

4

Céline fr. Marie ger. Marie fr.

3

Arturo ger. Arturo sp.

2

Aurelio ger. Aurelio it.

1

Valentin ger. Valentin it.

5;0

4;8

4;10

4;6

4;4

4;2

4;0

3;8

3;10

3;6

3;4

3;2

3;0

2;8

2;10

2;6

2;4

2;2

2;0

1;8

1;10

1;6

0

Age

Figure 14.7 MLU of bilingual children with a weak language

Interestingly, all these children only mix functional categories to a higher extent in the weaker language; in the respective other language, they prefer mixing of the noun. Let us look at the two languages of Arturo, who develops Spanish as a weaker language. As shown in Figures 14.8 and 14.9, it is only in the Spanish context that he frequently mixes determiners; in the German context he nearly never mixes functional categories. The same is true for Marie, the French-German child who develops German as the weaker language. Figure 14.10 shows the context of the weaker language, German, and Figure 14.11 the context of French. For reasons of space, we cannot present the other bilingual children, Aurelio and Valentin. Suffice it to say that all children mix functional 100 90 80 70 56

60 50

43

40 30 20 10 0 Dger + Nsp

Dsp + Nger

Figure 14.8 Determiner + Noun in the context of Spanish (Arturo)

274

Par t 2: L1 and L2 Acquisit ion

100 29

90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20

4

10 0 Dsp + Nger

Dger + Nsp

Figure 14.9 Determiner + Noun in the context of German (Arturo)

categories to a higher degree within the DP of the weaker language. In this respect, they are like the adult second language learner Berta who was also shown to mix determiners when speaking her second language, French. The question is now how to formulate the relevant generalization. In order to be able to formulate a two-way implication between language dominance (weak language) and functional category mixing, we will have to look for children who do develop a weak language like Arturo, Marie, Aurelio and Valentin, but do not mix functional categories frequently. One of the 100 90 80

38

70 60 50 40 30

11

20 10 0 Dfr + Nger

Dger + Nfr

Figure 14.10 Determiner + Noun in the context of German (Marie)

The Der ivat ion of Mixed DPs 100

275

38

90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10

3

0 Dger + Nfr

Dfr + Nger

Figure 14.11 Determiner + Noun in the context of French (Marie)

children (the others are Jan and Julie) who developed French as a weak language is Céline. In the context of her stronger language, German, she does not mix determiners at all. In French, she nearly does not do so either, as shown in Figure 14.12. In other words, the generalization has to be formulated as follows: Children who mix functional categories do have a weak language (they show an unbalanced language development). Our data does not corroborate the findings generally found in the literature on early child bilingualism, namely 100

106

90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20

13

10 0 Dger + Nfr

Dfr + Nger

Figure 14.12 Determiner + Noun in the context of French (Céline)

276

Par t 2: L1 and L2 Acquisit ion

that children with a weak language also mix more functional categories. Furthermore, it seems that, for the children who do mix functional categories, the language of the environment does not seem to play the role it is generally assumed to play. Arturo and Aurelio are born in Germany. Nevertheless, Aurelio mixes functional categories in the German context (German is also his weak language) and he does so only once in Italian (against 150 mixes of the noun in the Italian context). The two children born in the Romance countries, Marie and Valentin, do mix functional categories in the German context (Marie: 38 mixes of functional categories against 11 mixes of nouns, Valentin: 76 mixes of functional categories against 17 mixes of nouns), not in the context of the Romance language (Marie: 3 mixes of functional categories against 48 mixes of nouns in the French context, Valentin: 2 mixes of functional categories against 24 mixes of nouns in the Italian context). In other words, three of the four children would support the idea that the weak language corresponds to the language of the country in which the child lives; one child does not. It would be interesting to measure the input the children have received in the respective languages (which we cannot do for the data presented here). However, we can safely conclude that having a weak language does not always lead to a higher percentage of mixing of functional categories.

Discussion of the Results One of our results is that children who mix functional categories do have a weak language. The second result is that the adult second language learner mixes functional categories in the second language, the weak language. The question that remains to be discussed is the reason for the mixing. Does functional category mixing indicate a gap in the grammatical system of the weak language? Cantone and Müller (2005) have argued that the bilingual German-Italian children analyzed have already acquired the DP (whether the D position has to be filled or not; cf. Kupisch, 2006) when they still mix within the DP. They exclude the possibility that mixing may lend itself to a straightforward interpretation as a developmental strategy in the sense of Bilingual Bootstrapping or Ivy Hypothesis. We would like to add the following to their arguments: Mixing of functional categories within the DP is independent of other aspects of grammatical development, like gender marking for example. Cantone and Müller (2008) (for five bilingual German-Italian children) and Eichler (2010) (for all children of this chapter) have studied gender marking on the determiner within the mixed DPs. Two possibilities interest us here, namely (1) when the determiner marks the gender of the noun that is actually used in the mixed DP or (2) when the determiner marks the gender of the equivalent of the noun that is actually used. The word for ‘sun’ is Sonne in German and sole in Italian. In German, Sonne is a feminine noun; in Italian, sole is

The Der ivat ion of Mixed DPs

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masculine. The first option would bring about a DP of the type der sole or la Sonne, where the gender marking on the determiner is constrained by the gender of the noun actually used by the child. The second option would result in DPs like die sole and il Sonne. These two options become only visible if the gender of the noun actually used and of its equivalent are different in the two languages and if the gender classes of the two languages are structured in similar ways. In other words, if s/he uses a German neuter noun like Fenster ‘window’ with an Italian determiner, the child can never mark the neuter gender of the actually used noun on the Italian determiner, since adult Italian (as well as French and Spanish) only provide two genders, masculine and feminine. In a recent study Liceras et al. (2008) analyze spontaneous and experimental data of code-mixed DPs that is an English Determiner + Spanish Noun and a Spanish Determiner + English Noun from English-Spanish bilingual children, from L1 speakers of English, and from L2 speakers of French and of Spanish (Spanish in the case of L1 English and French; English in the case of L1 Spanish). The results for the bilingual children and L1 Spanish speakers show that they favor mixed DPs where the determiner is Spanish. Furthermore, the authors investigated the gender marking on the Spanish determiner accompanied by an English noun. Interestingly they found (1) that most of the Spanish L1 speakers favor the gender of the Spanish noun that is the translation equivalent noun of the English noun when they mark gender on the determiner and (2) most of the non-native speakers of Spanish use the masculine gender, that is the default gender marking in Spanish when they mark gender on the determiner. What would we expect if functional category mixing were a developmental strategy? Intuitively speaking, one would assume that children with a weak language cannot access the grammatical gender information in the weak language either and take the gender of the equivalent in order to mark gender on the determiner which is produced in the strong language. Eichler (2010) found that this is not the case. The use of the gender of the equivalent noun depends more on the specific language (the children have recourse to the gender of the equivalent noun more often when they have to mark it on the determiner of a mixed DP in German and French, and less so in Italian and Spanish). Eichler (2010) advances the hypothesis that the way gender information is accessed is related to how the lexicon is organized and mainly independent of language balancy. Figure 14.13 illustrates that the vast majority of cases are covered by our possibility (1), namely when the determiner marks the gender of the noun that is actually used. Option (2), the gender of the equivalent, is used rarely and more importantly not by the children in their weak language. We can then ask the following question: If the children have an advanced knowledge of the grammatical system in their weak language (here: gender), why should they mix the functional category in order to compensate for gaps in the grammatical system of the weak language?

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100

4

1

8

9

1 17

90

2

11

25

11

43

7

2

8

6 17

18

11

80 5

28

27

70

11 3

60 %

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18

16 9 8

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Gender of mixed N

10 12

Gender of equivalent N

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9

6 2

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15

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3 2

4

1

2

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1

3

3

0

Arturo Ge.

Arturo Sp.

0

Teresa Sp.

Marie Fr.

0

Teresa Ge.

Marie Ge.

Alexander Fr.

Céline, Fr.

Alexander Ge.

Amélie Fr.

Céline Ge.

Emma Fr.

0

Amélie Ge.

Juie Ge.

00

Emma Ge.

Marta It.

Marta Ge.

Aurelio It.

00

Aurelio Ge.

Lukas It.

0

Lukas Ge.

Jan It.

0

Jan Ge.

Valentin It.

Valentin Ge.

Carlotta It.

Carlotta Ge.

0

Juliette Fr.

0

Luca Ge.

Siria It.

0

Juliette It.

1

Luca It.

0

9

2

20

Figure 14.13 Gender marking on determiners in mixed DPs

Furthermore, although mixing within DPs amounts for the vast majority of mixing in child language overall, we should not forget that mixing within utterances is a relatively infrequent phenomenon (cf. Arencibia Guerra, 2008). Rare are the recordings in which this type of mixing exceeds 10%. If competence, or gap-filling, is not the reason for the mixing of functional categories, what then could account for this phenomenon? One could suggest that access to the functional lexicon is less automatic in the weak language than in the strong one. As a consequence, mixing of functional categories would not represent a compensatory strategy for competence gaps but a performance effect. In bilingual speech processing, there can always be a competitor for a particular lexical or functional expression. Our data show that the stronger language wins such a competition if the functional skeleton is concerned. The functional skeleton is activated to a higher degree in the stronger language as compared to the weaker language. Therefore, if a noun of the weak language is chosen, it may compete with a functional category of the stronger language. Notice that the grammatical gender information comes from the noun of the weak language; children do not seem to have problems with ignoring the gender of the equivalent noun even in cases when this actually used noun is taken from the lexicon of the weak language. Further research will have to show what kind of factors determine whether the child or the second language learner use the functional skeleton of the weak language. How does Céline fit into this picture? Why is the strong language not in competition with the weak language if the functional skeleton of the weak language has to be accessed? Céline does mix the two languages within utterances more generally speaking. Her way is to produce monolingual

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German utterances with the French interviewer. Pillunat (2007) has studied the development of the noun and verb lexicon of most of the bilingual children analyzed here. One of her results is that Céline’s verb and noun lexicon in German figures among the largest lexicons. If compared with some of the bilingual children, her lexicon in German is as big as the lexicons of both languages in the other children. From a psycholinguistic view, the generalizations could be formulated as follows: (1) Children who mix the functional category have a bigger lexicon in one language, that is the functional skeleton of the strong language receives more activation than the functional skeleton of the weak language. During grammatical encoding, the activated functional skeleton provides the slot in which the functional category, that is the determiner, is inserted and has to be marked for gender. (2) Children who show an unbalanced language development and do not mix the functional category have a huge lexicon in their dominant language. Due to this huge lexicon the mechanism which is responsible for the activation of the functional skeleton in the strong language is blocked. Since the children mix the lexical category (not the functional category), that is the noun which comes from their huge lexicon, it seems to be easier for them to activate the lexical category of their strong language. Future research should try to develop factors that can serve to sort out children with high processing abilities, a huge lexicon, as well as bilingualism per se, that may figure among them. Therefore, it is necessary to combine our results from mixing at the syntactic level with those obtained on the basis of lexical development. We have written this chapter in honor of Professor Dr Clive Perdue. He was one of the outstanding researchers who have connected first and second language acquisition. This comparison has allowed leading hypotheses in the field of language acquisition in general. We are proud to contribute to the present volume and, by reporting very recent work, we would like to express our sadness that we cannot discuss the issue with Clive.

Notes (1) The French-Italian child Juliette has been analyzed by Eichler (2010). (2) The data come from three research projects which have all been financed by the DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft). The children’s spontaneous interactions are video-recorded at home. The study started in April 1997 (cf. Müller et al., 2007). Currently, the project has established 28 longitudinal corpora of bilingual children raised with German and a Romance language (French, Italian, Spanish) or two Romance languages in Germany or the Romance countries. (3) D = determiner, N = noun, ger = German, it = Italian, Fr = French, Sp = Spanish. (4) The results exclude all forms which are homophonous in French and Italian and therefore cannot be analyzed as belonging to one of the languages. One example is the feminine definite article la, which could be either Italian or French. We found 523 of such cases in the Italian context and 436 of such cases in the French context.

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References Arencibia Guerra, L. (2008) Sprachdominanz bei bilingualen Kindern mit Deutsch und Französisch, Italienisch oder Spanisch als Erstsprachen. PhD thesis, Bergische Universität Wuppertal. Arencibia Guerra, L. and Müller, N. (2009) Code-switching bei bilingualen Kindern. In C. Röhner (ed.) Europäisierung der Bildung – Konsequenzen und Herausforderungen für die Grundschulpädagogik (pp. 103–107). Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Bentahila, A. and Davis, E.D. (1983) The syntax of Arabic-French code-switching. Lingua 59, 301–330. Bernardini, P. and Schlyter, S. (2004) Growing syntactic structure and code-mixing in the weaker language: The Ivy Hypothesis. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 7, 49–69. Cantone, K.F. (2007) Code-Switching in Bilingual Children. Dordrecht: Springer. Cantone, K.F. and Müller, N. (2005) Code-switching at the interface of language-specific lexicons and the computational system. International Journal of Bilingualism 9, 205–225. Cantone, K.F. and Müller, N. (2008) Un nase or una nase? What gender marking within switched DPs reveals about the architecture of the bilingual language faculty. Lingua 118, 810–826. Deuchar, M. and Quay, S. (1998) One vs. two systems in early bilingual syntax: Two versions of this question. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 1, 231–243. Deuchar, M. and Quay, S. (2000) Bilingual Acquisition: Theoretical Implications of a Case Study. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eichler, N. (2010) Code-Swtiching bei bilingual aufwachsenden Kindern: Eine Analyse der gemischtsprachlichen Nominalphrasen unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Genus. PhD thesis, Bergische Universität Wuppertal. Gawlitzek-Maiwald, I. and Tracy, R. (1996) Bilingual bootstrapping. Linguistics 34, 901–926. Genesee, F., Nicoladis, E. and Paradis, J. (1995) Language differentiation in early bilingual development. Journal of Child Language 22, 611–631. Kupisch, T. (2006) The Acquisition of Determiners in Bilingual German-Italian and GermanFrench Children. München: Lincom Europa. Lanvers, U. (2001) Language alternation in infant bilinguals: A developmental approach to codeswitching. International Journal of Bilingualism 5, 437–464. Lanza, E. (1997a) Language contact in bilingual two-year-olds and code-switching: Language encounters of a different kind? International Journal of Bilingualism 1, 135–162. Lanza, E. (1997b) Language Mixing in Infant Bilingualism: A Sociolinguistic Perspective. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. Liceras, J.M., Todd Spradlin, K., Fernández Fuertes R., Perales, S. and Pérez-Tattam, R. (2008) Gender and gender agreement in bilingual native and non-native grammars: A view from child and adult functional–lexical mixings. Lingua 118, 827–851. Meisel, J.M. (1994) Code-switching in young bilingual children: The acquisition of grammatical constraints. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 16, 413–441. Müller, N. and Cantone, K.F. (2009) Code-switching in young bilingual children. In B.E. Bullock and A.J. Toribio (eds) The Handbook of Code-Switching (pp. 199–220). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Müller, N., Kupisch, T., Schmitz, K. and Cantone, K.F. (2007) Einführung in die Mehrsprachigkeitsforschung: Französisch, Italienisch. Tübingen: Narr. Paradis, J. and Genesee, F. (1996) Syntactic acquisition in bilingual children: Autonomous or interdependent? Studies in Second Language Acquisition 18, 1–25. Paradis, J., Nicoladis, E. and Genesee, F. (2000) Early emergence of structural constraints on code-mixing: Evidence from French-English bilingual children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 3, 245–261.

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Petersen, J. (1988) Word-internal code-switching constraints in a bilingual child’s grammar. Linguistics 26, 479–493. Pillunat, A. (2007) Der Erwerb des Lexikons durch mehrsprachige Kinder: Französisch, Italienisch und Deutsch im Vergleich. Unpublished master’s thesis, Bergische Universität Wuppertal. Poplack, S. (1980) ‘Sometimes I start a sentence in English y termino en Espanol’: Toward a typology of code-switching. Linguistics 18, 581–618. Schlyter, S. (1993) The weaker language in bilingual Swedish-French children. In K. Hyltenstam and A. Viberg (eds) Progression and Regression in Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 289–308. Schlyter, S. (1994) Early morphology in Swedish as the weaker language in FrenchSwedish bilingual children. Scandinavian Working Papers on Bilingualism 9, 67–86. Vihman, M. (1998) A developmental perspective on codeswitching: Conversations between a pair of bilingual siblings. International Journal of Bilingualism 2, 45–84.

15 L1 or L2 Acquisition? Finiteness in Child Second Language Learners (cL2), Compared to Adult L2 Learners (aL2) and Young Bilingual Children (2L1) Suzanne Schlyter and Anita Thomas

Introduction For many years Clive Perdue studied the expression and development of finiteness. During the last years of his life, he also discussed the differences between adult and child development of finiteness (e.g. Perdue, 2009). He mentioned (Perdue, 2009: 235) that adult L2 learners almost never learn to master the morphology of finiteness in the new language. Finiteness is seen as a key issue in language acquisition as it concerns syntactic, morphological and semantic parts of language and its acquisition (Dimroth et al., 2003). Phenomena like information structure, or syntactic aspects of word order, are strongly linked to the acquisition of finiteness. Other authors concentrate on the more formal aspects (Prévost & White, 2000). It is well known that aL2 learners often ‘speak in infinitives’, using, in finite contexts, non-finite forms like *je prendre; *il manger/é, (‘I take, he eat’) instead of je prends; il mange, a formal opposition which will be studied here. Such structures do not seem to exist in children acquiring their first language (L1). It has been argued that in this respect L1 children behave in a fundamentally different way from adults learning their L2 (Meisel, 1991). This means that in the discussion on a possible fundamental difference between L1 and L2 and a possible Critical Period for L1 acquisition (see Slabakova, 2009), the marking 282

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of finiteness in learners with different Ages of Onset of the Acquisition of the second language (AOA) plays a crucial role (Meisel, 2009). If aL2 learners ‘speak in infinitives’ and children acquiring their L1 never do, what happens in child second language (cL2) learners? Does their language develop rather as in children acquiring their L1 or as in adults acquiring an L2 (aL2)? This is currently a subject of interest for many researchers (see the comments on Meisel, 2009). We intend here to contribute to this discussion with more empirical data from a study of Swedish children who start learning French as a second language (cL2) between the ages of three and seven. The cL2 learners studied, acquiring French in a French school in Sweden, are compared to younger simultaneously bilingual children (2L1) acquiring French and Swedish in the family, and to Swedish-speaking adult L2 (aL2) learners, acquiring French informally during a stay in France. French finiteness morphology concerns different phenomena: Subject clitic as ‘prefix’, Subject–Verb Agreement, Tense–Aspect marking, and the opposition between finite and non-finite forms. We limit this study to the opposition between finite and non-finite forms (parle, prend ‘speaks’, ‘takes’ vs. parler/parlé, prendre, ‘to speak/spoken’, ‘to take’), used in finite contexts and with reference to non-past. (See further under the section ‘Present Study, Methods’ below.) If we assume an influence from the source language of a learner, this is a rule that should be easy for Swedish-speaking learners, since Swedish has a clear difference between finite forms and non-finite forms. The Swedish finite forms in present end in –r (e.g. talar, sitter, ‘speaks’, ‘sits’ without person–number agreement); whereas the infinitives end in –a (tala, sitta, ‘to speak, to sit’). In this chapter, we will argue that the cL2 children, in their production of finite and non-finite forms, initially behave differently from 2L1 but like aL2 learners, in the sense that they use many target-deviant non-finite forms. However, they seem to become target-like more rapidly than aL2 learners. They therefore possibly constitute a learning type that is intermediate between (2)L1 and aL2 learners. The possible reasons for this specific development will be discussed.

Background Age of Onset and the Critical Period Hypothesis There is, at present, an intense discussion going on concerning the role of the AOA for language acquisition, and on how bilingual children with different AOAs develop their languages. The discussion concerns whether there is a limited Critical Period for language acquisition or not, and whether the acquisition of an L2 in adults is fundamentally different from L1 development or not. Two recent journal volumes are dedicated to these questions and

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provide a state of the art of the question: Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 28 (2009) on cL2 acquisition (commenting a keynote article by J.M. Meisel) and SSLA 31 (2009) on the Fundamental Difference Hypothesis. If there is a fundamental difference between (2)L1 and aL2 acquisition, there should also be a limited Critical Period, finishing at a specific Age of Onset of a second language, after which a child can no longer acquire this language as an L1 but as an (a)L2. Is there such a cut-off point (or interval) and, if so, at what age does it occur? Such questions are discussed in Unsworth (2005) and in the volumes mentioned above, regarding cL2 acquisition in children with an AOA roughly between three and seven years. Meisel’s arguments for a fundamental difference refer not only to differences in the ultimate attainment of acquisition, but also to differences in the process of acquisition in early stages of development. Meisel argues in favour of a very early cut-off point between L1 and L2 acquisition, at an AOA around 3;5–4;0 (using, among other criteria, the morphological marking of finiteness). In Meisel (2009) he argues for the possibility of many cut-off points at different ages for different phenomena. Studies within this framework are somewhat contradictory (see the comments in Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 28, 2009). Some authors argue that cL2 acquisition with an AOA below six years of age proceeds like L1, others that cL2 learners with an AOA as early as three to four years are, rather, similar to aL2 (Meisel, 2008). There is possibly a difference between the acquisition of syntax versus morphology, but here too, studies differ. Other authors (Herschensohn, 2007; Montrul, 2008; Singleton, this volume) argue for a gradual decline in the language-making capacity (LMC). Montrul (2008) studied, in Spanish-English immigrants in USA, the attrition of an L1 or the change of language dominance. She observed that the first language, in spite of an early AOA, was often not as qualitatively perfect as the Critical Hypothesis would predict, but that the L2 could – with rich and good input – develop more perfectly than the L1 and according to the principles of UG. She argues that this is evidence against a fundamental difference between L1 and L2, and consequently there could not be a Critical Period for the LMC. Instead, languages can be acquired all through the life span, but with increasing difficulty with increasing age.

Finiteness in Studies on Adult Second Language (aL2) Acquisition The question of how learners mark finiteness morphologically on verbs is central in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research and has been considered to provide one of the essential cues to the differences between aL2 and L1 acquisition (Prévost, 2004b; Prévost & White, 2000). For aL2 learners, most researchers report around 30% of lexical verbs in early stages with subject clitics + non-finite verb forms.

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For example, for English-speaking aL2 learners of French, Prévost (2008) mentions non-finite verb forms in finite contexts: *il prendre des vêtements – ‘he take-INF some clothes’/*nous faire la cuisine – ‘we do-INF the cooking’. The data from Prévost (2008) show that there is a high proportion of nonfinite forms in finite positions at the beginning stages – between 3.4% and 39.1% for the lowest group. This proportion decreases as the level of French proficiency increases (even if not necessarily gradually) – between 0% and 14.8% at the highest level. The data also show that there is individual variation. Finally, Prévost’s data show that the production of non-finite forms in finite positions with non-lexical verbs is an exception, which means that this phenomenon is one pertaining to lexical verbs. A problem of learners with L1-English is, however, that present tense (with the exception of 3pers sing) and infinitive forms are, to a great extent, identical in English (I work – to work; we talk – we will talk; etc.). It is therefore difficult to generalize the results from learners with L1-English, and the study of learners with L1-Swedish is necessary in order to compare different kinds of learners. Adult L2 learners with L1-Swedish acquiring French, both in formal (classroom) learning situations and in informal (naturalistic) contexts have been the objects of several studies (for a review, see Bartning & Schlyter, 2004). These show that aL2 learners in formal learning situations initially exhibit a certain proportion of non-finite verb forms in finite contexts in free oral production. In a study of beginners in a formal learning situation, Thomas (2009, 2010) observed that in a storytelling task the proportion of non-finite forms for non-past reference was approximately 40%. Typical for adult learners is not only the proportion of non-finite forms in finite contexts but also the inter- and intra-individual variation. The following example shows the variation found in the production of a learner (from Thomas, 2009: 11; the * is used here to mark target-deviant use): (1) aL2 learner c’est deux personnes que va va voyagE à en Italie ‘it is two people who will travel-INF to Italy’ elle(s) mange(nt) en un restaurant ‘they eat-PRE in a restaurant’ et les hommes va parle avec les filles et boire le vin ‘and the men will *speak-PRE with the girls and drink-INF wine’ et il(s) dansE ensemble ‘and they *dance-INF together’ Schlyter and Bartning (2005) performed a longitudinal study of finite and non-finite forms in aL2 Swedish learners of French (formal and informal learners) from two different corpora, the Stockholm InterFra Corpus and the Lund FIFI corpus (Bartning & Schlyter, 2004). With some exceptions, all learners showed a rather large proportion of non-finite forms in the initial

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stages. These target-deviant non-finite forms remained for a long time, but after many years of input or of study and with increasing linguistic development these were gradually replaced by target-like finite forms. Table 15.1 presents the proportions, in finite contexts, of correctly used finite forms compared to non-finite forms, in the Corpus Lund-FIFI. Bartning’s data from the corpus InterFra showed a similar development over time (Schlyter & Bartning, 2005: 59–60). Her beginners used a great proportion of non-finite forms whereas the university students (analysed as at Stage 4 according to Bartning & Schlyter, 2004) never used such forms, but in finite contexts only used finite forms. Such a development could also be shown longitudinally in individual learners (e.g. Robert). This development over time is in contrast to data from, for example, the ESF corpus (Prévost & White, 2000) in which some of the aL2 learners never really manage to produce the expected forms in finite contexts. The data from the Swedish-speaking aL2 learners of French show that they initially have as much difficulty as the English-speaking learners in providing the correct finite forms. Thus, the learners’ L1 does not appear to help the learners produce the expected forms, at least not in the initial stages.

Finiteness in Studies of First Language (L1) Acquisition In first language acquisition (L1) of French, monolingual children (Pierce, 1992), or children with two first languages (2L1, Meisel, 1994; Schlyter, 2003), are reported not to have any problems with finite forms even in the earliest stages of development. Finite forms are not only acquired and used very early, but also seem to function as triggers of subsequent syntactic development. From the moment the children use subject clitics, they also use finite forms (il dort, je prends, elle parle, ‘he sleeps’, ‘I take’, ‘she speaks’, etc.). Non-finite forms also occur frequently in (2)L1 French but they are interpreted as instances of Root Infinitives (RI) (Rizzi, 1994), since they very rarely have subjects (e.g. boire! = je veux boire). (2)L1 children normally omit subjects for a rather long time, also with finite verbs (dort! = il dort, ‘(he) sleeps’; est cassé = il est cassé, (‘(it) is broken’), in contrast to Swedish-French aL2 learners (Schlyter, 2003). According to the literature, Root Infinitives might also have subjects in (2)L1 French but then the subject is either a noun (papa pati!) or a strong pronoun (moi boire!). This means that structures with a subject clitic + non-finite forms, like *je aimer, *il boire, etc. are nonexistent in L1 or 2L1 acquisition (except possibly for isolated lapses). This has been accounted for by a structure-building hypothesis (Meisel, 1994), in the sense that children start with the lowest syntactic node: the bare lexical verb (dort, cassé), later using the higher (IP) node representing the inflection (il dort, il est cassé). Such data, when compared to the aL2 data discussed above, point to a structural difference between L1 and L2. We argue that these (2)L1–aL2

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TABLE 15.1 Finite versus non-finite forms in the FIFI corpus of Lund Learners, formal/ informal

Months of exposure

Caroline F

6 (24 hours)

Henry 1–2 IF

cL2 > aL2. In the following examples, we can clearly see this search for forms and vocabulary in aL2 learners (8) Karl 1 (aL2): *KAR: eh # on [/] on rempl(e) non [//] on remplir ? ‘one fill-PRS ? no one fill-INF’ Such a use also seems to occur in the speech of the youngest cL2 learner, Rachel. From the first part of the example (9) below – where she has to say something like ‘she is reading the book’ we can understand that she knows the concept of reading a book. She is probably mimicking the activity of reading. The interviewer gives Rachel the word and checks it later on. We can then see that Rachel is hesitating, thus providing both forms, the finite and the non-finite. We can interpret this hesitation as a reflection of the search for both (perhaps simultaneously) the lexical item and the appropriate form. (9) Rachel 4 (cL2): *INV: qu’ est ce qu’ elle fait là avec le livre ? ‘what does she do here with the book?’ *RAC: il le fait ça, il regardE . ‘he does that, he look-INF’ *INV: oui, elle regarde le livre, elle le lit . ‘yes she looks at the book, she reads it’ (. . .) *INV: et ça s’ appelle comment quand on fait ça ? ‘and how do you call that when one does that’ *RAC: euh, il fait ça . ‘hm, he does that’ *INV: oui ? yes? *RAC: il [/] il lit . il lire ? ‘he reads. he read-INF?’ *INV: oui . ‘yes’

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To summarize we propose that •

•

•

cL2 learners from about 3;5 years initially differ from (2)L1 learners if their first language is already developed. This is the age at which (2)L1 learners normally have acquired their entire syntactic structure, including subordinates, etc. The access to previously acquired structure and concepts results in a search for default forms to map onto the existing structures and concepts. The form chosen – long or short – depends on the frequency of that form for each specific verb in the language the learner is exposed to (Thomas, 2009, 2010). cL2 learners are however young and flexible, and probably highly sensitive to sounds and forms, and therefore may acquire the forms more rapidly than adult learners.

We therefore suggest that our data rather speaks in favour of a gradual decline model, where the development of syntax, morphology and conceptual knowledge interact in different ways from L1 to adult L2.

Acknowledgements This study was supported by the Swedish Research Council. We are grateful to our colleagues in the project STUF (Jonas Granfeldt, Malin Ågren, Maria Kihlstedt) for valuable discussions on this study. We also express our gratitude to the children, their parents and – above all – to Sylvie Renard for her precious help with the recordings.

References Bartning, I. and Schlyter, S. (2004) Itinéraires acquisitionnels et stades de développement en français L2. French Language Studies 14, 281–299. Dimroth, C. (2008) Age effects on the process of L2 acquisition? Evidence from the acquisition of negation and finiteness in L2 German. Language Learning 58, 117–150. Dimroth, C., Gretsch, P., Jordens, P., Perdue, C. and Starren, M. (2003) Finiteness in Germanic languages: A stage-model for first and second language development. In C. Dimroth and M. Starren (eds) Information Structure and the Dynamics of Language Acquisition (Studies in Bilingualism 26) (pp. 65–93). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Granfeldt, J. (2003) L’Acquisition des Catégories Fonctionnelles. Étude comparative du développement du DP français chez des enfants et des apprenants adultes. Études romanes de Lund 67. PhD thesis, University of Lund (also available online). Granfeldt, J., Schlyter, S. and Kihlstedt, M. (2007) French in cL2, 2L1 and L1 in pre-school children. In J. Granfeldt (ed.) Studies in Romance Bilingual Acquisition – Age of Onset and Development of French and Spanish (pp. 7–42). PERLES 24, Lund, Sweden: University of Lund. Herschensohn, J. (2007) Language Development and Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Meisel, J.M. (1991) Principles of Universal Grammar and strategies of language use: On some similarities and differences between first and second language acquisition.

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In L. Eubank (ed.) Point-Counterpoint: Universal Grammar in the Second Language (pp. 231–276). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Meisel, J.M. (1994) Getting FAT: Finiteness, agreement and tense in early grammars. In J.M. Meisel (ed.) Bilingual First Language Acquisition (pp. 89–129). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Meisel, J.M. (2008) Child second language acquisition or successive first language acquisition? In B. Haznedar and E. Gavruseva (eds) Current Trends in Child Second Language Acquisition: A Generative Perspective (pp. 55–80). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Meisel, J.M. (2009) Age of onset in successive acquisition of bilingualism: Effects on grammatical development. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 28, 5–34. Montrul, S. (2008) Incomplete Acquisition in Bilingualism. Re-examining the Age Factor. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Noyau, C., Houdaïfa, E-T., Vasseur, M.T. and Véronique, D. (1995) The acquisition of French. In R. Dietrich, W. Klein and C. Noyau (eds) The Acquisition of Temporality in a Second Language (pp. 145–209). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Perdue, C. (2009) L’expression de la finitude chez les apprenants L1 et L2 du néerlandais, du français et de l’allemand. In M. Kail, M. Fayol and M. Hickmann (eds) Apprentissage des langues (pp. 223–242). Paris: CNRS éditions. Pierce, A.E. (1992) Language Acquisition and Syntactic Theory: A Comparative Analysis of French and English Child Grammars. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Prévost, P. (2004a) Morphological variation in early adult second language French. In S.H. Foster-Cohen, M. Sharwood Smith, A. Sorace and M. Ota (eds) Eurosla Yearbook (Vol. 4. pp. 147–175). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Prévost, P. (2004b) The semantic and aspectual properties of child L2 root infinitives. In P. Prévost and J. Paradis (eds) The Acquisition of French in Different Contexts (pp. 305– 331). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Prévost, P. (2008) Knowledge of morphology and syntax in early adult L2 French: Evidence for the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis. In J. Liceras, H. Zobl and H. Goodluck (eds) The Role of Formal Features in Second Language Acquisition (pp. 352–377). New York: Lawrence Erlbaum. Prévost, P. and White, L. (2000) Missing surface inflection or impairment in second language acquisition: Evidence from tense and agreement. Second Language Research 16, 103–133. Riedel, A-K. (Unpublished manuscript) Root infinitives in child L2 acquisition of French. Centre for Multilingualism, Hamburg University. Rizzi, L. (1994) Some notes on linguistic theory and language development: The case of root infinitives. Language Acquisition 3, 341–393. Schlyter, S. (2003) Development of verb morphology and finiteness in children and adults acquiring French. In C. Dimroth and M. Starren (eds) Information Structure, Linguistic Structure, and the Dynamics of Learner Language (pp. 15–45). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Schlyter, S. (2005) Adverbs and functional categories in L1 and L2 acquisition of French. In J.M. Dewaele (ed.) Focus on French as a Foreign Language: Multidisciplinary Approaches (pp. 36–62). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Schlyter, S. (2011) Tense and aspect in early French development in aL2, 2L1 and cL2 learners. In E. Rinke and T. Kupisch (eds) The Development of Grammar. Language Acquisition and Diachronic Change. In Honour of Jürgen M. Meisel (pp. 47–74). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Schlyter, S. and Bartning, I. (2005) L’accord sujet-verbe en français L2 parlé. In J. Granfeldt and S. Schlyter (eds) Acquisition et production de la morphologie flexionnelle. Actes du ‘Festival de la morphologie’, mars 2005 à Lund (pp. 53–64). PERLES 20, Lund, Sweden: Lund University.

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Slabakova, R. (2009) L2 fundamentals. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 31, 155–173. SSLA (2009) 31. (entire issue). Thomas, A. (2009) Les apprenants parlent-ils à l’infinitif? Influence de l’input sur la production des verbes par des apprenants adultes du français. Études romanes de Lund 87, PhD thesis, University of Lund (also available online). Thomas, A. (2010) The influence of lexical aspect and input frequency in the L2 French of adult beginners. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 33, 169–196. Unsworth, S. (2005) Child L2, Adult L2, Child L1: Differences and Similarities. A Study on the Acquisition of Direct Object Scrambling in Dutch. Utrecht: LOT. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft (2009), 28. (entire issue).

16 Young L2 and L1 Learners: More Alike than Different1 Rosemarie Tracy and Vytautas Lemke

Introduction Within acquisition research, the question of how first-language (L1) learners discover the regularities governing word order, inflectional morphology and their interfaces plays a prominent role. For German, the language we focus on here, the emergence of these properties has been documented in numerous case studies (e.g. Bittner et al., 2003; Clahsen, 1988; Clahsen & Penke, 1992; Dimroth & Jordens, 2009; Meisel, 1992, to name but a few), and even though researchers may differ with respect to theoretical framework, they would probably agree on the following description. German-speaking children’s earliest non-formulaic combinations typically include VP fragments, with non-finite verbs following their complements, as well as (often verb-less) constructions with focus particles such as auch (also), cf. (1).2 (1) Nutella essen, Hände waschen da auch des da

(Nutella eat, hands wash) (there also that one)

After what look like conservative expansions of these patterns (Mama auch Nutella essen, ‘M. also eat nutella’), there is a developmental shift towards the target grammar, with finite verbs occupying the second position within the clause. As shown in (2), different types of constituents are topicalized and appear in front of the verb. At this point, children’s most advanced sentences are not just propositionally complete but, morphological detail apart, actually look like adult main clauses. (2) der Papa hat auch geschlaft the Dad has also slept (target: der Papa hat auch geschlafen) dann hat er geweint then has he cried, ‘then he cried’ das Nuss gibt sie Eichhörnchen 303

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the nut gives she squirrel (target: die Nuss gibt sie dem Eichhörnchen) ‘she gives a nut to the squirrel’ Finally, as shown in (3), syntactically complex sentences, that is combinations of matrix and embedded/subordinate clauses, emerge. (3) (a)

(b)

ich will jetzt [va∫] du kommst [va∫] = placeholder, based on was (what) I want now what you come (target: Ich will jetzt, dass du kommst) ‘I want you to come’ wenn du dies gewürfelt hast if you this rolled have ‘if you get this (number) by rolling a dice’

Beyond this point, a lot of paradigmatic detail still needs working out, such as the appropriate shape of irregular verb forms, and the principles determining the distribution of articles and their form (depending on case, number and gender), an issue to which we turn later on (sections ‘No less robust: Early L2’ and ‘Adding another challenge: DP properties’). But the most crucial architectural properties of clauses have emerged by the time children are three years old. Indeed, syntactic placeholders like [va∫] in (3) show quite convincingly that the child’s structure-building skills are not deterred by lack of lexical detail. It is now time to reveal our reason for not including the ages of the children quoted in (1)–(3). Even though these examples could pass for utterances produced by L1 children, they were produced by L2 learners, two girls with L1 Farsi and Russian. Both children were first exposed to German upon entering kindergarten at age 3;1 and age 3;5, respectively, and they went from first word combinations to simple German clauses in about half a year. In our contribution, we argue that for young L2 learners of age three to five, successive acquisition still patterns with bilingual acquisition, that is the simultaneous acquisition of two first languages, in terms of outcome, developmental path and overall dynamics. To this null hypothesis, which has been proposed in various studies for word order and subject–verb agreement (cf. Rothweiler, 2006; Thoma & Tracy, 2006; Tracy & Thoma, 2009), we here add evidence from a more problematic task: the acquisition of DP properties. Even in this difficult domain, young L2 children appear to stand a better chance than hitherto suspected (cf. Lemke, 2009). We support our argumentation by two longitudinal case studies of a Russian- and a Syrian Arabic-speaking child. While the young Russian speaker was first exposed to German at 3;1, hence falls under what most researchers would accept as a candidate for bilingual acquisition (cf. the discussion in Meisel, 2007, 2009; Schwartz, 2004; Tracy & Gawlitzek-Maiwald, 2005), the Syrian child was already four and a half years old when he came into regular contact with German.

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We first provide a brief sketch of German clause structure and highlight, more detailed than above, typical L1 development. We then take a closer look at two L2 children and trace the development of their clause structure and subject–verb agreement over a period of about one year. The section ‘Adding another challenge: DP properties’ focuses on the morphological features associated with German DPs, especially gender and case marking. The final section relates our discussion to current attempts at disentangling various acquisition types.

German Clause Structure and the Way it is Mastered by L1 Children The characteristic for German clause structure is the asymmetry summarized in (4) for main and embedded/subordinate clauses, where ‘asymmetry’ refers to the different positions of the finite verb in both clause types. (4) Main: Sub.:

(XP)

V2{ + fin} . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . VE {- fin} COMP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . VE {+ fin} ⇑___ SENTENCE BRACKET ___⇑

In the main clauses, the finite verb appears in the second position (V2), the so-called left sentence bracket (‘Satzklammer’). The main clause preverbal position is available to all topicalized constituents (Ich esse meine Suppe nicht. I eat my soup not. Meine Suppe ess ich nicht! My soup eat I not!, ‘I won’t eat my soup!’), including wh-operators (Was hast du gegessen? What have you eaten?), or it is left empty, as in yes/no questions or topic-drop constructions (A: Willst du Suppe?, ‘Would you like some soup?’ B: Ø Mag ich leider nicht! Ø Like I unfortunately not, ‘Unfortunately I don’t like soup.’). Non-finite verbs (participles, infinitival verbs) and verbal particles are restricted to the right sentential bracket (verbend, VE) (Ich habe meine Suppe aufgegessen. I have my soup up-eaten. ‘I have eaten (up) my soup.’ Ich esse alles auf. I eat all up. ‘I eat up everything.’). In complement and subordinate clauses, the presence of complementizers or relative pronouns forces the finite verbs to stay in clausefinal position (Ich fürchte, dass er meine Suppe gegessen hat. I fear that he my soup eaten has. ‘I’m afraid that he ate my soup.’). In children acquiring German as their L1, this clausal architecture typically emerges from right to left, cf. (5). The ages given are only rough indicators; especially for the emergence of target-like complex clauses, age varies considerably (cf. Fritzenschaft et al., 1990; Rothweiler, 1993; Schulz, 2007). (5) (a) Single-word expressions da, nein, weg, ab, Hund, Ball . . . there, no, away, off, dog, ball

(12–18 months)

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(b) Elementary word combinations (18–24 months) among them VPs and Focus-Particle Phrases with and without verbs Tür auf. Mama Bus fahren. Mama auch Bus. Mama nicht Bus fahren. door open. Mommy bus go. M. also bus. M. not bus go. (c) V2 clauses with finite verbs (IP/CP) (24–30 months) Jetzt geh ich hoch. Da kommt Ball rein. Wo kann der hingehen? Now go I up. ‘Now I go up.’ There comes ball in. ‘The ball goes in there.’ Where can he go? (d) Complex sentences (CPs) with finite verbs in VE (30 months and up) Ich warte, bis der Hund weggegangen ist. I wait until the dog away-gone has. ‘I’ll wait until the dog has gone.’) This characterization in terms of surface patterns avoids the question of how many phrasal projections are actually involved, that is whether German main clauses should be analysed as IPs, CPs or projections of other functional heads. Since nothing hinges on this issue here, we forgo this discussion.3 In many ways, the development sketched in (5) is highly simplified. Both fast learners as well as children with extended ‘silent phases’ may not provide us with clear evidence for specific developmental steps (cf. the articles in Meisel, 1992; Weissenborn, 2000). Distinctions between developmental phases may be obscured by the extent to which old and new learner grammars and construction types coexist (cf. Roeper, 1999; Tracy, 2002). It is also well known that children temporarily produce both finite and non-finite root clauses side by side (cf. Rizzi, 1993/1994; Wexler, 1994). Also, children fluctuate in their production of subjects (cf. Hamann, 2002; Hyams, 1986). Additionally, children are excellent at building up repertoires of holistically stored expressions – such as gehtich, modelled on geht nicht, goes not, ‘(this) doesn’t work’, machstn da? (from (was) machst du denn da?, (what) make you PARTICLE there, ‘what are you doing there?’) – that already mimic the left periphery of German main clauses. The following examples show two semi-productive constructions based on deictic [das ] (there’s the), modelled on the adult cliticization of the verb and the article to a deictic host (da) on the left. e

(6) (a) J. (2;4) [das ] Bauernhof\ . . . da . . . da IS das Bauernhof\ [there-s-the] farm . . . . there there is the farm (b) J. (2;4) [dasa] Schava (= Scheuche) . . . da ISi Vogelscheuch\ [there-s-the] scarecrow . . . there IS-the scarecrow e

As we can tell from spontaneous repairs, the child who produces the leftperiphery placeholder [das ] has reached the point of reanalysis, which temporarily leads to yet another trochaic structure, [IS das] and [ISi] (cf. Demuth & McCullough, 2009; Tracy, 1991, for English). e

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While children may lack lexical entries for adult functional categories, they know how to fill architectural gaps by placeholders (cf. Fritzenschaft et al., 1990; Müller & Penner, 1996; Rothweiler, 1993; for placeholders in questions cf. Penner, 1994; Tracy, 1994). (7) M. 3;4 turns off a radio. Adult asks why he did that. [ənənə] des so laut is (instead of weil das so laut ist) [. . .] that so loud is, ‘because that’s so noisy.’

No Less Robust: Early L2 Background In typical first language acquisition, ultimate attainment is the rule; in adult L2, it is the exception. The features of the clausal architecture captured in (4), which are highly accessible and robust in the case of L1 learners, turn into significant hurdles for adults learning German as a second language and possible also to school-age children, both with respect to ultimate attainment and developmental pattern (cf. Clahsen & Muysken, 1989; Dimroth, 2002, 2007; Haberzettl, 2005; Hawkins, 2001; Wegener, 1998). It is a matter of considerable debate how young children have to be in order to outperform older L2 learners. Depending on one’s theoretical perspective, peculiarities of adult L2 systems have been attributed to loss of access to universal grammar, L1 transfer, problems at the syntax–pragmatics interface, lack of motivation, self-consciousness and processing limitations (Birdsong, 1999; Johnson & Newport, 1989; Klein, 2000; Klein & Perdue, 1997; Long, 2005; Meisel, 2009; Schwartz, 2004; Singleton, 2005; Unsworth, 2007; White & Genesee, 1996). There is by now a distinct consensus that questions addressing critical or sensitive periods will receive different answers for different subsystems as well as for different processing tasks (cf. Clahsen & Felser, 2006; Hopp, 2007; Indefrey, 2006; Sorace, 2003). The data we discuss below were gathered in a longitudinal case study of the acquisition of German by eight children of different first languages (Tunesian and Syrian Arabic, Turkish, Russian), languages that differ from German in crucial syntactic and morphological properties.4 For 12–14 months, we obtained bi-weekly 30–45-minute audio-recordings, including sessions in the children’s L1. All children attended kindergartens with children from many different language backgrounds.

RNV, L1 = Russian At the age of 3;1, a couple of months after entering kindergarten, RNV produced predominantly single-word utterances, partially productive formulae, as in (8)(a), verbless constructions involving focus particles, cf. (b),

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and VPs, (c). In (d) and (e), we list one marginal occurrence each of a finite V2 and a non-finite V2 pattern. (8) (a) (b) (c) (d) (e)

vosə Mama da auch des da ischə aufräumen ich räum auf ich essen so

(where’s-the M.) (there also that there) (I tidy up[-fin]) (I tidy[+fin] up) (I eat[-fin] that way)

Four months later, when RNV was 3;5 years old, she produced wellformed V2 clauses exhibiting a number of V2 effects as well as correct subject–verb agreement. (9) (a) Warum hast du des? (b) (c) (d) (e)

why have you this? ‘why do you have this?’ Wenn gehen wir in der Gruppe? when go we in the group? ‘when do we join the group?’ Dann muss man das anmal then must one that paint, ‘we should color this.’ Jetzt geh ich meine Gruppe now go I (to) my group, ‘now I will join my group’ In də Gruppe hab ich dies gespiel in the group have I this played, ‘I played with this in my group.’

These examples also reveal what still needs to be worked out: cf. the misselection of wenn (if) for wann (when) in (9)(b), deviant case marking within the PP in the same sentence (in der Gruppe instead of in die Gruppe). In (d), with Gruppe a goal argument as well, case marking is adequate, but this time RNV drops the preposition in. In (e), the article preceding Gruppe surfaces as a neutralized placeholder (də). RNV also reduces consonant clusters in final syllables of infinitives and participles, cf. (c) anmal instead of anmalen, and (e) gespiel for gespielt. To some of these issues, we return in the section ‘Adding another challenge: DP properties’. Morphological detail apart, verbs satisfy the V2 constraint (cf. Tracy & Thoma, 2009). Figure 16.1 shows that after initially separate developments, numbers for both V2 (filled square) and subject–verb agreement (triangles represent attempted agreement and circles target-like forms) rise fairly quickly. The dip between 47–48 months is an artefact of the context, a game of Memory without need for verbs. Eight months into recording RNV also produces complex sentences, with placeholders, [va∫], and defaults, that is, wenn (if) for bis (until), in complementizer position. As shown in (10), in RNV’s first documented subordinate clauses, finite verbs do not always appear in final position, as required by the target.

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Figure 16.1 RNV, development of finite verbs in V2, based on 18 L2-transcripts; 3758 sentences

(10) (a) 3;9 (b) 3;9

ich will nicht [va∫] du hast gewinne I want not what you have won, ‘I don’t want you to win’ warte doch mal wenn ich hab fertig gemal wait PARTICLES when I have finished drawing, ‘wait until I’m done drawing’

AII, L1 = Arabic The second child, AII, speaks Syrian Arabic, and we recorded him from 4;7 to 5;8. We could also include his younger brother in the study (cf. Tracy & Thoma, 2009). Both brothers started kindergarten at the same time, only a few weeks before we took up data collection. Initially, AII was limited to holistic single-word expressions (kannisch, ‘(I) cannot’, meaning weiß nicht, know not, ‘I don’t know’), and he was generally reluctant to speak German and actively discouraged his brother from doing so. His attitude changed after a few visits on our part, and he began to readily involve himself in German conversations. This is reflected in the steep rise in verb tokens produced, as shown in Figure 16.2. The examples in (11) show the emergence of finite V2 clauses and case-marked forms, even though spell-out still deviates in detail. (11)(c) illustrates AII’s attempts at describing quite complex events, even though his L2 grammar still fails him. Our gloss is no more than a guess. (11) (a) 4;7 die Hase gib den ein Ei ‘the rabbit give this one an egg’ (b) 4;10 geht aua. . .den Pferd hast gemacht aua ‘goes ouch. . .the horse have made ouch, ‘the horse hurt itself’

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(c) 4;11 jetzt kleine Baby die so die Mutter kleine Baby die hat alles now small baby the this way the mother small baby she has everything ‘now the mother of the small baby she did everything . . ..’ Figure 16.2 reveals that V2, finiteness and (generally) correct verbal inflectional morphology emerge in tandem (see also Tracy & Thoma, 2009). We return to AII’s nominal inflection in the section ‘DPs in L2: Mission impossible?’ AII’s first complex sentences sometimes lack a verb, as in (12)(a), or – probably due to the complexity of what he is trying to express – miss out on agreement and target-like word order, as in (b). (12) (a) 5;5 weil ich kann noch nicht weil ich noch drei Jahre Ø because I can still not because I still three years ‘because I can’t yet do it because (at the time) I was only three years old’ (b) 5;6 ein Kind das in die Schule haben dich so was gebaut a child that in the school have you such a thing build ‘a child who built this for you in school’ As shown in Thoma and Tracy (2006) and Tracy and Thoma (2009), both children have interesting ‘matches’. In the case of RNV, this is an initially very shy Russian-speaking child, who needs about a year to reach the level of development in her German which RNV attains after six months. AIIs’s younger, Arabic-speaking brother also needs considerably longer time. Despite their different L1, these two slower children share one important feature beyond their initial reluctance to communicate: It takes a long time for them

0.60 V V2 V2 fin V2 fin+

Proportion of sentences

0.50

0.40

0.30

0.20

0.10

0.00 55

56

57

58

59

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61

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67

68

Age [months]

Figure 16.2 AII, development of finite verbs, 12 L2-transcripts; 3158 sentences

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to build up their verb lexicons, which may explain why they also find it hard to discover the distribution of finite and non-finite verbs in their L2. For RNV and AII, on the other hand, the discovery of verbs, their placement and their morphological shape are mastered fairly quickly. In what follows we consider their development in yet more challenging grammatical domains.

Adding Another Challenge: DP Properties The Target The acquisition of the German DP involves mastery of partially idiosyncratic inflectional systems and various syntactic, semantic and pragmatic rules determining article distribution (cf. Eisenbeiss, 2000). In German (as in English), most DPs require a determiner, for example a definite or indefinite article to specify the reference of the noun. Therefore, bare singular nouns are ungrammatical unless licensed by context or genre, as in newspaper headlines or other reduced registers, cf. (13). (13) *Minister hält Rede

‘minister delivers speech’

German determiners − as well as attributive adjectives − agree with the head noun with respect to case, gender and number, with only number (and sometimes case) spelled out on the noun. While gender is an intrinsic classificatory feature of nouns, case is externally assigned by specific heads and within certain configurations. Semantic, morphological or phonological properties determine to which gender class (masculine, feminine, neuter) a noun belongs. The rule with the greatest scope (schwa-rule) makes most trochaic two-syllabic nouns ending in -ə, such as Nase ‘nose’, Mütze ‘cap’ feminine. However, a considerable percentage of similarly patterned nouns does not comply, for example der[masc] Hase (‘hare’) (cf. Wegener, 1995). Due to competing classification criteria (natural gender, morphological and phonotactic subclasses), learners can only partially rely on gender assignment rules. For many cases, learners must store gender information on an item-by-item basis. While effective communication need not suffer from mismatched determiner and adjectival forms, failure in decoding gender features may make it impossible to reconstruct pronominal anaphor–antecedent relationships, cf. (14). (14)

Der Zeitungsbote ist mit der Fahrradfahrerin und ihrem Kind zusammengestoßen. Zum Glück blieb er/sie/es unverletzt. ‘The paperboy collided with the (female) biker and her child. Luckily, he/she/it remained uninjured.’

German nominal inflectional paradigms are obscured by the fact that gender, case, and number marking are fused into polyfunctional morphemes.

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TABLE 16.1 Inflectional paradigm of the definite article Case

Masculine

Neuter

Feminine

Nominative

der

das

die

Accusative

den

Genitive

des

Dative

dem

Plural

der den

As shown in Table 16.1, taken out of context, most forms are ambiguous since, with five distinctive suffixes representing 16 distinct functions. Only in the masculine paradigm, the nominative and the accusative singular can be distinguished unambiguously. Correct case marking therefore crucially depends on figuring out noun gender. Once we add the plural to this picture, complications increase since the article die corresponds to both the nominative and the accusative singular feminine as well as – for all genders – to the nominative and accusative plural. In prepositional phrases, accusative versus dative case marking are linked to a difference in meaning: Whereas unter die Decke, ‘under the blanket’, is associated with a dynamic reading, unter der Decke, ‘under the blanket’, indicates the location of events/objects and yields a static interpretation.

DP Properties in L1 Acquisition How do learners cope with this intricate morphological system? In what follows we focus on the acquisition of the definite article, that is on the determiner required whenever a nominal referent can be identified by both speaker and hearer (cf. Rozendaal & Baker, 2008). After an initial bare-noun stage (cf. Kupisch, 2001) determiners emerge around the age of 2;0 and remain optional for a while. They are morphologically underspecified, phonologically reduced (e.g. /də/, /ə /, /n/, cf. Müller, 2000; Tracy, 1986, 1991), and often part of bisyllabic formulaic expressions (cf. Demuth & McCullough, 2009 for English examples). As argued by Penner and Weissenborn (1996), these reduced forms act like placeholders for functional elements. According to Clahsen et al. (1994) and Müller (2000), early determiner–noun combinations are simple noun phrases (NPs), whereas the functional category D (determiner) and its structural layer, emerge with the establishment of gender, case and number features. This step-wise construction of nominal shells parallels the augmentation of VP to IP/TP and CP (or whatever layer is needed). Monolingual German-speaking children establish the opposition between masculine and feminine gender between the ages of 2;0 and 3;0. Neuter gender, on the other hand, may take several years longer, due to lack of reliable cues apart from diminutive suffixes. Because early articles are

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either phonologically reduced (də) or neutral forms based on the nominative forms der/die/das, case distinctions are hard to detect. Once a binary distinction between nominative and accusative is established, the latter is systematically overextended to dative contexts. Target-like datives typically emerge in pronouns, for example mirDAT versus michAKK (me), followed by determiners later on (cf. Clahsen, 1984; Clahsen et al., 1994; Dittmann, 2010; Mills, 1985; Tracy, 1986). Evidence for inflectional paradigms across indefinite and definite determiners, pronouns and other forms involved in concord relations (quantifiers, adjectives) can be found around the age of three, but the overall approximation to the target is a gradual process, from the first systematic matching of article forms and their morphosyntactic functions to near-target distinctions between accusatives and datives in articles, quantifiers and other subsystems around age four to five.

DPs in L2: Mission Impossible? The complexity of the target DP system leads us to predict problems for the L2 learner. One might also expect differences between L1 and L2 acquisition due to L1 transfer. Parodi et al. (2004) show that learners whose L1 does not have articles omit them more frequently in their L2 German than learners whose L1 has articles. Similarly, the acquisition of gender features has been considered especially tough for learners with an L1 without grammatical gender. According to the Failed Functional Features Hypothesis (Hawkins & Chan, 1997), only features or categories already available in L1 can be transferred to L2. A study with adult English L1 learners of L2 French led Hawkins (2001: 255ff.) to assume that item-based lexical learning strategies can compensate for the absence of the actual representation of gender features in learners’ L1 and L2. In general, it seems that adult L2 learners are better at discovering canonical word order patterns than at acquiring inflectional morphology (cf. Meisel, 2007, 2009). While default articles are characteristic for adult L2 grammars, child L2 learners first exposed to German around age five to six behave differently (cf. Kaltenbacher & Klages, 2006; Wegener, 1995, 1999). After an initial bare-noun phase, children employ different forms of the definite article (at least der/die) in free variation. In her study of Russian, Polish and Turkish children, Wegener (1999) identified a third stage, with children focusing on one single article form as a default (in most cases die), overgeneralizing it across all contexts. Children appeared to systematically mark definiteness, not gender, case or number. Only later, further differentiations were established: forms ending in -r (der) occurred in nominative contexts, forms with -n (den) in accusative contexts, regardless of noun gender. Kaltenbacher and Klages (2006) documented interesting acquisition patterns in Turkish and Russian learners of German aged five to six.

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While one group first drew a two-way gender distinction and afterwards distinguished nominative and accusative forms, another group proceeded in the opposite direction. Both groups converged after two to three years of exposure, establishing a binary gender (masculine/feminine) and a binary case system (nominative vs. accusative/dative). What about even younger learners, such as the two children introduced above, who first came into contact with German around age three (RNV) and around age 4;7 (AII)? The data show that both children differ from each other in systematic ways, and their acquisition paths also contrast with the patterns found in older learners (cf. Lemke, 2009). For RNV, three phases in the acquisition of the German DP can be identified. Initially, at age 3;0–3;4, articles appear as phonetically reduced variants, (15)(a), integrated into formulaic trochaic feet, (b), and as non-reduced expletives in the context of proper names, (c). The latter is fully grammatical in the Southern variety of German the children are exposed to. (15) (a) 3;0 ə Hund uə Katze (b) 3;0 [desta] Hunde 3;1 [desta] Papa 3;1 [vosə] Mama (c) 3;1 əə kommt die Nicole 3;3 wo is die Michelle

(a dog and-a cat) (there-is-the dogs) (there-is-the daddy) (where-is-the mummy) (əə comes the Nicole) (where is the Michelle)

From 3;5 onwards RNV supplies definite articles in almost all obligatory contexts, but she also overextends the default die to all genders and case contexts. This default strategy emerges shortly after the sentential bracket and obligatory V2 become manifest in production. Even though RNV differentiates between dative and accusative pronouns (3;3 Mama kauf mir[DAT], ‘M. buy (for) me’; 3;7 Mama hat mich[AKK] getragen, ‘M. has carried me’), she holds on to the default article for a period of six months. As of 3;11, other definite articles are produced: der, das, dem, den. This expansion of forms goes hand in hand with the establishment of gender agreement and case marking. A close analysis of DPs in the last four recordings (following 3;11) reveals that RNV now employs the correct article in 93% of all cases, cf. Table 16.2. TABLE 16.2 Agreement of definite articles and nouns (RNV) Occurrences of definite article + noun

Correct article form

Deviant gender

Deviant case

Masculine

16

13 (81%)

3

0

Feminine

49

47 (96%)

1

1

Both

65

60 (93%)

4

1

Young L2 and L1 Lear ners

315

Accusative forms are used appropriately with masculine nouns, cf. (16)(a),(b). Correct datives are still restricted to prepositional phrases, cf. (c)– (d). For indirect objects, RNV uses the accusative (or nominative feminine form) die instead of the dative der, cf. (e). As in L1 acquisition, neuter gender is not established as a separate category, although RNV combines three of her 12 neuter nouns with a regional variant of the neuter article das: des Schaf, des Flugzeug, des Spiel (sheep/airplane/game). (16) (a) 3;11 auf den Tisch on the[ACC] table (b) 4;0 ich will jetzt den Hasen machen I want now to the[ACC] rabbit[ACC] do, ‘I want to do the rabbit now’ (c) 4;1 ja und denn hab’ ich mit dem Papa geweint yes and then have I with the[DAT.MASC] daddy cried, ‘Yes and then I cried with daddy’ (d) 4;1 dann muss ich Schokolade austeilen in der Gruppe then must I chocolate distribute in the[DAT.FEM] group ‘then I have to distribute chocolate in the group’ (e) 4;0 dann zeig ich *die Cecilia des then show I *the[NOM/AKK.FEM] Cecilia that, ‘then I will show that to Cecilia’ There is no indication that the child’s L1 Russian directly influences her acquisition of German. Russian has no articles but three gender categories and marks gender, case and number by inflectional suffixes on nouns and pronouns. At the same time one cannot exclude that the existence of a complex morphological agreement system in her L1 might have facilitated RNV’s perception of morphological detail and contrasts in German. RNV masters most of what the German DP requires within 18 months of exposure. She differentiates masculine and feminine gender and omits the determiner in only 11 (5%) of 205 obligatory contexts. Towards the end of our study, RNV systematically marks accusative case and differentiates dative and accusative DPs after prepositions, in accordance with the dynamic/static distinction. The remaining tasks, the establishment of neuter gender and of consistent dative marking in non-prepositional contexts, are known to be difficult for L1 learners of the same age as well. The systematic way in which RNV tackles both gender and case marking differs from the strategy of our second learner, AII. His acquisition process shows a striking dissociation between article forms and their functions. After a short period of one-word and holistic utterances, AII builds up a considerable inventory of article forms (die, der, das, den), which he employs as free variants. He behaves very much like the slightly older L2 learners in Wegener ’s (1999) study. Similar to RNV, AII subsequently picks a default and limits himself to the article die. In contrast to RNV, however, who

316

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maintains this strategy for six months, AII’s restriction to die is attested in only one recording at 4;10. Afterwards, AII’s inventory of article forms increases once more, with all forms employed in free variation, without apparent functional motivation. In addition to der, die and den, there is the phonetically reduced də. Later, at 5;3, this set of forms is joined by neuter das, and subsequently, at 5;5, by the dative dem. AII’s overall form–function mapping proceeds slowly, with many non-target-like article–noun combinations attested. As shown in (17)(a), AII does not yet recognize gender as a consistent DP feature. As shown in (b), AII does not even pick up an immediately preceding (and therefore conveniently primed) pronoun. (17) (a) 5;3 (b) 5;2

die[FEM] Tasse und *den[MASC] andere Tasse the cup and the other cup (Responding to ‘What is she doing here?’) *er schlaft. *he sleeps, ‘he is sleeping’

Table 16.3 provides an overview of AII’s gender-marked definite articles in the last two recordings (5;6–5;8). By then mismatches of definite articles and nouns have dropped to 6% of all masculine and to 26% of all feminine nouns. We can thus – despite the rather high error rates of feminine nouns – conclude that AII has acquired the gender system. Neuter nouns remain rare in the data, which makes it difficult to argue in favour of neuter gender as a separate category.5 Although the rate of AII’s deviant gender assignment is considerable in comparison to what we saw in RNV, the large number for incorrect case is even more striking and calls for a closer look. The dative masculine or neuter dem appears late in AII’s article inventory, but by then, they are used reliably for dative contexts only. Out of five occurrences, one results in a gender mismatch: auf dem[MASC/NEUT] Brücke[FEM] (‘on the bridge’). The dative also occurs in target-like amalgams with prepositions, as in (18)(a)–(c). (18) (a) 5;3 (b) 5;5

möchte ich runtergehn zum Spielplatz want I go down to-the[DAT.MASC] playground der sitzt auf dem Frosch he sits on-the[DAT.MASC] frog

TABLE 16.3 Agreement of definite articles and nouns (AII) Occurrences of definite article + noun

Correct article form

Deviant gender

Deviant case

Masculine

52

33 (63%)

3 (6%)

16 (31%)

Feminine

31

18 (58%)

8 (26%)

5 (16%)

Both

83

51 (61%)

11 (13%)

21 (25%)

Young L2 and L1 Lear ners

(c) 5;8

317

und dann ist der vom Fenster weggegang and then is he from-the[DAT.MASC] window away-gone ‘and then he went away from the window’

In contrast, AII’s use of the accusative masculine article den is not restricted to appropriate contexts. Only seven instances of den appear in target-like accusative contexts, the remaining 15 forms occur in contexts calling for nominatives and datives. The examples in (19), from the last recording at age 5;8, illustrate this. Up to the end of the observational period, the form of the accusative masculine article den is marked as masculine but underspecified for case and therefore appears in different case contexts. (19) (a) *den Junge hat aber *ein Frosch the[ACC.MASC] boy has, however, a frog (b) und dann hat der. . .*den *den Hund hat seinen Kopf in *den Tasse hingele..gesteck and then has the[NOM.MASC] .. the[ACC.MASC] the[ACC.MASC] dog has his head into the cup (fem.) put ‘and then the dog put his head into the cup’ In (19)(b), AII starts with a completely appropriate nominative der and only then repairs it to den in subject function. As with RNV, interference phenomena caused by the L1 – Syrian Arabic, which only has a definite article, a two-way gender system, three-way number marking, but no overt case – are hard to identify. Lack of overt case marking in Arabic could make it more difficult for AII to perceive the functions of case marking in the German DP or, more generally, within German clauses. Compared to RNV, AII appears to have more difficulties unravelling the form–function mapping of the German article system. He eventually acquires the distinction between feminine and masculine gender, marks dative on masculine nouns consistently and – like RNV – shows low rates of omissions in obligatory contexts: only 6% (13 out of 201) in the last two recordings. However, AII chooses non-target genders in far more cases than RNV and continues to have problems with the distribution of accusative forms. RNV follows a default-article strategy, audible in the overextension of die for a period of six months, whereas AII gives up his default strategy after only one month. There is no way of telling whether RNV profits from this longer timestretch by accumulating a critical mass of article–noun combinations from which she can then deduce that differences in form signal different functions. It is striking that RNV’s default period is followed by a pervasive and almost instantaneous reorganization of the overall article system, with gender, number and case features available. AII’s development, on the other hand, is characterized by a slow and continuous increase in target-like uses of article forms rather than by a radical change.

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Clausal Structure and Nominal Morphosyntax Compared We have considered two developmental trajectories within the same children: their fast mastery of clausal structure, including subject–verb agreement, and the drawn-out emergence of DP features. Apparently, speed in one domain does not lead to equally speedy discoveries in the other. Figures 16.3 and 16.4 locate the emergence of functional layers in the nominal domain (defP = definiteness phrase without agreement vs. a full DP) and in the verbal domain (IP, CP) on a time scale. The establishment of the IP does not entail any specific DP layer. For both RNV and AII, overt DP features emerge independently of the development of clause structure. Case studies with children exposed to German as an early L2, that is at age three to four, have identified developmental paths very much like those familiar from L1, both in terms of outcome and overall dynamics (cf. Rothweiler, 2006; Thoma & Tracy, 2006; Tracy & Thoma, 2009). They have also shown that L2 children, given sufficient exposure, can be surprisingly fast, even in coming to grips with verb morphology. Schwartz (2004), in a summary of various studies dealing with L2 learners older than age four at onset of exposure, points out that L2 children’s speedy convergence onto target properties actually makes them different from L1 children. Factors that might have placed constraints on L1 – maturational principles either falling away or waiting to come in, cf. Schwartz (2004: 48) – no longer affect the L2 learner, hence the even faster developmental pattern in some areas. AII, with his jumpstart into clausal structure and subject–verb agreement, might just be such a candidate, but RNV, who was more than a year younger at first exposure, was also remarkably fast. The investigation of early L2 may well help us resolve some long-standing theoretical issues, such as the availability of UG principles to learners of different ages, questions concerning the role of maturation and of processing limitations. Moreover, L2 in children, as pointed out by Schwartz (2004: 62), is ‘the perfect natural experiment’. According to Schwartz, L2 children aged four behave like L1 learners with respect to inflectional morphology and like adult L2 learners in terms of syntax. Meisel (2009) takes the opposite position,

defP

IP 2;7

3;5 3;6

1

10 11

DP

CP 3;9 14

Figure 16.3 Development of functional categories (RNV)

3;11 age 16

exposure (months)

Young L2 and L1 Lear ners

defP

DP

IP 4;7 4;8 1

319

CP

4;10

5;3

4

9

2

5;6 age 12 exposure (months)

Figure 16.4 Development of functional categories (AII)

stressing that children aged four still cope very well syntactically but begin to exhibit adult L2 traits with respect to inflectional morphology. Sopata’s (2008) study with three Polish children first exposed to German at the ages of 3;8–4;7 finds considerable variation both in inflectional morphology and word order, which likens her subjects to adult L2 learners. Our own data, of which we presented only a fraction above, allows the conclusion that L2 children are highly comparable to L1 learners in the domain of both syntax and subject– verb agreement and at least outperform older and adult learners with respect to nominal inflection.

Conclusion Young L2 learners can be extremely fast and accurate, despite the fact that their input situation is often far from optimal. And although there is certainly space for considerable inter-individual as well as intra-individual variation, learners nevertheless proceed in fairly systematic ways (cf. also the general overview in Paradis, 2007). Our contribution dealt with areas of acquisition known to be tough for adult L2 learners of German: verb placement, verbal inflection, nominal inflection. We attempted to show that crucial features of the German syntax–morphology interface can be mastered by young L2 learners within 6–12 months of exposure to a German-speaking environment. It also became clear that L2 children are remarkably good at discovering the various subsystems interacting within the DP. The two learners differed with respect to their L1, and they also differed with respect to age of first exposure. Nevertheless, both children proved to be remarkably successful: rulegoverned as well as idiosyncratic areas of the target grammar turned out to be manageable. In view of the absolute speed with which all this happened, young L2 learners may not only challenge the adult learner but even the L1 child.

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Notes (1) We wish to thank the participants of various workshops, especially those present at the Paris conference in honour of Clive Perdue in December 2008. We also thank Gerda Videsott for commenting on an earlier version, and Heike Wipfler, Andrea Scheinert and Marlene Schulz for proofreading. (2) Examples are provided with literal translations and, whenever necessary for understanding, with glosses. Where it matters, we indicate what the adult pattern looks like. (3) How this discussion is reflected in the acquisition literature can be seen in the articles in Meisel (1992) and in Tracy (1994, 2002). (4) For more information cf. Thoma and Tracy (2006) and Tracy and Thoma (2009); for DP development cf. Lemke (2009). The project (in collaboration with E. Kaltenbacher) was based on a grant to the first author by the Ministry of Science and Research of the State of Baden-Württemberg from 2003–2005. (5) AII uses four of 11 neuter nouns with a masculine or feminine determiner. In the same period, the total number of nouns requiring a determiner is 201.

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17 The Older the Better, or More is More: Language Acquisition in Childhood1 Christine Dimroth and Stefanie Haberzettl

Introduction The issue addressed in this chapter, similarities and differences between various types of language acquisition, was dear to the heart of our friend and mentor, Clive Perdue (Perdue, 2006) and was – along with quite a few even more interesting topics – thoroughly discussed with him during extensive walks in the surroundings of Kolymbari (Crete) at the occasion of a EURESCO conference on The Structure of Learner Language. Our study compares first language acquisition and child second language acquisition and looks at the structure of the unfolding learner systems from the very beginning of the acquisition process (Perdue, 1996). Common wisdom has it that child learners proceed very quickly in acquiring a second language. They have a good chance of becoming nativelike speakers, provided that they can benefit from enough input and have enough occasion to make use of the target language. Adult learners are much harder to find among those L2 speakers who perform in a native-like or nearly native-like way, even if they enjoy comparably good learning conditions. Despite the fact that no target language property has yet been identified that adults cannot acquire (Birdsong, 2005a), the popular slogan ‘the younger the better’ seems to be a valid generalization as far as L2 acquisition is concerned. This has led to the assumption of maturational constraints for language acquisition, in particular versions of the Critical Period Hypothesis according to which maturation leads to the decay of some language-learning mechanisms that causes inevitable non-native outcomes in language learners beginning after puberty (cf. Birdsong, 2005b, for a critical discussion). This chapter addresses a different spell-out of maturational constraints, the Less is More

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Hypothesis (Newport, 1990, 1991), which proposes that the observed nonnativelike endstates in late language acquisition are due to the growth of cognitive capacities (in particular memory span) during development that interfere with successful language acquisition. Whereas most versions of the Critical Period Hypothesis disregard potential age-related differences in language acquisition as long as they take place before the transition to adulthood, the Less is More Hypothesis focuses on a gradual increase of information processing capacities during childhood and therefore also predicts differences between younger and older children, suggesting ‘that the cognitive limitations of the young child during the time of language learning may [. . .] provide a computational advantage for the acquisition of language, and that the less limited cognitive abilities of the older child and the adult may provide a computational disadvantage for the acquisition of language’ (Newport, 1991: 125, our emphasis). The literature on memory development in childhood indeed reports converging evidence for developmental changes in memory capacity and significant increases in information-processing speed. Based on an extensive literature review, Schneider (2002: 240) concludes that the difference between the memory capacity of 2 vs. 7–9-year-old children is in fact more dramatic than the difference between older children and adults (see also Huttenlocher & Burke, 1976). It is thereby assumed that maturation as well as prior knowledge contribute to this increase in memory capacity, a point to which we will return in the discussion of our results. The Less is More Hypothesis assumes that the more advanced cognitive capacities of older language learners are counterproductive for the task of language acquisition, because the database resulting from a more comprehensive intake (Corder, 1967) is less ideal for performing certain types of linguistic analysis. Newport thereby narrows down the prediction of her hypothesis to aspects of language acquisition that require componential analysis and explicitly mentions the acquisition of morphology. ‘Overall, then, a learning mechanism with a restrictive input filter more successfully acquires a morphology; the same learning mechanism with a less restrictive filter [. . .] entertains too many alternative analyses and cannot uniquely determine which is the better one’ (Newport, 1991: 127, our emphasis). If this is true, two-year olds should be faster in building up a productive system of target-like form-function mappings than 7–9-year-old L2 learners who have an additional disadvantage: much less input than the monolingual L1 learners. This prediction will be put to test in the following sections by comparing published findings on first language acquisition in monolingual German children to longitudinally collected production data from a group of 7–9-year-old children with L1 Russian, acquiring German as their second language in untutored settings.

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Verb Inflection in German In this chapter we focus on the acquisition of verbal paradigms of lexical verbs. We study the acquisition of present tense and past participles, since these forms are the first ones to appear in L1 as well as (child) L2 acquisition. In German, verbal inflections agree with person and number of the grammatical subject. The suffixes displayed in Table 17.1 apply to all tenses. Past participles are regularly formed by the prefix ge- and the suffix –t (ge-mach-t, ‘made’). Most of the so-called strong verbs show stem vowel alternation in the present singular, but take the same suffixes as the weak verbs. In addition, many of them use the suffix –en instead of –t for the formation of past participles (ge-sung-en, ‘sung’). As can be seen in Table 17.1, German has a relatively rich verbal morphology. A high amount of different markings alone need not be a problem for L1 or L2 learners, as long as the mapping of forms and functions is regular and univocal, as for example in Turkish (see Aksu-Koç & Ketrez, 2003). What makes the acquisition of verbal inflectional morphology in German a complex task is the absence of a 1:1-correspondence of forms and functions. This goes in both directions: (1) One function can be encoded by different forms, as in the case of –e or –0 for the first-person singular, and –t or –ts for 2nd plural in Austrian German, and -t (ge-mach-t; ‘done’) or –en (ge-les-en; ‘read’) as endings of the past participle according to the verb class. (2) One form can have several functions, as for example –en (1st/3rd plural, infinitive), -t (3rd singular, 2nd plural, past participle). -0 can mark 1st singular and imperatives (which will not be considered in this chapter). These syncretisms often lead to problems in the interpretation of utterances in early learner language. In cases where the context is not entirely clear it is often difficult to decide if some form is target adequate or not, even more so if other markings are not yet used reliably, as for instance the prefix ge- for the construction of past participles. It is thus the combination of a relatively rich paradigm and ambiguous form-function mappings that makes the acquisition of German verbal TABLE 17.1 Present tense paradigm of lexical verbs Mach-en (make)

Singular

Plural

1. person 2. person 3. person

mach(-e) mach-st mach-t

mach-en mach-t(s)1 mach-en

1in

Austrian German

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327

inflections – and the investigation of this phenomenon – a difficult and timeconsuming task. In addition, there are several classes of irregular (‘strong’) verbs involving stem changes that make the verbal paradigms even less transparent. In the following, we shall ignore these irregular cases and focus on the way in which L1 learners and young L2 learners build up the regular suffix paradigm displayed in Table 17.1. In order to do so, we rely on recent careful documentations of L1 development that will be summarized in some detail in the next section.

Verb Inflections in the Acquisition of L1 German For a long time, the difficulties of the German verb inflection with regards to the acquisition of agreement marking have been underestimated. There has been little effort to systematically document the acquisition processes,2 or even worse, it has been taken for granted that children acquire agreement marking automatically together with the V2 property; cf. Wexler (1998: 27), who ‘make[s] the case for extremely young children as “little inflection machines”’, and who insists on the fact ‘that young German speaking children [. . .] do not make agreement mistakes’ (Wexler, 1998: 41). Recent studies by Bittner (2000, 2003) and Klampfer (2000, 2003) show that this is absolutely not true. It may very well be the case that ‘verb inflections are used comparatively early in German child language’, as Clahsen (1986: 80) claims with respect to his longitudinal study of three children (age range 1;6–3;6 and 1;2–2;6). Clahsen admits however that inflections do not mark target grammatical relations from the beginning. It is also not entirely clear how much time the Clahsen children needed to make their way from single verbs to verbal paradigms. Clahsen (1986: 88, 93) counts instances of inflections and the ratio of correctness but does not give evidence for verb lemmas which occur in different forms, let alone an exhaustive list of those paradigms. Over-regularized verb forms, another clue for ‘morphological competence’, are not mentioned either. Without such clues it remains unclear up to which point the different verb forms might still be unanalyzed. This becomes much clearer in the rigorous analysis and the transparent presentation of the data of four L1 learning children in Klampfer (2000, 2003) and Bittner (2003) that we choose as background for the interpretation of our own data. The L1 corpora are presented in Table 17.2. Both Bittner and Klampfer focus on the detection of emerging verb paradigms in child language production, and show that this is a rather slow process that they subdivide into three phases: pre-morphology, proto-morphology and morphology proper. Roughly speaking, in the pre-morphological stage, children produce singular forms of verbs, mainly in rote-learnt phrases to which no kind of morphological knowledge can be attributed. As soon as a critical mass of verb lemmas are stored and recognized as such, morphological

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TABLE 17.2 Data considered for comparison Child

Observation period

Frequency of sampling

Minutes per recording

Verb containing utterances

Jan

1;4–2;0

up to 1;7 monthly, then weekly, collapsed in the analysis

up to 1;7 30 min, then 60 min

10–746 per month (total 2188)

Katharina 2;0–2;4

±every 9th day

6–40 min

2–80 (total 156)

Caroline

1;6–2;2

every second week

“a few minutes up to one hour”

11–224 (total 1110)

Anna

1;8–2;1

every second week

±60 min

52–209 (total 1370)

categorization and the recognition of systematic relations between individual verb forms becomes possible – the child enters proto-morphology. This stage is prepared by an increase of morphological diversity of the (still rote-learned) verbs and by first target-like differentiations in the syntactic use of inflected forms. During this transitional period, the first so-called mini-paradigms develop: ‘non-isolated set[s] of minimally three phonologically unambiguous and distinct inflectional forms of the same lemma produced spontaneously in contrasting syntactic or situative contexts in the same month of recordings’ (Bittner et al., 2003: xxix). Besides these milestones in the morphological development, first analogies can be observed. Since in German the verb inflectional system is not very transparent, children need a long time to build up verbal mini-paradigms after the first instances of verbs in their utterances: six months for Jan (Klampfer, 2003), six months for Katharina (cf. Klampfer, 2000; Klampfer et al., 1999/2000), at least five months for Anna and at least seven months3 for Caroline (Bittner, 2003). In the following, we will go through these subjects one by one and briefly summarize their acquisition of verbal morphology. The criteria for considering a given suffix as acquired are as follows: • •

It occurs with at least three verb lemmas per month. At least 50% of all occurrences are found in a target-like agreement context.

If these criteria are met, the relevant cells in the tables below are marked in gray. Jan produces utterances with (mainly non-finite) verbs from 1;4 onwards. A couple of nonfrozen uses of -t (3sg) are attested from 1;8 onwards, but it is only in 1;11 that the percentage of infinitives declines and that finite categories other than 3sg are productively marked. There is a huge number

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329

TABLE 17.3 Jan:* Repertoire of present tense suffixes of lexical verbs (lemmas/tokens) 1;5

1;6

1;7

1;8

1;9

1;10

1;11

2;0

1/1

1/1 *1/2 ?1/1

?1/1

5/10 *1/1

2/2 *1/1 ?1/1

8/16 *3/4 ?5/10

11/200 ?5/8

47/304 ?8/20

−(e)

6/10

9/21

−st

3/3

8/12

−t

−en

2/m mps 3/m mps

*1/3

*2/2

*1/1 ?1/1

*2/7 ?8/11

*4/4 ?15/40

*5/9 ?11/32

1/1 3pl *2/2 ?17/43

3/4 1pl 3/4 3pl *1/1 ?19/35

2

...

...

...

27

1

...

3

*Contains information from Tables 5a and 5b in Klampfer (2003: 307 and 308). Occurrences in target-deviant contexts are indicated. Without frozen forms and imperatives.

of tokens for which it is unclear whether they occurred in a target-like context (e.g. 19/35 for –en in 2;0). These have been disregarded when a given suffix has been marked as ‘acquired’ (gray cells) (Table 17.3). The first three-member mini-paradigm is ‘to make’ machen (inf.) – gemacht (pp) – macht (3sg) at 1;10. However, at 2;0 only 25% of all verbs occur in more than one form. True mini-paradigms (3/m mps) remain very rare. But since the number of 2-member-mini-paradigms (2/m mps) increases from 2 in 1;8 to 27 in 2;0, the proto-morphology stage is surely entered at that time and these results should perhaps be taken as a reason to weaken the true mini-paradigm criterion, especially for relatively small corpora (see Tomasello & Stahl, 2004). Katharina proceeds much faster than Jan. The time span between first verbs and the onset of proto-morphology is only three months. However, her first verbs emerge only at 2;0, half a year later than for Jan, who, at the same age, has already entered proto-morphology. Interestingly, her first verb forms do not end in –en, but in –e and, less often, in –t. Infinitives appear only at 2;3, simultaneously with the first mini-paradigms, the first instances of 2sg and the first past participles. The first three-member mini-paradigms emerge at 2;6 (Table 17.4). Caroline shows a rather late emergence of productive morphology. First verbs appear at 1;6, but at 2;2, still more than 60% of all utterances do not contain any verb at all. The first form type established besides -en occurring in all kinds of grammatical contexts is the stem form respectively the suffix –(e) used in 1sg contexts. The first productive and functional intra-verbal form contrasts can be found after 1;11, but true mini-paradigms are only attested in 2;1 where Bittner recognizes a ‘developmental spurt’ (Bittner,

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Par t 2: L1 and L2 Acquisit ion

TABLE 17.4 Katharina:* Repertoire of present tense suffixes of lexical verbs (lemmas/ tokens) 2;0 −(e)

1/5

−t

*1/1

2;1

2;2

1/1 *1/1

1/1 *1/1

2;3

2;4

6/10

9/25

3/5 *3/5

8/19 *3/9 ?1/1

−st

1/2

−en

*2/2

2/m mps

3

2

2;5

2;6

5

7

3/m mps

2

*Contains information from Tables 4a, 4b, 5a, 5b, 7, and 9 in Klampfer (2000: 13, 14,16,17). For 2;5 and 2;6, Klampfer gives only information on the mini-paradigms. Occurrences in target-deviant contexts are indicated. Without frozen forms and imperatives.

2003: 71). At 2;2 Caroline still does not use -st (2sg) and -en for 1pl, so that the verbal paradigm is not fully acquired yet. Tables 17.5 (Caroline) and 17.6 (Anna) do not indicate if a given suffix was used in a target like person-number context. As Bittner (2003: 60ff.) points out especially with early utterances this is often hard to decide, but target deviant uses of certain suffixes clearly exist. Anna, being an early talker as well as a segmental child, proceeds much faster in building up the whole range of endings. Bittner observes a verb spurt at 1;11.6, and the first mini-paradigms are attested after 2;05 (Table 17.6). As pointed out by Klampfer and Bittner, the emergence of mini-paradigms marks the onset of proto-morphology, a phase during which ‘children detect and reconstruct or construct creatively morphological patterns of analogies or of first rules’ (Bittner et al., 2003: xix). Leaving the level of chunk learning and establishing the first productive form-function mappings is a major step demanding rather detailed analysis of the distribution of input properties and their relation to different referential contexts. In the remainder of this chapter we shall address the questions of how young L2 learners of German build up verbal inflectional paradigms of the same sort, what the time course of their acquisition looks like in comparison to child L1 acquisition, and what conclusions can be drawn on the basis of this comparison.

The Acquisition of Verbal Inflection in the Acquisition of L2 German by three Children with L1 Russian In this section we will present the results of a longitudinal observation of the acquisition of verbal inflection by L2 learners of German who were 7–9

1/1

6/8

2/3

1;8

4/4 1/2 8/12

1;9a 1/1 2/2 17/44 1/1

1;9b 2/2 2/2 13/26

1;10a 5/11 1/1 29/44 1/1

1;10b 4/6 1/1 28/80

1;11a 4/4 1/2 18/36

1;11b 10/21 8/8 15/31

2;0a 5/5 3/3 7/8

2;0b 10/12 2/2 35/60

2;1a 23/34 5/5 40/76 1/1

2;1b

22/44 7/7 43/65 1/1

2;2a

11/13

10/30

9/15

13/23

1;8.29 16/23 2/2 20/25

1;9.14 9/15 1/1 15/33

1;10.0 18/27 1/1 48/85

1;11.6 14/19 3/3 33/59

1;11.20

*Presents information from Tables 9 and 17 and Figure 1 in Bittner (2003: 59 and 64). Does not contain 0-forms.

3/m mps

−t −e −en −st

1;8.10

18/21 1/1 26/43

1;11.30

24/50 1/1

15/32

2;0.5

TABLE 17.6 Anna:* Repertoire for present tense suffixes of lexical verbs in any context (lemmas/tokens)

27/44 2/2 64/119 3/6

2;0.29

22/28 5/6 34/63 4/4

2;1.13

*Presents information from Tables 10 and 18 and Figure 2 in Bittner (2003: 59 and 64). Does not contain 0-forms. †Bittner (2003: 62) also presents a number of two-member paradigmatic contrasts for both learners. They are not included here, since the observed formal contrasts do not seem to have any interpretable functional counterpart.

3/m mps†

−t −e −en −st

1;6

TABLE 17.5 Caroline:* Repertoire for present tense suffixes of lexical verbs in any context (lemmas/tokens)

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Par t 2: L1 and L2 Acquisit ion

years old when first coming into contact with the target language. For reasons of comparability we thereby largely adopted the criteria established in the studies on L1 acquisition that were discussed in the preceding section.

Learners and Data Our study is based on longitudinally collected production data from three children acquiring German as an L2 in an immersion situation in Germany. The L1 of all subjects is Russian. The data from EU and AN are part of a corpus collected under the direction of Heide Wegener (cf. Wegener, 1992) in Augsburg, Southern Germany. The data from NAS is part of the DaZ-AF corpus collected under the direction of Ursula Stephany in Cologne (cf. Bast, 2003; Dimroth, 2008; Pagonis, 2007). NAS was 8,7 years old when she came to Cologne, where her mother worked as a scientist at the University. She lived with her mother and her older sister, and the family language continued to be Russian. NAS attended the 2nd grade of a German primary school and rapidly established contacts to German age mates. The first recording with NAS was made in her fourth week of residence in Germany (NAS 01), then data were collected on a weekly basis.4 The data mainly consist of free conversation with adult as well as child interlocutors (while playing games or looking at photos, books etc.). These different types of activities account for the huge variation in the amount of tokens, especially in the first couple of recordings. Table 17.7 contains detailed information about the recordings analyzed for the present study. The numbers include all occurrences of lexical verbs in TABLE 17.7 Data NAS Time 01

22.01.1998

Interlocutor Adult

Min 61

Verb lemmas

Verb types

23

29

Verb tokens 49

02/03

28/29.01.1998

Adult/child

43/41

6

7

11

04

05.02.1998

Child

53

7

8

10

05

12.02.1998

Child

60

13

20

39

06

19.02.1998

Child

37

4

7

9

07

27.02.1998

Adult

61

28

40

74

08

05.03.1998

Child

60

25

43

179

09

12.03.1998

Child

65

33

54

151

10

21.03.1998

Adult

65

22

37

133

11

26.03.1998

Child

65

34

43

157

12 13

02.04.1998 17.04.1998

Child Adult

60 65

28 31

40 47

165 271

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333

the present tense. Forms occurring in target deviant contexts as well as repetitions and frozen forms are also included. Particle verbs representing the same stem count as one lemma (e.g. schneiden, abschneiden, ausschneiden, ‘cut, cut off, cut out’). Verb forms with the same suffix but different stem vowels count as one type (e.g. er *lest, er liest ‘he reads’). Since we are primarily interested in the regular paradigm of verbal suffixes, occurrences of haben ‘have’ (as a lexical verb or as an auxiliary) are included. Only forms, not functions, have been distinguished for this overview. This means that all occurrences of a given verb with an ambiguous suffix (e.g. –en for infinitives, 1st plural, 3rd plural) count as one type. EU was 7;5 years old when he immigrated with his mother. Immediately after the arrival in Augsburg, they moved in with a German-speaking lorry driver. EU entered school three months later and also attended a day care center during the afternoons. The first recording with EU was made in his fourth month of residence (=EU4). However, the analysis of EU4 shows that at this time, he still has to be considered as a real beginner, although we must assume that he has had some German input before. The interviewer’s utterances have to be translated by a Russian-speaking classmate, and EU’s answers mainly consist of single words. There are monthly recordings of approximatively 35 min with adult interlocutors. As an exception, five shorter recordings (labeled EU6a–e) were made in the sixth month of residence. Table 17.8 gives an overview of the recordings and the amount of analyzable lexical verb lemmas, types and tokens (same criteria as above, with the exception of the formula ich weiß (nicht) ‘I (don’t) know’, which is not included here). The data collected from EU as well as from AN mainly consist of free conversations and story telling, for which picture stories were used as TABLE 17.8 Data EU Time

Interlocutor

Min

EU4

22.01.1991

Child + adult

30

9

EU5

19.02.1991

Adult

29

14

13

27

EU6a

06.03.1991

Adult

9

14

29

EU6b

12.03.1991

Adult

8

10

26

EU6c

15.3.1991

Adult

27

36

82

EU6d

19.3.1991

Adult

23

30

75

75

Verb lemmas

Verb types

Verb tokens

10

11

EU6e

22.3.1991

Adult

13

14

37

EU7

30.4.1991

Adult

37

37

45

100

EU8

05.06.1991

Adult

37

37

57

117

EU9

08.07. 1991

Adult

39

47

62

138

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Par t 2: L1 and L2 Acquisit ion

TABLE 17.9 Data AN Time

Interlocutor

Min

Verb lemmas

Verb types

Verb tokens

AN1

27.03.1990

Adult

22

15

20

41

AN3

04.05.1990

Adult

26

20

25

50

AN4

28.05.1990

Adult

60

35

48

81

AN5

17.07.1990

Adult

38

25

32

58

AN8

10/1990

Adult

33

36

41

89

AN10

12/1990

Adult

38

15

23

65

AN11

22.01.1990

Adult

86

53

69

186

elicitation tools. Additional data that were elicited with a battery of special tests (repetition tasks etc.) are not included in the analyses. AN came to Germany at the age of 8;6 with her family who continued to speak Russian at home. During the first 18 months, the family lived in a special hall of residence (Übergangswohnheim) together with other Russianand Polish-speaking immigrants. Thus, although AN attended school immediately after her arrival, she did not play with German children in the afternoons and thus had less contact to the target language. Her learning conditions improved significantly after the family moved into a normal flat. AN was recorded by an adult interlocutor on a monthly basis from the first month onwards. The data collection shows some gaps due to the holidays. Table 17.9 gives an overview of the recordings and the amount of analyzable verb lemmas, types and tokens (same criteria as for EU). Like the L1 data, the three L2 corpora are of different size. For NAS, due to the weekly recordings, we have much more material for the relevant period than for AN or EU (mainly monthly recordings). In the case of NAS, the amount of available data is roughly comparable to the L1 corpora for Anna and Caroline (but see Jan who has nearly twice as many utterances), whereas the corpora for EU and AN and especially Katharina are smaller (Table 17.10).

TABLE 17.10 Verb containing utterances in the L1 and L2 corpora* L1/L2 learner

Jan

Katharina

Caroline

Anna

NAS

EU

AN

Number of verb containing utterances

2188

156

1110

1370

1248

830

712

*Gives only a rough estimate of the size of the corpora used for this comparison. The corpora differ with respect to the inclusion of formulaic expressions, repetitions and the copula/auxiliary sein (‘to be’).

The Older the Bet ter, or More is More

335

Furthermore, the data collected from EU and AN contain many more narratives elicited with the help of picture stories than is the case for NAS. On the one hand, this elicitation technique facilitates the interpretation of learner utterances since it is easier to trace back the speaker’s communicative intentions than in free conversation. On the other, the content of picture stories poses some constraints on the occurrence of verb lemmas and, more importantly, on the contexts of reference (mostly third person) that can be expected. In addition, due to avoidance strategies, ‘natural’ interaction data might contain less errors than elicited data. We will come back to some of these differences during the interpretation of our results in the following sections.

Results For every L2 learner, we present two tables, showing the development of verbal inflections over time. The first table presents results for inflected lexical verbs in the present tense (no infinitives, no repetitions, no frozen forms). Gray cells indicate that we consider the relevant form-function relation as acquired. A suffix is considered to be acquired at the time when • •

•

It is attested with at least three different lemmas (e.g. läuf-t (runs), mach-t (does/makes), sag-t (says)). More than 50% of all tokens are target-adequate (e.g. 3/7 -t 3sg (=seven tokens of the suffix –t appearing with three different lemmas in a correct 3sg context) as opposed to *2/4 -t 3pl (=four tokens of the suffix –t appearing with two different lemmas in an incorrect 3pl context)). The given context is not marked more frequently (tokens) by some other suffix (e.g. -t in EU5 : -t 6/12 3sg vs. -en *4/7 3sg)

The second table displayed for every learner contains the first mini-paradigms attested in the data. For a selection of frequent/productive verb lemmas these tables indicate which suffixes appear over time. Only suffixes occurring in the correct context are counted. Gray cells in that second table indicate for every verb lemma when the morphological variation has reached the level of a mini-paradigm (light gray = two-member mini-paradigms, dark gray = three-member mini-paradigms). For the building up of mini-paradigms, all morphological contrasts used with a target adequate function have been considered (present tense inflections, imperatives, infinitives and past participles) (Table 17.11a and b). Table 17.11a shows that already in the first recording, that is after ca. three weeks of contact with the target language, NAS systematically distinguishes between the –e suffix used for the first person singular and the –t suffix used for the third person singular. Compare the examples in (1): (1) Int:

Und was spielt ihr? (. . .) ‘And what are you playing?’

336

Par t 2: L1 and L2 Acquisit ion

NAS: Int: NAS:

Ich eh läufe I run-1sg ‘I’m running.’ Was malt ihr denn? ‘What are you drawing?’ Ich male Haus (. . .) und K. malt eh Haus (. . .) I draw-1sg house and K. draw-3sg house ‘I’m drawing a house and K. is drawing a house.’

(NAS01)

(NAS01)

Self-corrections like in (2) indicate early sensitivity for contrasting verbal inflections: (2) NAS:

Er eh kamm / kammst / er kammt eh . . . He comb / comb-2sg / comb-3sg . . . ‘He combs. . .’

(NAS01)

Up to the fifth week, the contrast between –e and –t forms is further established. Both markings occur with a couple of new verbs and mainly in target contexts. Additional evidence for the productivity of this early system comes from overgeneralizations of the –t morpheme on modal verbs, which do not mark third person singular with –t in the target language: (3) NAS:

M. willt sitzen mit mir und P. willt sitzen mit mir . M. *want-3sg sit with me and P. *want-3sg sit with me. ‘M. wants to sit next to me and P. wants to sit next to me.’ (NAS05)

At the same time the –st suffix, marking the second person singular is added. It first occurs only in questions and gets fused with the pronoun that follows due to inversion. (4) NAS:

Has(t) du Tamagochi? Have-2sg you Tamagochi? ‘Do you have a Tamagochi?’

(NAS05)

The suffixes –e, -t, and –st (sometimes supplemented by the infinitive) also constitute the first mini-paradigms, as illustrated here with the verb machen (do): (5) Int: NAS:

Sei vorsichtig. Die is(t) spitz die Schere. ‘Be careful. The scissors are pointed.’ Mach ich. Do-1sg I. ‘I will.’

(NAS05)

−0*

−st −en

1/1 3p 1/1 1p *1/2 ? *1/1 1s

8/11 1s 2/3 1s

−(e)

2/3 3s

4/5 3s

02/03

−t

01

Month 1 05

06

1/1 2s 3/6 2s 2/2 2s *1/1 ? *2/2 3s 1/1 1p

1/1 3s 2/3 3s 1/1 3s *1/1 1s *1/1 2s 1/1 1s 5/10 1s 1/3 1s

04

Month 2

*1/1 ? 2/2 3p 2/5 1p *1/1? *4/5 3s *1/1 3s

7/9 1s

9/15 3s *1/1 1s

07

4/20 1s *1/1 3s 7/20 2s 1/1 3p? 5/15 1p *1/1 3s *1/1 2s

5/19 3s

08

4/10 2s 3/5 1p *2/3 ?

10/17 1s

11/20 3s

09

*2/2 3s

12/37 3s *1/2 2s? *1/3 3p 5/19 1s *1/1 3s – 1/1 3p 3/10 1p *2/2 2s

10

Month 3

3/3 2s 5/24 1p

8/22 1s

9/14 3s

11

2/7 2s 1/1 3p 2/7 1p

5/17 1s

8/18 3s *1/1 2s

12

TABLE 17.11a Repertoire of present tense suffixes of lexical verbs (no imperatives, infinitives, participles) in NAS (weekly)*

1/1 2s 4/5 3p 3/9 1p *1/1 1s

7/14 1s

12/51 3s

13

Month 4

The Older the Bet ter, or More is More 337

01 t e e e

en t

e,t

0

04

02/03 e

en

e, t e, st

05 e, st, t

t

t e

t

06 07 e, st, en e, t, en e st e t

08 09 e, st, t, en e, st, t, en st, t t, en e e, st 0, e, st, t, pp e, en e, en 0, t e t, en t e, st, t, en en 0 0 en e, en

t, pp

10 e, t, en e e, t, en e, t, pp

t, pp

en 0, e, t t, pp en

t, en en e

0 pp

11 12 e, st, en e, st, t, en e, en t t, en e, en en, pp

e, t en t, en, pp

pp

t, en, pp e, st, t, pp

13 e, t, en

+= particle verbs included (e.g. wegmachen (‘make away’, remove), zurückkommen (come back) *Since the data – weekly recordings – displayed in Table 17.11 have not been pooled, the acquisition criteria might have been reached earlier than the shadowed areas indicate.

schlafen geben sagen schreiben sitzen nehmen fahren

MPS haben spielen gehen machen +

TABLE 17.11b Two- and three-member mini-paradigms (including imperatives, infinitives, participles)

338 Par t 2: L1 and L2 Acquisit ion

The Older the Bet ter, or More is More

NAS:

NAS:

D. macht so. D. make-3sg like-this. ‘D. is doing like this.’

(NAS04)

Was machs(t) du? What make-2sg ‘What are you doing?’

(NAS05)

339

From week seven onward the suffix –en starts to be used systematically. The acquisition criteria mentioned in the beginning of this section are first met for the target-adequate marking of first person plural (week eight). (6) NAS: Wir waren eh/ gehen eh in / nach (. . .) nach Hause und sagen We were / go-1pl in / to to home and say-1pl ‘We went home and said’ ‘Mama, Mama, wir haben fünf’. Mommy, mommy, we have-1pl five (NAS08) At the same time -en is also used in a target-adequate third plural context (see Example 7), but this context remains quite rare and nontarget-adequate suffixes are used as well (Example 8). The acquisition criteria are only met from the 13th week onwards. (7) Int:

Drei grosse Mädchen. Und wo waren die? ‘Three older girls. And where were they?’ NAS: Sie singen das Lied ,, Wer-Wie-Was’. They sing-3pl the song ‘Wer-Wie-Was’ ‘They were singing the song. . .’

(8) NAS: Unsere Schuhe steht im Korridor. Our shoes stand-3sg in the corridor

(NAS07) (NAS10)

By the end of the second month of target language contact all suffixes are used, and the majority occurs in target-adequate contexts. Within the first four months the acquisition of verbal inflection in the present tense can be considered to be completed – even according to our strict criteria. As for EU, the results are comparable in that he only needs a couple of months to acquire the whole inflectional paradigm. The L2 acquisition process starts when he enters school in his fourth month of residence in Germany, 5 and four to five months later he has acquired all suffixes for lexical verbs in the present and present perfect. After four months, in EU8, all suffixes are correctly used in the majority of cases, with the exception of the suffix –en encoding the third person plural. In EU9, this function is marked correctly as well (Table 17.12a). The first three-member mini-paradigm already appears two months after the first production of verbs (essen ‘eat’ in EU6a) and another five follow in the same month (Table 17.12b).

340

Par t 2: L1 and L2 Acquisit ion

In contrast to NAS, EU does not start with both suffixes, -e for the first person and –t for the third person singular, but only with –t. Cf. the following examples in which EU combines the verbal stems productively with the suffix. The target-adequate forms are irregular: isst (‘eats’) instead of esst, and schläft (‘sleeps’) instead of schlaft. (9) Ein Pferd esst Gras. A horse eat-3sg grass.

(EU6a)

Katze schlaft. Cat sleep-3sg.

(EU6a)

However, the fact that for a couple of weeks EU produced only –t forms has to be considered as an artifact of the data collection since the use of picture stories leads to the prevalence of third person contexts. The marker for the first person only shows up when EU starts to communicate more freely with the interviewer, as in the following examples: (10) Ich liebe so was. I love-1sg such a thing Ich zeige dir, so was. I show-1sg you, such a thing.

(EU6c) (EU6c)

Obviously, this effect also holds for AN (see Table 17.13). Before AN5, there are no contexts for the first person singular, but as soon as these contexts are given, AN marks the first person singular in the correct way. (11) Int: AN: Int: AN:

Fährst du weg? Bleibst hier. ‘Are you leaving? Staying here?’ Ich bleibe hier. I stay-1sg here. (AN5) Was machst du denn in den Ferien, AN? ‘What are you going to do during your vacation, AN?’ Ich spiele. I play-1sg. (AN5)

There is just one single piece of evidence for a wrongly chosen suffix (-en) in AN10, and in this utterance, the second part contains the correct form with -e: (12) Wenn ich sprechen mit Paul, dann ich spreche deutsch When I speak-inf to Paul, then I speak-1sg German

(AN10)

Of all three children, AN needs the longest to acquire the inflectional paradigm. In the first five months of contact to the L2, all suffixes are

*1/1 3sg

*5/13 3sg *1/1 1sg

EU5

*4/7 3sg

6/12 3sg

EU6a

*1/1 3sg *1/1 ?

1/1 1sg

4/17 3sg

EU6b

3/10 1sg

2/2 1pl *2/3 ? *1/1 1sg *1/1 3sg

2/2 3pl 1/1 1pl *3/4 3sg *1/1 1sg 6/7 ?

13/27 3sg

EU6d

10/26 3sg *3/3 3pl 1/1 ? 3/3 1sg

EU6c

Two- and three-member mini-paradigms (including imperatives, infinitives, participles)

−0

−(e) −st −en

−t

Suffix

*1/1 3pl

*1/1 ? *1/1 3sg

1/1 3pl

3/14 1sg

4/8 3sg *3/6 3pl

EU6e

7/18 1sg 4/4 1/1 3pl 2/2 1pl *3/3 ? *2/3 1sg

21/39 3sg

EU7

14/22 1sg 6/8 1/1 3pl 5/7 1pl *1/1 ? *1/2 3sg

26/70 3sg *2/3 3pl

EU8

TABLE 17.12a Repertoire of present tense suffixes of lexical verbs (no imperatives, infinitives, participles) in EU

9/16 1sg 2/3 5/7 3pl 3/4 1pl *1/1 3sg

44/106 3sg

EU9

The Older the Bet ter, or More is More 341

en

En

pp

pp

en, t, pp en, t

En

essen schlafen sehen machen + sagen schlagen gehen + haben schauen (+) lesen kommen brauchen hören spielen nehmen +

EU6a

EU5

MPS

e, pp en, pp en pp

EU6b

pp

t t en, e, pp en, pp en, t, pp en, t, pp en, t e, t en

EU6c

en, t pp t

en, t, pp E t

T

t, pp

e, pp t, en, pp pp

EU6e

pp pp E, pp en, t, en, pp 0, pp

EU6d

st, pp en, t pp

pp e, st, t, pp t, e, pp en, t, pp t, pp

e e, pp t, en, 0, pp en, t, e, pp

EU7

TABLE 17.12b Two- and three-member mini-paradigms (including imperatives, infinitives, participles)

t, en, pp e, t, pp e, t, pp t, e, en, pp pp

t, e, en, st, pp t, e, st, en, pp t, e, 0, pp

e t, en st e, t, pp t, e, pp t, 0, e, st, pp

EU8

t, pp t e, t t, st, pp t, pp t t, e, en, pp e, t, st, en t t t, en, pp t t, pp e, en e, t, pp

EU9

342 Par t 2: L1 and L2 Acquisit ion

*3/5 3sg

*5/5 ? *7/11 3sg 1/1 *2/4 3sg *1/1 3sg

*1/1 ? *12/18 3sg

1/1 *3/3 3sg

16/34 3sg

AN4

*1/1 3pl

2/2 3pl

16/29 3sg *1/2 3pl 3/4

AN5

1/1 *3/5 3sg

1/1 imp s

2/2 3pl

30/69 3sg *1/1 3pl 1/1

AN8

kaufen + legen Gehen machen stecken haben stellen (sich) + kommen + lachen sagen

t

AN1

t

t t

e, en, pp en, pp t t

AN4

e pp t

AN3

t

pp t, en, pp t, en t, pp t, pp

AN5

t, pp Pp t, en t, en t t t t

AN8

TABLE 17.13b Two- and three-member mini-paradigms (including imperatives, infinitives, participles)

Two- and three-member mini-paradigms (including imperatives, infinitives, participles)

−st −0

*2/4 ? *6/18 3sg

1/2 3pl(?)

−en

8/11 3sg

1/1

4/4 3sg

AN3

−(e)

−t

AN1

t, en t, en t t, en t, en en

AN10

*1/1 (?) *3sg

3/11 3pl 1/1 1pl *1/1 1sg *1/1 3sg

2/2

11/25 3sg

AN10

TABLE 17.13a Repertoire of present tense suffixes of lexical verbs (no imperatives, infinitives, participles) in AN

st, t, pp t, en, pp t, en, pp st, t, en, pp e, t, pp 0, t, en t, en, pp 0, e, t, en

0, t, pp

AN11

4/7 *1/1 3sg

2/2 3pl

52/141 3sg *1/1 3pl 3/3

AN11

The Older the Bet ter, or More is More 343

344

Par t 2: L1 and L2 Acquisit ion

recorded and used correctly in most cases. But it is only in AN11 that the results meet our strict criteria. The first three-member mini-paradigm is recorded in AN4 (kaufen ‘buy’), and in comparison to EU not very many others follow afterwards. On the one hand, it seems only natural that AN does not acquire verbal inflection with the same ease as NAS and EU, since her input conditions are not nearly as good. On the other hand, our data may make the acquisition process look more cumbersome than it perhaps really is. The already mentioned prevalence of third person singular contexts entails the low frequency of suffixes other than –t. But of course neither this argument nor the reference to the rigour of our criteria can relativize the numerous infinitives instead of -t forms up to AN4. AN produces another kind of error rather frequently: the use of the verb stem. Some of these errors deserve closer attention. (13) Int: AN:

Int: AN:

Was macht der Willi jetzt? ‘What is Willi doing now?’ Er bad sich. He bathe-0 himself. ‘He is taking a bath’

(AN8)

Und was macht er dann? ‘And what is he doing then?’ Er schneid die Papier. He cut-0 the paper.

(AN 8)

Because of terminal devoicing, the verb stems above (bad ‘take a bath’, schneid, ‘cut’) end on [t] – like any other correctly inflected verb in the third person singular. These errors might in fact be instances of overgeneralization.

Comparison Taking these results together, we are now in a position to compare the duration of the acquisition of agreement marking in learners of German as L1 and L2. We thereby focus on the time span between the occurrence of the first verbs in the learner corpora and the moment when the criteria for proto-morphology are fulfilled. The comparison is based on the lowest common denominator, that is the criteria for ‘proto-morphology’ used in the studies on L1 acquisition (Bittner, 2003; Klampfer, 2000, 2003) that we briefly recapitulate below. The first important criterion states that all person and number marking verbal suffixes must be attested (due to the lack of appropriate contexts this normally excludes the second person plural – this is also the case for the older L2 learning children). In the L1 studies, suffixes with more than one function

The Older the Bet ter, or More is More

345

TABLE 17.14 Time course of acquisition of verb morphology in L1 and L2

L1

L2

First verb-containing utterances

All suffixes attested*

2-member mps

3-member mps

Clahsen

?

about 12?

?

?

Jan

1;4 years

8

4

6

Kat

2;0 years

5

3

6

Car

1;6

years†

more than 8

?

7

Anna

1;8 years‡

more than 5

?

5

NAS

1st month

2

1,5

2

AN

1st month

3

1

4

EU

4th month

4

2

2

*Without disambiguating the –en suffix according to its function †In the first recording at 1;6 Caroline used already nine verb lemmas ‡In the first recording at 1;8 Anna used already 25 verb lemmas

are not disambiguated, that is the suffix counts as attested when it is first used in whichever function. Researchers rather rely on mini-paradigms for the assessment of productivity and consequently the achievement of proto-morphology. True (three-member) mini-paradigms, however, occur late and infrequently in the child L1 data. Since this can partly be due to missing contexts this should not be overrated. Bittner (2003) and Klampfer (2000, 2003) therefore also document the learners’ first two-member mini-paradigms. Table 17.14 summarizes the results of the L1 and the L2 studies. From a comparison of the results summarized in Table 17.14 it can be seen that the older L2 learning children need less time to build up verbal paradigms than the younger L1 learning children – despite the fact that they were learning German under generally less advantageous input conditions. From Tables 17.11 through 17.13 it can be seen that this is also true when stricter acquisition criteria are applied. The amount of early three-member mini-paradigms is much bigger in the L2 learning children. They need less time to build up the first target-like form-function distinctions and thus also for a productive use of verbal inflectional morphology (mini-paradigms) than the L1 learning toddlers.

Discussion Given this conclusion, and contrary to what was predicted by the Less is More Hypothesis, it seems clear that an increase in memory and information processing capacity did not harm the older children. Despite their less favorable input conditions they were more successful in acquiring an aspect of language requiring the type of componential analysis for which the Less is More

346

Par t 2: L1 and L2 Acquisit ion

Hypothesis predicts too much intake to be detrimental. Our findings therefore clearly disconfirm the hypothesis. If anything, their advanced cognitive capacity seems to have helped the older children at the acquisition task at hand. We do not assume, however, that this is the only advantage that made the child L2 learners so fast in comparison to both child L1 and adult L2 learners. Rather, we think that the success of the child L2 learners is most likely due to a combination of advantageous learning conditions and strategies. The list given in Table 17.15 is not meant to be exhaustive. We will briefly comment on the entries below. With respect to cognitive maturity the older children might be closer to the adult learners than to the young children (compare the findings on the increase of memory span during childhood summarized in the Introduction). Instead of being a hindrance, we assume that these learners’ increased memory capacities and their wider attention spans lead to a greater receptiveness to distributional properties of the input. The abstraction capacity increases with age as well, which means that the critical mass of rote-learned ‘verb islands’ that the older learners need in order to draw abstractions might be smaller than the amount needed by toddlers. In fact, these factors can hardly be separated from the prior knowledge and the language learning experience that L2 learners at any age bring to the task. Faster abstraction processes might occur because of both their advanced cognitive capacities and preexisting linguistic knowledge – L2 learners already ‘know’ how to perform a distributional analysis. In the case of inflectional morphology this prior knowledge can be of a very specific kind: at least for certain L1–L2 pairs (including the one studied here) it can be assumed that L2 learners can profit from positive transfer of a languagespecific category like subject–verb agreement from their L1. Experience guided search: It is important to note that L1 learning children must first of all discover the category of verbs (in contrast to nouns which are normally acquired first, along with social words like hello). Some researchers hypothesize that the concepts that children entertain for inflected verbs do not match the corresponding concepts in the adult language. Bittner (2003: 76ff.) for example maintains that L1 learning children rely on target deviant form-function mappings when acquiring agreement marking in TABLE 17.15 Learning conditions and strategies in relation to age of language acquisition

Cognitive maturity Experience-guided search Less L1 entrenchment Precise mimicking of input

Toddler

Older child

Adult

− − Ø +

+ + + +

+ + − −

The Older the Bet ter, or More is More

347

German (see also Clahsen’s (1986) proposal according to which early suffixes encode degree of transitivity). The details of such proposals may be taken to be plausible or not – it is in any case unlikely that learners with experience in agreement marking are geared to such idiosyncratic concepts. The L2 learning children have already mastered a language and manage to analyze the target categories without a detour via proto-grammatical categories – in particular since Russian has a rich and uniform verb inflection paradigm. L1 entrenchment is an important factor that is usually confounded with age and leads to different learning conditions for children as opposed to adult L2 learners (cf. Ellis, 2008). Because of L1 entrenchment, adult learners may be less attentive to certain aspects of the L2 input than child L2 learners who have not automatized the use of first language patterns to the same degree. Precise mimicking of input or chunk learning takes place in language acquisition at all ages. But from our data we have the impression that children are particularly inclined to reproduce chunks from the input and use them as building blocks that sound completely authentic even though their meaning and structure are probably not fully understood. Chunks can best be detected in situations where they do not really fit the context. Compare the following example: (14) Int: EU: Int: EU:

Wieviel Kinder seid ihr? (. . .) Also du. . . ‘How many children are there at your home? (. . .) OK, you. . .’ Mein Schwester und mein Bruder – ist gleich drei – drei. ‘My sister and my brother – equals three – three’ Drei, seid ihr drei, und dann noch die Mama. ‘Three, you are three, and then Mummy of course’ Und Mama ist gleich vier. ‘And Mummy equals four.’ (EU5)

The formula ist gleich (‘equals’) is only used in mathematical equations – most likely the source from which EU has copied it. The example illustrates both the capacity to extract and holistically store relatively big chunks from the input and the advantageous lack of worry about possible errors or misunderstandings that seems to be more typical of child than of adult language learners.

Conclusion Using contemporary methods for the assessment of early productivity in the acquisition of inflection paradigms, we have shown in this chapter that 7–9-year-old L2 learners, rather than suffering from a counterproductive increase in information processing capacity, are faster in acquiring German verbal morphology than young monolingual children acquiring the same language as L1.

348

Par t 2: L1 and L2 Acquisit ion

We hypothesize that L2 learning children benefit from the combination of several advantageous conditions and strategies for language acquisition. Older children share both, small children’s form-oriented strategies and their unbiased confidence that any input property is worth imitation on the one hand, and advanced information processing capacities as well as experience in language learning and consequently ‘vigilance’ for certain properties of the input on the other.

Notes (1) We are very grateful to Leah Roberts’ useful comments on an earlier version of this chapter. (2) The well-known overview of the acquisition of German by Mills (1985) offers only sparse information on agreement marking, as compared to the acquisition of case markers for example. Note: Aspect-tense inflection has attracted much more attention, cf. Behrens (2001). (3) The emergence of these girls’ first verbs is not documented. At the beginning of the data collection, Anna (1;8) already used 25 verb lemmas, Caroline (1;6) used nine verb lemmas. (4) In week 5, two shorter recordings (Nas02 and Nas03) were made on two subsequent days. These are pooled together in the following analyses. (5) The recording made in EU’s fourth month of residence in Germany has not been included since it only contains four infinitives and one –t form.

References Aksu-Koç, A. and Ketrez, F.N. (2003) Early verbal morphology in Turkish: Emergence of inflections. In D. Bittner, W.U. Dressler and M. Kilani-Schogh (eds) Mini-Paradigms and the Emergence of Verb Morphology (pp. 27–52). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Bast, C. (2003) Der Altersfaktor im Zweitspracherwerb. Die Entwicklung der grammatischen Kategorien Numerus, Genus und Kasus in der Nominalphrase im ungesteuerten Zweitspracherwerb des Deutschen bei russischen Lernerinnen. Doctoral dissertation, Universität zu Köln. Behrens, H. (2001) Cognitive-conceptual development and the acquisition of grammatical morphemes: The development of time concepts and verb tense. In M. Bowerman and S.C. Levinson (eds.) Language Acquisition and Conceptual Development (pp. 450– 474). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Birdsong, D. (2005a) Why not fossilization? In Z. Han and T. Odlin (eds) Studies of Fossilization in Second Language Acquisition (pp. 173–188). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Birdsong, D. (2005b) Interpreting age effects in second language acquisition. In J.F. Kroll and A.M.B. De Groot (eds) Handbook of Bilingualism: Psycholinguistic Perspectives (pp. 109–127). New York: Oxford University Press. Bittner, D. (2000) Early verb development in one German-speaking child. ZAS Papers in Linguistics 18, 21–38. Bittner, D. (2003) The emergence of verb inflection in two German-speaking children. In D. Bittner, W.U. Dressler and M. Kilani-Schoch (eds) Development of Verb Inflection in First Language Acquisition. A Cross-Linguistic Perspective (pp. 53–88). Berlin: de Gruyter. Bittner, D., Dressler, W.U. and Kilani-Schoch, M. (2003) Introduction. In D. Bittner, W.U. Dressler and M. Kilani-Schoch (eds) Development of Verb Inflection in First Language Acquisition. A Cross-Linguistic Perspective (pp. vii–xxxvii). Berlin: de Gruyter.

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Clahsen, H. (1986) Verb inflections in German child language: Acquisition of agreement marking and the functions they encode. Linguistics 24, 79–121. Corder, S.P. (1967) The significance of learners’ errors. International Review of Applied Linguistics 5, 161–169. Dimroth, C. (2008) Age effects on the process of L2 acquisition? Evidence from the acquisition of negation and finiteness L2 German. Language Learning 58, 117–150. Ellis, N. (2008) Usage-based and form-focused language acquisition: The associative learning of constructions, learned-attention, and the limited L2 end state. In P. Robinson and N. Ellis (eds) Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition (pp. 372–405). New York, NY: Routledge. Huttenlocher, J. and Burke, D. (1976) Why does memory span increase with age? Cognitive Psychology 8, 1–31. Klampfer, S. (2000) Early verb development in one Austrian child. ZAS Papers in Linguistics 18, 7–20. Klampfer, S. (2003) Emergence of verb paradigms in one Austrian child. In D. Bittner, W.U. Dressler and M. Kilani-Schoch (eds) Development of Verb Inflection in First Language Acquisition. A Cross-Linguistic Perspective (pp. 297–323). Berlin: de Gruyter. Klampfer, S., Maillochon, I., Bassano, D. and Dressler, W. (1999/2000) On early acquisition of verb inflection in Austrian German and French: The case of person and number marking. Wiener Linguistische Gazette 64–65, 1–29. Mills, A. (1985) The acquisition of German. In D.I. Slobin (ed.) The Crosslinguistic Study of Language Acquisition (pp. 141–254). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Newport, E. (1990) Maturational constraints on language learning. Cognitive Science 14, 11–28. Newport, E. (1991) Contrasting conceptions of the critical period for language. In S. Carey and R. Gelman (eds) The Epigenesis of Mind (pp. 111–130). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Pagonis, G. (2007) Der Einfluss des Alters auf den Spracherwerb. Eine empirische Fallstudie zum ungesteuerten Zweitspracherwerb des Deutschen durch russische Lerner unterschiedlichen Alters. PhD dissertation, Universität Heidelberg. Perdue, C. (1996) Pre-basic varieties: The first stages of second language acquisition. Toegepaste Taalwetenschap in Artikelen 55, 135–150. Perdue, C. (2006) ‘Creating language anew.’ Some remarks on an idea of Bernard Comrie’s. Linguistics 44, 853–871. Schneider, W. (2002) Memory development in childhood. In U. Goswami (ed.) Blackwell Handbook of Childhood Cognitive Development (pp. 236–256). London: Blackwell. Tomasello, M. and Stahl, D. (2004) Sampling children’s spontaneous speech: How much is enough? Journal of Child Language 31, 101–121. Wegener, H. (1992) Kindlicher Zweitspracherwerb. Untersuchungen zur Morphologie des Deutschen und ihrem Erwerb durch Kinder mit polnischer, russischer und türkischer Erstsprache. Eine Längsschnittuntersuchung. Doctoral dissertation, Universität Augsburg. Wexler, K. (1998) Very early parameter setting and the unique checking constraint. A new explanation of the optional infinitive stage. Lingua 106, 23–79.

18 Additive Scope Particles and Anaphoric Linkage in Narrative and Descriptive Texts: A Developmental Study in French L1 and L2 Sandra Benazzo, †Clive Perdue and Marzena Watorek

The core ideas of this chapter have been initially worked out for a joint presentation at the Euresco conference ‘The structure of learner language’ (Kolymbari, 7–12 October 2002), and afterwards refined in the form of this chapter, which was written before Clive passed away. We decided to publish it here,1 as a tribute to Clive, in memory of a deep friendship and a fruitful collaboration, made of stimulating scientific discussions, hard work but also a lot of fun!

Introduction This chapter addresses the general question of discourse construction from the specific point of view of the speaker/learner’s use of additive words in the production of two different text types – picture descriptions and retellings. These tasks will be described in detail in the following section. We compare performances on these two tasks by different types of speaker: children aged 4, 7 and 10 years, adults speaking in their L1, and adult learners of an L2. The language spoken is French in all cases. We analyse these speakers’ use of ‘additive words’: additive scope particles aussi (also), encore (another) and temporal adverbs of contrast encore, toujours (again – still). Aussi associates with a constituent of the utterance it occurs in, and adds this constituent to an already established (set of) alternative(s). In what follows, we call this constituent the ‘scope domain’ of the particle. For encore, we understand the idea of repetition or addition, a meaning close to that of aussi. Encore differs however from aussi in that the set of alternatives are 350

Addit ive Scope Par t icles and Anaphor ic Linkage

351

tokens of the same type (=another or one more). Encore also has two temporal values: (a) often associated with une fois – encore une fois (‘once again’) – it has a value of repetition: the same type of situation takes place at a later time; (b) it relates two temporal reference points: a state or action remains valid from a previous time to the time in question. This temporal value comes close to one of the values of toujours, whose meaning is usually described as marking (a) a permanent validity for the time span in question, or (b) the persistence of the validity of a state or action until a time in question. (b) is strongly reminiscent of encore, and we propose the following common denominator: ‘an action or state is valid for a time span t and for at least one other time span preceding t’. Used in (adult) discourse, all these words refer back, that is anaphorically, to a previous time span or a previous member of a set. The scope particles are attested early in the spontaneous production both of children (Gayraud, 2004; Jordens, 2002; Penner et al., 1999) and adult learners (Benazzo, 2002; Perdue et al., 2002), whereas the temporal adverbs occur somewhat later. What we attempt to do here is to analyse their role in organising the different text types. Table 18.1 gives the sum of the tokens of these words found in the production of each group of speaker. The table also shows that for the additive task, each group of children contained 15 subjects, and for the description, 20 subjects. Ten native adults performed both tasks. The group of adult L2 speakers (age range 20–46 years) was composed of 10 subjects whose L1 is Polish. All were recorded in France, after a length of stay ranging from one to six months (with the exception of one subject who has been in France for two years). Two of these learners, Waldemar and Ewa, were at a basic level of proficiency (Klein & Perdue, 1997), whilst the other eight were more advanced, using (unsystematically) some verbs in the present tense and with one or two past forms (passé composé) and the modal vouloir (‘want’); one also observes some cases of subordination with parce que (‘because’) et pour (‘in order to’).

Additive Task: Reference to People and Time The Task For this task the subject was asked to produce an online narration based on a series of 30 pictures. The interviewer comments on the first four pictures, which serve as an orientation. The first introduces the setting: a small village with a church, a café and a general store, within the background a castle atop a hill. The second allows the interviewer to give the point of the story, which is to help the king discover who has released the princess, who had been imprisoned in the castle. Only the subject can do this, as s/he has been watching what has been going on in the village all day. Pictures three and four introduce the possible candidates for the reward: Mr Red and Mr Blue (henceforth MrR and MrB). With the personal, temporal and spatial

15 15 42

12 15 36

3 39 51

17 2 37

73 73 207

18 0 37

4 years 19 3 0 26

7 years 23

26 2 41

61

Encore toujours Total

L2 18

L1 9

10 years 9

4 years 13

Aussi

7 years 12

Children (20subj./gr)

Adults (10subj./ gr.)

Children (15subj./gr)

Tot.

Description

Additive task

Particle

TABLE 18.1 Tokens of words across groups and text types

17 0 44

10 years 27

19 19 56

L1 18

2 0 29

L2 27

Adults (10 subj./gr.)

59 19 192

114

Tot.

132 92 399

175

Tot

352 Par t 2: L1 and L2 Acquisit ion

Addit ive Scope Par t icles and Anaphor ic Linkage

353

frame set up, the subject takes over and reconstructs from the following pictures, shown one by one, what MrR and MrB did on the day the princess was freed. The task is an adaptation of the ‘additive task’ conceived first of all for adults2 by Dimroth (2002) specifically to elicit additive particles. Table 18.2 summarises the content of each picture and specifies the contexts where use of additive particles could be expected (‘additive episodes’ I–V). The additive episodes are organised in the following way: Episodes I and V show a series of actions undertaken first by MrR and later by MrB. The same actions accomplished by different protagonists was designed to elicit aussi (MrB buys a ladder and MrR aussi buys a ladder), or some contextual equivalent such as également or comme MR (like MrR). Such expressions explicitly mark the additive relation between the protagonists for the same action-type. Episode II shows MrR at a café table who drinks one orange juice, then a second, then a third. The same protagonist performs the same action-type at successive time intervals. Here, the subject can either prolong the time interval: il boit encore/toujours, or focus on the different drink-tokens: il boit un jus. . . il boit encore un jus. Episodes III and IV are understood in relation to the church clock: at 3.30 MrR is sleeping, at 4.00 he is sleeping, at 4.30 he is reading a paper and at 5.00 he is sleeping. This episode requires both an additive relation in the domain of time as the same activity continues il dort encore/toujours, and the repetition of the same situation – he goes back to sleep: il dort encore/ de nouveau, or il re-dort. Marking these additive relations on protagonists or other entities, or on time intervals, contributes to discourse cohesion by building up anaphoric chains. We start by examining when these additive relations are indeed explicitly marked.

Results Marking vs non-marking of additive relations For the L1 speakers, explicit marking increases with age. This increase is true of all episodes, but in different proportions: the three groups of children mark additive relations for entities less than those for time intervals. Even at 10 years, although almost 100% of the temporal relations are marked, only four subjects out of 15 (26.6%) mark the additive relation on entities. Indeed, the childrens’ results from episodes I and V makes one wonder whether it is at all necessary to mark these additive relations. The L1 adults do however overwhelmingly (80%) mark episode V, but not episode I (20%). Episode I is therefore not an obligatory context. This is so because a contrast other than that between the two protagonists is possible: both leave the scene, but MrB exits stage left whereas MrR exits stage right.

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TABLE 18.2 The ‘additive-elicitation task’ Add. Episode

N° picture

Situation

I

01 02 03 04 05 06

Introduction ‘village street’ Introduction ‘princess’ introduction ‘Monsieur Rouge’ introduction ‘Monsieur Bleu’ R & B are in front of the church B leaves R remains in front of the church R leaves/walks towards the café R drinks an orange juice R drinks an orange juice R drinks an orange juice R leaves B walks along the street B smokes a cigarette B leaves in the bus R is seated on a bench R sleeps on the bench R sleeps on the bench R sits up, reads the paper R sleeps on the bench

Expected additive item

IV

07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

V

20 21 22 23 24 25

R goes into a shop R comes out with a ladder R walks towards the hill B arrives back with the bus B walks towards the café B drinks an orange juice

aussi

26

B goes into a shop

aussi

27

B comes out with a ladder

aussi

28

B walks towards the hill

aussi

29

B walks up the hill towards the castle R stays near the trees B nears the castle R picks apples

II

III

30

Source: Adapted from Dimroth (2002)

aussi encore un / un autre encore un / un autre

15.00 15.30 16.00 16.30 17.00

encore / toujours encore / de nouveau

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TABLE 18.3 Explicit marking of additive relations Additive

Episode

4-year olds (%)

7-year 10-year olds (%) olds (%)

I

Add. of entities

13,3

26,6

V

Add. of entities

13,3

III IV

Adults (%)

L2 (%)

6,6

20

20

20

26,6

80

80

Add. of time intervals 13,3 (continuation)

73,3

100

100

90

Add. of time intervals 60 (repetition)

66,6

93,3

90

60

The adults all mark the temporal relation of continuation, and nine out of 10 mark the repetition. A preliminary comparison with the adult L2 learners shows that they behave more like the L1 adults than the children: only 20% explicitly mark episode I, but a large majority mark all the other additive contexts (60–90%, depending on the episode). Episode II has not been quantified, as too many different interpretations have been attested for this scene (Table 18.3). In the following section we examine group by group all the explicit means, whether they be direct or indirect, that subjects use to mark the additive relations.

The 4-year-old The main characteristic of this group is the use of very simple utterances, by means of which children comment on each picture separately, rather than linking them to construct a story. Most children use deictic means to refer directly to the picture and the interviewer has to intervene to have the protagonists specified. In (1), the interviewer’s words are in bold: (1)3 y a un monsieur qui va par là y a un monsieur qui va par là et après il vient encore et puis il boit son jus son truc c’est qui? Monsieur Rouge (Axelle) et après il arrive au château il coupe l’arbre lui !

there’s a man who goes that way there’s a man who goes that way and after, he comes again and then he drinks his juice his thing it’s who? Mr Red and after, he arrives at the castle he cuts the tree, him!

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Monsieur rouge? MrR? oui Monsieur Rouge yes MrR Monsieur Bleu il va couper cet arbre là(Car.) MrB he goes to cut that tree there •

Episodes I and V: Protagonists

The explicit marking of the additive relation is rare overall, but when it is marked, all subjects use aussi. But there are problems with its interpretation. Either the referent in question is undecidable, as in (1), in which case the scope domain of aussi is an uninterpretable pronoun, or the position of aussi is compatible with two scope domains. When aussi is in post-verbal or utterance-final position, its scope domain can be either the subject or the predicate of the utterance: (2) après il ... va acheter une échelle aussi (Mélanie) after, he goes to buy a ladder too In (2), one needs the preceding picture to be able to decide whether aussi’s scope domain is ‘il’ (addition of protagonists) or ‘acheter une échelle’ (addition of actions). We also find the particle at the beginning of the utterance: (3)4 M.Bleu boiva aussi un verre... et aussi M.Bleu prena l’échelle(Lena)

MrB drinked also a glass and also MrB taked the ladder

(3) describes the episode (V) where MrB is recapitulating MrR’s actions: the informational context thus indicates that the scope domain of aussi in bold type is MrB (underlined in the gloss). This position for this scope domain is in fact impossible in TL-French. The vast majority of these interpretation difficulties can be attributed to the fact that these children do not take into account the state of knowledge of the interviewer. •

Episodes III and IV: Situations

The continuation of the action of sleeping in episode III is often marked by temporal adverbs: encore (‘still’, 6/15) or longtemps (‘for a long time’, 1/15). But ‘indirect means’, such as aussi or the negation, are also often present. (4) là il est allongé / là aussi(Lucie)

there, he is stretched out / there too

Lucie uses aussi to express a similarity between two pictures, to which she refers deictically. Examples such as (4) clearly show that at this age,

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children can produce descriptions when performing this narrative task. In (5), Pauline, in commenting successive pictures, indirectly asserts that the action is continuing by denying that it has stopped: (5) il boit / il a pas fini (de boire)(Pauline)

he drinks/ he has not finished (drinking)

A last noteworthy fact in this group’s expression of continuation is that the concept is sometimes confused with that of iteration, insofar as encore is used with a verb expressing a telic event to comment a picture depicting a continuative rather than a repeated situation. (6) il s’allonge / il s’allonge encore(Lola.)

he lies down/ he lies down still

Another possible interpretation is that, by analogy with là aussi used as a deictic commentary, Lola is commenting the repetition of a scene she has already observed: encore une fois je vois quelqu’ un qui s’allonge ‘again I see someone lying down’. Otherwise, the expression of repetition is unproblematic, with six subjects out of 15 using the specific prefix re- as in this example from Quentin: (7) il dort / il redort (Quentin)

he goes to sleep/ he re-goes to sleep

The 7-year-olds With the exception of là (‘there’, referring to the picture) all the deictic uses of the 4-year-olds production have disappeared. The protagonists are clearly identified, with in some cases an expression which is over-explicit in relation to adult productions (see example 8: the MR he . . . the MB he.., and with other children: MR he. . . or there is MR who.., in a context of reference maintenance). (8) le M.Rouge il rentre dans le magasin d’outils le M.Rouge il ressort avec une échelle (Jus.)

the MrR he goes into the tool shop the MrR he comes back out with a ladder

The strong pronoun lui is used as in TL French to contrast two topics (5 subjects out of 15): (9) M.Rouge va prendre des pommes et M.Bleu lui suit le chemin (Bas.)

MrR goes to take some apples MrB (as for) him continues along the path

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Use of re- is now extended to denote the restitutive variant of repetition (ressortir, ‘come back out of’, see example 8, revenir, ‘return’, etc.). •

Episodes I and V: Protagonists

Aussi remains the preferred linguistic means for marking this additive relation, and now the scope domain of the particle has become clearly identifiable thanks to the use of the contrastive pronoun lui. The means are now in place for (over-)marking contrastive topics, as (10) shows: (10) il est parti pour aller à l’épicerie. . . et lui aussi il a pris une échelle (Mél.) là M.Bleu il part et M.Rouge aussi il part (Mat.)

he’s gone to the grocer’s and he too he has taken a ladder there MrB he leaves and MrR too he leaves

Other means can now be used to mark this relation, as with the explicit comparison of (11): (11) il va vers le chemin comme son frère (Dap.) he goes toward the path like his brother •

Episodes III and IV: Situations

Indirect means such as negation or the described similarity between two pictures (Examples 4 and 5) are still used to mark continuity, as is encore (five subjects). However, other means are also used: toujours (three subjects), and the verb continuer (one subject): (12) et puis il est toujours en train de dormir (Cor.) après il continue à dormir (Mat.)

and then he’s still sleeping after, he continues to sleep

although the use of this verb in an iterative context (13) suggests that some seven years still have problems in differentiating continuity and iteration: (13) il lit un journal / il continue de dormir comme tout à l’heure* (Bla.) he reads a paper / he continues to sleep like shortly before Other subjects use however the re-V prefix in this iterative context.

The 10/11-year olds More sophisticated means are used to contrast the two protagonists, such as a less rigid and TL-like use of contrastive topic, which can be associated with the successful contrast of (simultaneous) actions by means of tandis que (‘whereas’) and pendant que (‘while’):

Addit ive Scope Par t icles and Anaphor ic Linkage

(14) M.Bleu lui monte vers le château... tandis que M.Rouge a déjà cueilli des pommes (Luc.) et M.Bleu il s’ en va en voiture tandis que M.Rouge # il est assis sur un banc . . . M.Rouge appuie son échelle contre un pommier où y a des belles pommes rouges pendant que M. Bleu arrive (Axe.)

•

359

MrB HE goes to the castle whereas MrR has already picked apples and MrB he goes away in a car whereas MrR # he is seated on a bench MrR leans his ladder against an apple tree where there are nice red apples while MrB arrives

il rencontre M.Rouge qui cueille des pommes lui il monte encore plus vers le château(Eme)

he meets MrR who is picking apples HE he climbs still further towards the castle

pendant ce temps M.Bleu arrive (Nic.)

during which time MrB arrives

Episodes I and V: Protagonists

The contrastive pronoun lui + aussi structure, used systematically by the seven years in initial position, can also be used as an antitopic by the 10 year olds. For topic continuity, the 10 year olds, unlike the younger children, also use ellipsis of the subject (zero anaphor), as the following example shows: (15) après il va voir vers le magasin d’outils et en sort lui aussi avec une échelle (Eme)

after, he goes to see in the tool shop and Ø comes back out he too with a ladder

The means marking addition of entities become richer, as does the organisation of information. The 10 year olds use a procedure also used by adults which consists in framing a series of actions by stating they are similar – comme – to a preceding series, then giving the detail. Here is an adult version of this procedure: (16) et là il fait comme M.Rouge tout à l’heure il s’assoit à la terrassse du café et il boit un coup ensuite il rentre dans le magasin (Tif.)

and there he does like MrR did before he sits down at the café terrasse and he has a drink then he goes into the shop

The comparison with native adults shows that these have an even bigger repertoire for expressing the additive relation, using également and à son tour as well, as in the following examples:

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(17) il en ressort avec une échelle sur le dos he comes back out with a ladder on his back et Ø se dirige lui aussi à son tour vers le château (Bru.) and Ø directs his steps he too in turn towards the castle il boit également une orangeade he equally drinks an orangeade il va également acheter sa petite échelle (Lin.) he equally goes to buy his little ladder •

Episodes III and IV: Situations

To express continuity, the 10 year olds use a variety of means: encore (6/15), toujours (6/15), continuer (1/15); the prefix re-V (il se rendort, ‘he goes back to sleep’, and, once il recommence à dormir ‘he starts sleeping again’) is the only means now used to mark reiteration.

The Polish learners of L2 French As we said, the explicit marking of additive relations is quantitatively like that of the native adults; these adult learners systematically attempt to give structure to their reference to the protagonists, and to the temporal relations. Recall also that this group does not master the verb morphology of French, hence, some of the English glosses given below contain verbs in the infinitive form, so as not to over-interpret the learners’ underlying knowledge. •

Episodes I and V: Protagonists

(18) gives the complete repertoire of these learners’ means for marking additive relations: aussi, comme, même and the idiosyncratic à nouveau (used by Agnieska to convey ‘also’ rather than ‘again’) (18) M.Bleu parti / M.Rouge aussi partir (Ewa) M.Bleu il assis comme avant M.Rouge et il boire quelquechose comme avant M.Rouge (Barbara) il prend le même passage petit à château (Pawel) M.Bleu à nouveau* boit (Agnes)

MrB leave/ MrR also leave MrB he seated like before MrR and he drink something like before MrR he take the same passage little to castle MrB again* (=also) drink

The beginning learners tend to place the particle aussi immediately to the right of its scope domain (as Ewa, in 19), whereas the more advanced learners use the post-verbal/final position (as Agn., in 19).

Addit ive Scope Par t icles and Anaphor ic Linkage

(19) M.Rouge juste à côté M.Bleu il aussi devant l’église M.Bleu parti / M.Rouge aussi partir (Ewa) après M.Rouge aller parti aussi (Agnes)

361

MrR just next to MrB he too in front of the church MrB left/MrR also leave after, MrR go leave too

Almost as if they were aware of the different scope possibilities of aussi in this position, these learners add supplementary means (comme M.Rouge, or, as in the following example, même ‘the same’) in order to make explicit the scope domain of aussi: (20) après il va au magasin. il il va acheter aussi l’échelle euh aussi il va acheter achète échelle il va aussi le même chemin M.Rouge pour le château(Edyta)

after, he goes to the shop he he goes to buy also the ladder er also he goes to buy buys ladder he goes also the same path MrR for the castle

What is remarkably different with the adult learners is that none uses either the French-specific contrastive pronoun lui, or, therefore, the contrastive topic structure lui aussi. •

Episodes III and IV: Situations

The means used by the beginners tend to confirm the results of other studies (Benazzo, 2002, 2003) that additive aussi is used/acquired before the temporal adverbs of contrast. As we have seen, Ewa has aussi, but does not use encore. The beginners resort, completely unlike the children, to a chronology (21) with or without the aid of the church clock, or, somewhat like the young children, to the expression of similarity between pictures (22): (21) il dort il dort à 30 minutes à 5 h il fatigué et il dort (Ewa) (22) M.Rouge se couche devant l’église ici il se couche aussi (Mat.)

he sleeps he sleeps to 30 minutes at 5 o’clock he tired and he sleeps MrR lies down in front of the church here he lies down too

The intermediate learners do mark the addition of time intervals, using encore both for continuity and for iteration. (23) il dort sur le banc / il dort encore (Pawel)

he sleeps on the bench/ he sleeps still

The positioning of this adverb, and also of toujours, is however unstable: Five learners place them pre- and post-verbally:

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(24) MR dort à côté église / encore dort MR lit le journal ou livre il dort encore (Renata)

MrR sleeps next to church/still sleeps MrR reads the paper or book he sleeps again

il est toujours à côté de l’église. . . il toujours dort (Barbara)

he is still next to the church he still sleeps

il dort encore M.Rouge il a [revej]. . .. ensuite il M.Rouge encore il dort (Edyta)

he sleeps still MrR he has awake then he MrR again he sleeps

It may be that the position of encore varies with the continuity/iteration distinction, and that the adverbs behave differently with respect to the copula and main verbs, but the data are too scant to be affirmative. What can be reliably asserted, though, is that none of the adult learners uses the French-specific prefix reV.

Comparison L1–L2 We can summarise the development observed in the child learners in the following way: •

Protagonists

The 4-year-olds mainly use aussi in association with extra-linguistic referents (là aussi, ‘there too’) before using it endophorically as a means to reinforce text cohesion, that is as an anaphor. Its scope domain becomes clearly identifiable from seven years onwards, thanks to the emergence of the contrastive use of the strong pronoun lui. These two words together (lui aussi) function to link actions by contrasting their actants. This development parallels that in reference to people: NP-expressions are ambiguous in the 4-year-olds’ production, as they do not take account of the interlocutor’s state of knowledge; forms are on the contrary overexplicit at age seven, and contextually adjusted at age 10, with the emergence of zero anaphor. •

Time intervals

In this domain, we see the progressive emergence of specific and adequate means for marking the additive relation. 4-year-olds mark continuity indirectly (negation, aussi accompanied with a deictic expression) before the subsequent use of encore, toujours, and the verb continuer. The iterative value comes systematically to be marked by the specific prefix re-. The two values, continuity and iteration, are not systematically differentiated even with some 7-year-olds, as the incompatibilities between encore, continuer and the Aktionsart of the associated predicate attest.

Addit ive Scope Par t icles and Anaphor ic Linkage

•

363

Form–function relations

All the elicited additive items do seem to be part of the youngest childrens’ repertoire, and what has to be acquired is their discourse function. The same reasoning holds also for lui: the strong pronoun is used, albeit rarely, in the youngest group, but with either a deictic or a non-contrastive value (respectively il s’en va, lui in example 1, and il a un verre devant lui ‘he has a glass in front of him’). The contrastive function is not attested before age seven. For the adult learners we observe systematic attempts to mark additive relations, differently from the children. What differentiates the adult learners from the adult L1 speakers is the linguistic means employed. In particular, the specific means to mark contrastive topics lui (aussi) or repetition/ restitution – re- - are not acquired; the additive particles aussi/encore, or indirect means are used instead, and in this particular respect we do see similarities with the productions of the very young children.

The Descriptive Task: Reference to Entities and Places The Task The descriptive task involves describing as completely and precisely as possible the spatial structure of a poster depicting an urban scene, and the positions of entities relative to each other (what is where in relation to what). The children were asked to describe the poster to a person who was present but could not see it, whereas the adults were told that their recording would be used in a further part of the experiment, 5 to see if another person could reproduce the poster from the recorded description, by drawing it. The procedure thus gives more freedom to the subject in contrast to the additive task, as s/he can choose the point of departure and the linearisation strategy. The poster did however provide a constant set of spatial configurations to be described. These configurations are described in what follows as a relation between a relatum (or ‘ground’, in Talmy’s, 1985, terms) and a theme (‘figure’, in Talmy’s terms). As we did in the Introduction, we first take the childrens’ productions, then compare them with those of the adult learners.

The results The 4-year-olds The young children found this task extremely difficult, and we find few theme–relatum relations marked explicitly in their productions. The general strategy is to take the poster as an implicit relatum, and then provide a list of themes. When the relatum is expressed, the order theme + relatum is systematically observed. A majority of utterances thus consist of a bare NP, to

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which an additive particle may be associated left- or right-adjacent. The particle also associates with a deictic spatial adverb, allowing the child to express that another token of the same entity-type can be seen in another place. •

Addition of entities is marked by aussi and encore

Quentin’s production illustrates the minimal strategy employed by this age group: the poster serves as implicit relatum, and the different themes are simply enumerated, with aussi marking the end of the list: (25) une voiture un trottoir et aussi des oiseaux (Que.)

a car a pavement and also some birds

Even when the relatum is made explicit, aussi can still be interpreted as having the same function, as its exact scope domain is otherwise hard to identify: (26) un vélo vers l’arbre ya une petite maison un camion sur la route aussi (Alex)

a bicycle towards the tree there’s a small house a lorry on the road also

Encore creates an additive link between tokens of the same type of theme located in respect to different (implicitly or explicitly expressed) relata. Antoine uses the deictic là to denote the two relata: (27) et après une coccinelle là et encore une coccinelle là (Antoine)

and after, a beetle there and another beetle there

Encore is never used with a temporal value at this age, but may take a meta-discursive value: ‘moreover’. •

Addition of places is marked by aussi

This additive link is used exclusively with the deictic adverbs of place ici and là: (28) et puis il y a trois fenêtres ici aussi et là aussi (Man.)

and then there are three windows here too and there too

Encore is however never used at this age to mark continuity (extension) of the relatum.

The 7-year-olds As we saw in the additive task, the 7-year-olds produce very regular discourse, with information in both domains of entities and space being clearly

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365

organised. Utterances now more systematically contain reference to the theme and the relatum, in either order. If the relatum is left implicit, this is now not only in relation to the poster in its entirety, but also to salient subparts of the poster. If the relatum is (the space occupied by) an object, then reference maintenance is explicitly (and redundantly) marked (29), giving an effect of ‘over-regularisation’ which disappears in the 10-yr-old production, as we shall see. (29) il y a un tabac au milieu de l’avenue. . . there’s a tobacconist’s in the middle of the avenue il y a une statue aussi au milieu de l’avenue (Corinne) there’s a statue as well in the middle of the avenue Utterances most often contain an existential verb, and aussi is placed after this verb when used. •

Addition of entities is marked by aussi and encore, and addition of places by aussi. There are still traces of the 4-year-olds’ ‘listing’ strategy with aussi being used to close off the list:

(30) il y a plein de gens il y a un bureau de tabac il y a des papeteries aussi des hôtels (Rém.)

there are lots of people there’s a tobacconist’s there are stationer’s shops also hotels

and encore is still used to create an additive link between tokens of the same type of theme, rather than to express continuity. Corentin’s example above (29) shows however another entity located in relation to an explicitly maintained relatum, and the following example of Alexandra shows a mirror organisation, with aussi creating a link between different relata associated with the same theme-type, the explicitly maintained blocks of flats: (31) à l’angle de l’affiche il y a des immeubles at the corner of the poster there are blocks of flats et de l’autre côté de l’affiche il y a aussi des immeubles (Ale.) and on the other side of the poster there are also flats

The 10-year olds The main difference between this group and the 7-year-olds is that now, information from the spatial domain is more highly structured, with the spatial relation between relata being expressed. Utterances are now mainly

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of the form: PP – Vexist – NP, expressing the informational order Relatum + Theme. •

Addition of entities is marked by aussi and encore If the relatum is inferrable from the co-text, it is now left implicit rather than being explicitly maintained, as with the 7-year-olds, cf. Example (29): (32) en bas de cet immeuble il y a une rue il y a aussi une fontaine (Ana.)

at the foot of the block of flats there’s a street there’s also a fountain

•

Addition of places is marked by aussi When two relata are associated with the same clearly inferrable theme type, then this theme-type may be left implicit (as a mirror image of 32): (33) à droite il y a des arbres derrière aussi (Bas.)

to the right there are trees behind as well

•

Continuity of space is marked by encore This relation is only attested with the 10-year olds and the adults. The children use encore: (34) encore en dessous à droite de la fontaine il y a un banc further below to the right of the fountain there’s a bench encore plus bas il y a un monsieur (Léa) still further down there’s a gentleman whereas the adults use both encore and the (temporal) toujours (8 sujets sur 10) : (35) ensuite toujours dans la profondeur on a un autre immeuble (Linda) then still deep in the background we have another block of flats

The Polish learners of L2 French Ewa and Waldemar, the beginners, have a poor repertoire of spatial expressions, often use nouns without articles, and use the idiosyncratic c’est, est as an existential. The only particle attested – aussi – is placed post-verbally. In the following example, it links two relata in respect to a similar, explicitly maintained theme type: (36) devant cette camion c’est petit la voiture derrière c’est aussi petit la voiture (Ewa)

in front of that lorry it’s little the car behind it’s also little the car

Addit ive Scope Par t icles and Anaphor ic Linkage

367

Reference maintenance is however generally left implicit, as is the case with the relatum entities in (37), which illustrates a relatively well-organised and comprehensible discourse using minimal means: (37) à côté de la rue à gauche il y a euh maison et euh à côté il y a tabac et cinq arbres et la fontaine à droite il y a deux voitures et une femme avec bicycle et derrière il y a deux maisons (Klaudia)

next to the street to the left there is er house and next to Ø there is tobacconist and five trees and the fountain to the right (of Ø) there are two cars and a woman with bicycle and behind Ø there are two houses

The intermediate learners tend on the contrary to (over-)mark reference maintenance explicitly, much in the same way as we saw with the 7-year-olds (cf. 29): (38) dans la place il y a beaucoup de personnes in the square there are lots of people dans la place il y a aussi un vélo (Ren.) in the square there is also a bicycle The intermediate learners tend to use il y a rather than c’est, and their utterances regularly show the form: PP – il y a – NP, with aussi placed postverbally when used. Aussi is in fact used relatively frequently (26×) to mark the addition both of entities and of places: (39) je vois aussi l’homme qui lit le journal à côté la rue je vois aussi un homme (Bar.)

I see also the man who reads the paper next the street I see also a man

Encore is used however neither to express addition of an entity-token, nor to express spatial continuity: the two occurrences of encore found in this subgroup have a meta-discursive function.

Summary and Discussion We are making no new claims in this chapter, but rather looking at some old problems from another point of view. We have found, as others have, that whilst there are some superficial similarities between child and adult learner production at points along the acquisition process, these similarities plausibly have different underlying causes, and are in any case outweighed by the differences.

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The additive means we have examined – aussi (également), encore, toujours – refer back to pieces of information already developed during the construction of discourse, linking them to pieces of information in the utterances in which they occur. In the texts examined here, this information comes from the referential domains of people, place and time (here, temporal reference and aktionsart). We have seen that the nature of the links established, changes over time for the child learners, whereas this not the case for the adults.

Summary •

In the 4-year-olds’ production, the problem for the analyst is to work out either (a) which is subject/agent of the actions mentioned – the relevant protagonists of the additive task are denoted with proper names or deictically used pronouns which are ambiguous half of the time (cf. also Hickmann, 1982) – or (b) where the themes introduced in the description task are located – entities are introduced, appropriately, with indefinite articles but reference to these entities is never maintained and, in the domain of space, the poster serves as an implicit relatum for the themes, which are enumerated, simply evoked, or related to an almost unstructured spatial context (ici, là, en haut, en bas): a list of themes may be closed by aussi, two tokens of the same type of theme may be related by encore un or the spatial context may be related deictically là aussi. Thus almost the only trace of attempts to structure these configurations are the additive particles, which create links between the extra-linguistic theme or spatial context, but not the linguistic context. Moreover (c) the time-line in the story is non-existent, as the children seem to comment on each picture one by one.

In these circumstances, the particles have a relatively considerable structuring power, although the deictic anchoring of these children’s production leads to an exophoric use of the particles. Aussi functions to link a similar referent-type (theme or process) to two different locations – là aussi (4, 33) – or a similar action to two different protagonists – il s’en va aussi (2) -; encore serves, inappropriately, to link a type of process to a previously mentioned process-type – il s’allonge encore6 (6). It seems that continuity and repetition are not well distinguished at this age. •

In the 7-year-olds’ production, reference maintenance (to entities, space and time intervals) is a problem that is being worked on. Protagonists as well as locations are carefully distinguished: as in many previous studies, we have seen that the anaphoric expressions are even over-explicit in relation to adult native production. Aussi links a similar action to two

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different protagonists, sometimes redundantly (10 : lui aussi il a pris une échelle; 11 . . . comme son frère). In the descriptive texts, the theme is localised more often, and this relatum is also specified redundantly in relation to adult production, when the simple additive particle localising two themes in relation to this relatum would have sufficed, as with the repetition of the relatum (29: il y a une statue aussi au milieu de l’avenue). The time-line in the story now emerges clearly, with deviations from the chronology beginning to be marked (avant de ‘before’, and one instance of pendant que – ‘during’). Repetition is consistently marked by re- (sometimes overmarked: il redort encore une fois), and continuation either by encore or by toujours. •

The 10-year-olds’ production is fluent. The explicitness of the expressions referring to the protagonists is appropriate, which means that the functions of the NP + pro construction are now restricted to the reintroduction or contrast of one of the two protagonists, while mere subject maintenance can be appropriately expressed by zero anaphora (15 : et Ø en sort lui aussi avec une échelle). The domains of time and space become malleable as other conceptualisations than discreteness become available: means to express temporal simultaneity and temporal and spatial continuity are used unproblematically.

Although the 4-year-olds and the adults produce very elementary utterances, the differences in organisation behind them is striking. In adult learner production, reference to protagonists relies on minimal means but is functional: there are no cases of unclear reference. Zero anaphor is used effectively right from the beginning, in alternation with pronoun, and contrasts with use of a full NP (proper name, or learner-specific je vois NP). Aussi is used in this context (19: MR juste à côté MB / il aussi devant l’église). The strong pronoun lui is not attested, but there is attested some idiosyncratic use of NP + pro. There is a remarkable difference in the domains of space and time, which are structured right from the beginning, with the one exception of the absence of toujours/encore to express spatial continuity. Both temporal continuity and repetition are however expressed, even if most subjects use the multifunctional encore for both temporal contexts. The Frenchspecific means for expressing repetition – re-V – is not acquired. The most basic learner, Waldemar, has recourse to the deictic ici, but in stark contrast to the children, uses it as a context from which to build up a story: (40) voilà l’église et trois heures et demie ici 4h MR dormi. (Wal.)

here’s the church and half past three here 4 o’clock MrR sleep

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Table 18.4 attempts to visualise for the picture description task the cohesive capabilities of the children in respect to additive relations.

Discussion In their analysis of the early manifestations of finiteness-marking in child and adult learners, Dimroth et al. (2003) identify a common developmental stage – the so-called ‘conceptual ordering stage’ –where the three information components of a finite declarative utterance are unambiguously realised. They term these components the topic, the predicate and the link. Under topic is included the expression(s) that refer(s) to the temporal and/or spatial and/or personal characteristics of the event that the utterance is about. The predicate7 denotes the state of affairs that is claimed to hold for the topic. The information unit called topic thus provides a (spatio-)temporal anchoring point for the information referred to in the predicate. The term anchoring is used here to cover the basic functions of topics, namely (a) the identification of what is talked about and (b) the embedding of the actual utterance in a discourse world. The discourse world can be text-internal (text, anaphor), or text-external (situation, deixis). Successful communication is dependent on the speaker’s and hearer’s mutual agreement on what is topical and what is predicative information. Linking elements express a more abstract grammatical operation. Linking devices do not carry content information, their function is rather to express that the content of the predicate is not just a mere idea but claimed to hold for the topic situation in question (cf. Klein, 1998). By executing a linking operation the speaker asserts that the predicate holds for the topic. All the utterances we have examined are to be interpreted as semantically finite: they assert the validity of a state of affairs with respect to a topic. Dimroth et al. (2003) found different ways to express linking during the acquisition process: it might be explicitly expressed by target language (TL) adequate (grammatical) means, or by intermediate (lexical) learner solutions. Among these intermediate solutions they identify precisely the additive particles we have been studying here. In a previous study, Dimroth (2002) demonstrates that the scope domain of these additive particles in the type of text we have been studying is typically (part of) the topic. In her own ‘additive elicitation task’, which we have adapted here, topic information typically concerns the protagonists and the temporal structure; in a description, the topic information typically concerns the relatum. Dimroth (2002) further relates one of the functions of the additive particles we have been studying to the linking operation: the (topic-related) particles express that a state of affairs under discussion applies to (part of) the topic component of an utterance. Both L1 and L2 data show in fact that

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TABLE 18.4 Children’s additive relations Description task 4 year olds

Additive task

Ref. to space Ref. to entities Deictic anchoring : Deictic anchoring : et puis là il y a 3 fenêtres là il est allongé // ici aussi et là aussi là aussi Relatum ???: une voiture un trottoir Et aussi des oiseaux

7 year olds

Explicit relatum c’est une ville où il y a plein de gens il y a un bureau de tabac il y a des papeteries aussi des hotels

10 year olds

Space continuity en dessous à droite de la fontaine il y a un banc encore plus bas il y a un monsieur

zero anaphor: à droite il y a des arbres derrière aussi

Protagonists ?? le monsieur (=MB) il s’en va il (=MR) s’en va aussi Unambiguous maintenance and contrast: et lui aussi il a pris une échelle et il est allé lui aussi au château

Ref. to time spans Deictic anchoring : là il lit une histoire là il redort (dort encore) Repetition of a situation or metadiscursive use of ‘encore’ ?? Repetition vs. Continuity (same situation for consecutive time intervals) après il s’endort et puis il est toujours/encore en train de dormir Simultaneity (2 situations for the same time interval) MB se dirige vers le château pendant que MR est en train de cueillir des pommes

zero anaphor: il va voir vers le magasin d’outils et Ø en sort lui aussi avec une échelle

there is a stage of development just in advance of the conceptual ordering stage when morphological finiteness marking, the TL-carrier of assertion, and additive particles are in complementary distribution. Dimroth (2002) discusses the following type of minimal pair: (41) die sind runnergefallen von dem wagen und der mann auch runtagefallen

they have fallen out of the car and the man also fallen out

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noting the correct morphological form of the finite verb – sind – in the first utterance, and its replacement by topic-related auch in the second utterance, and concluding that even in a relatively advanced learner variety such as this, ‘assertion does apparently not deserve an independent expression in utterances with . . . auch’. Nederstigt (2002) explains the same distribution (auch vs. finite verb form) in her child data in terms of a conflict: [. . .] Caroline’s particle use clearly reflects a conflict between AUCH and the finite verb. This conflict between the location of the particle and the finite verb provides evidence for the analysis of AUCH as an overt assertion marker because without this function the emergence of the finite verb in AUCH-utterances would be without consequences. (Nederstigt, 2002: 275) From this perspective, the simple assertion: ‘the state of affairs is valid for the topic (time, entity)’, has variants: it is valid for another topic entity (‘also’), or for another topic time (‘again’) and so on. Dimroth calls this the ‘syntagmatic function’ of the additive particles. This function is mastered by all the learners we have been studying: Nederstigt (2002, 2006) finds frequent examples as early as age 1;5 in German. But the nature of the topic information is very different between young and older children, and adults, and this is what we have to explain. The other function – Dimroth’s ‘paradigmatic function’ – of the additive particles is to relate, in fact to contrast, an information unit of the present utterance with the same information unit of a previous utterance. In (41) the two topic entities die and der Mann are related: the man is explicitly added to the set of people who have fallen out of the car. It is in this paradigmatic dimension that we can place the development observed in this chapter. Such development is well-researched in children for the domain of entities (Hendriks, 2000; Hickmann, 1982), but a parallel, less well-documented development is also valid for space and time. The observations made in this paper incite us to characterise the children’s developmental task as one of topic management. At 4-year-old, the topic component of children’s utterances is either left implicit or, for space and protagonists, expressed deictically. All stimuli are commented in coincidence with the time of utterance: the connector puis (‘then’), and sometimes encore, is used metadiscursively rather than to establish a chronology; the repetition of a state of affairs is contextualised by means of deictic spatial là (‘there’). At 7-year-old, we observe a regular structuring of the topic component in the domains of space, protagonists, and also time. In the descriptive texts, the topic space is divided into discrete sub-spaces, giving a preponderant topological relation of inclusion of the theme in the relatum. The protagonists in the retelling are carefully

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identified and contrasted by means of clitic and strong pronouns used anaphorically. In the same task, a chronology is established; puis is used anaphorically to link perfectively presented states of affairs. Then, the discrete relations between contexts can be supplemented by continuity: first, indirectly, in the domain of time, by use of adverbs that extend the time of situation to be valid for a further time span (encore, toujours), and only later, at 10 years old, in the domain of space, where the relatum is extended, thanks to the use of these same adverbials: encore plus à droite and so on. These being anaphoric relations, it becomes clear why such temporal values occur relatively late in the acquisition process (cf. Introduction). So what we see in the children is a development from linking of extra-linguistic referents, to linking a theme or an event to a topic within an utterance, to cross-utterance linking, as they come progressively to understand how to relate the information expressed in the topic of different utterances along the text. We have seen superficially similar ‘over-markings’ in the 7-year-old and adult production, corresponding partially to what von Stutterheim and Watorek have called ‘prototypical processing’ of these verbal tasks (cf. Carroll et al., 2000; Watorek, 1996). Both types of learners show this stage, but children have to get there. Adults know from their first language how to relate the information expressed in the topic of different utterances along the text. They acquire sufficient (if idiosyncratic) means to do so in another language, and if this functions – they may stop (cf. the absence of more specific morphosyntactic means as re-V). But we notice that not all the functions used by the 10-year-old children are expressed by the adult learners studies here, which may provide a communicative motivation to acquire more.

Notes (1) We thank Stephanie Haberzettl for making possible the publication of the present chapter in this volume. (2) In the first picture of the original story we see the princess with an axe in her skull, and the task is to find the murderer . . . . (3) Learners are identified by their first names. Transcription conventions are kept to a minimum. [ ] enclose sequences in broad phonetic transcription, and . . . indicates the omission of an irrelevant passage. A self-interruption is marked by /, and a silent pause by #. In cases where the form used by a learner has a different semantic value from the TL value, it is followed by *. (4) The verbal forms used by Lena are 'creative' (overgeneralisation of fr. passé simple) in that they do not correspond to the TL, although such errors are very common at this age. We also note that in this example, we cannot exclude that the scope domain of aussi is the whole utterance: (metadiscursive) aussi = ‘moreover’. (5) This 'further part' is in fact fictitious. (6) But repetition is mainly marked by re-. (7) Note that the term predicate is not used in its syntactic/categoric sense.

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References Benazzo, S. (2002) Communicative potential vs. structural constraints: Explanatory factors for the acquisition of scope particles. In S. Foster-Cohen, T. Ruthenberg and M.L. Poschen (eds) Eurosla Yearbook 2 (pp. 187–204). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Benazzo, S. (2003) The interaction between verb morphology and temporal adverbs of contrast. A longitudinal study in French, English and German L2 (pp. 187–210). In C. Dimroth and M. Starren (eds) Information Structure, Linguistic Structure and the Dynamics of Language Acquisition. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Carroll, M., Murcia, J., Watorek, M. and Bendiscioli, S. (2000) The relevance of information organisation to second language studies. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 22, 441–66. Dimroth, Ch. (2002) Topics, assertions, and additive words: How L2 learners get from information structure to target-language syntax. Linguistics 40, 891–923. Dimroth, C., Gretsch, P., Jordens, P., Perdue, C. and Starren, M. (2003) Finiteness in Germanic languages. A stage model for first and second language development. In C. Dimroth and M. Starren (eds) Information Structure and the Dynamics of Language Acquisition (pp. 65–93). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Gayraud, F. (2004) Emergence et développement du placement des particules de portée. Acquisition et Interaction en Langue Etrangère 20, 173–196. Hendriks, H. (2000) The acquisition of topic marking in L1 Chinese and L1 and L2 French. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 22, 369–397. Hickmann, M. (1982) The development of narrative skills. Pragmatic and metapragmatic aspects of discourse cohesion. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Chicago. Jordens, P. (2002) Finiteness in early Dutch. Linguistics 40, 687–766. Klein, W. (1998) Assertion and finiteness. In N. Dittmar and Z. Penner (eds) Issues in the Theory of Language Acquisition (pp. 225–245). Bern: Lang. Klein, W. and Perdue, C. (1997) The basic variety. Second Language Research 13, 301–348. Nederstigt, U. (2002) The development of the focus particles AUCH and NOCH in German child language. PhD Thesis, Universitaet Humbolt, Berlin. Nederstigt, U. (2006) Additive particles and scope marking in child German. In G. van Geenhoven (ed.) Semantics in Acquisition (pp. 303–328). Dordrecht: Kluwer. Penner, Z., Tracy, R. and Wymann, K. (1999) Die Rolle des Focuspartikel auch im frühen kindlichen Lexikon. In J. Meibauer and M. Rottweiler (eds) Das Lexikon im Spracherwerb (pp. 229–251). Tübingen and Basel: UTB-Frank. Perdue, C., Benazzo, S. and Giuliano, P. (2002) When finiteness gets marked. Linguistics 40, 849–890. Talmy, L. (1985) Lexicalisation patterns: Semantic structure in lexical forms. In T. Shopen (ed.) Language Typology and Semantic Description, Vol. 3 Grammatical Categories and the Lexicon (pp. 57–149). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Watorek, M. (1996) Le traitement prototypique: définition et implications. Toegepaste Taalwetenschap in Artikelen 55, 187–200.

19 Discourse Cohesion in Narrative Texts: The Role of Additive Means in Italian L1 and L2 Patrizia Giuliano

Introduction The purpose of this study is to investigate the type and function of additive means, especially of additive particles, in Italian as first and second language. We begin with an analysis of narrative texts produced by native speakers of Italian, both children and adults, and by adult native speakers of English learning Italian; next, we compare the narratives produced by learners to those produced by Italians, adults and children. We also consider narratives produced in English by English native speakers, through which we evaluate the transfer from L1 into their L2 Italian narratives. The focus on additive means in narratives is due to the crucial function they can have in building textual cohesion. Among the additive means, additive particles (also, still, as well, too, again, always) belong to the category of scopal items, namely, units having a semantic influence on the constituency of the utterance they scope over. With respect to the narrative text, these elements can mark the addition of entities (example 1) or the addition of time spans for the same event (example 2). (1) the Red Man is sitting at the table having a drink there is also another drink next to the Red Man (Linda, Eng. L1) (2) He’s sleeping on the bench the Red Man is still sleeping on the bench now the Red Man is sitting up and reading something and now the Red Man is sleeping on the bench + again (Corey, Eng. L1) 375

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The acquisition of scopal items represents a complex task, both for children learning their first language and for adult learners of L2, since both must identify the meaning of every item, the syntactic position it can occupy in the utterance, and the role it plays with respect to discourse cohesion. But whereas children learn to use the items in question simultaneously with their progressive mastering of discourse principles, adult learners already know how to build anaphoric links between entities or events thanks to their mature cognitive capacity. In spite of this, the adults’ task is no less complex, since the semantic, syntactic and pragmatic principles governing scopal particles can vary considerably across languages.

The Task Data for this study were collected using a task consisting of a sequence of 30 pictures forming a story about two characters (Mr Blue and Mr Red). The same task is used by Benazzo et al. (2004) to analyse narrative child production in French, German and Polish L1 and adult production in French L2. The story is summarised in Table 19.1, adopting the same criteria used by Benazzo et al. (2004). Cases correspond to the content of pictures; boldface letters and shades mark the contexts in which the use of scopal items is very probable. Episodes I and II deal with a series of events accomplished by one of the characters, and later accomplished by the other, a sequence that should lead informants to employ items such as also, too, as well; in episodes II and III, some actions are repeated by the same character, a sequence which should lead informants to mark an additive relationship in the temporal domain, as the same action is either continued or reiterated. As Benazzo et al. emphasise, informants may also exploit chronological expressions instead of additives, since a clock marks the temporal progression in some pictures (cf. pictures 16–19). During the task, the interviewer commented on the first four pictures, which introduce the set, the characters and the objective of the narrative (to discover who released the princess from the castle where she was imprisoned). On the basis of this introduction, the interviewee built his story picture by picture.

Additive Particles in Italian and English The English particles marking addition are also, too and as well/as well as, which differ considerably in their syntactic distribution (cf. Quirk et al., 1985: 605–610; Taglicht, 1984). (3) John could also see his wife from the doorway (4) John álso has seen it (5) I saw his elder brother also

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TABLE 19.1 Content of the pictures Add. N° episode picture 01 02 03 04 05 06 I

II

III

IV

Situation

07 08 09

introduction ‘village street’ introduction ‘princess’ introduction ‘Monsieur Rouge’ introduction ‘Monsieur Bleu’ R & B are in front of the church B leaves R remains in front of the church R leaves/walks towards the café R drinks an orange juice R drinks an orange juice

10

R drinks an orange juice

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

R leaves B walks along the street B smokes a cigarette B leaves in the bus R is seated on a bench R sleeps on the bench R sleeps on the bench R sits up, reads the paper R sleeps on the bench R goes into a shop R comes out with a ladder R walks towards the hill B arrives back with the bus B walks towards the café B drinks an orange juice B goes into a shop B comes out with a ladder B walks towards the hill B walks up the hill towards the castle R stays near the trees B nears the castle R picks apples

30

Source: Adapted from Dimroth (2002)

Expected additive item

anche; also/too/as well ancora uno/unaltzo; another one/one more ancora uno/unaltzo; another one/one more

15.00 15.30 16.00 ancora / sempre; still 16.30 17.00 ancora / di nuovo ; again

anche; also/too/as well anche; also/too/as well anche; also/too/as well anche; also/too/as well

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(6) John has seen it too/as well (7) John too/as well, has seen it [rare] (8) she has invited too/as well some of her own family [very formal] As for temporal continuity, English employs the particle still, which precedes lexical verbs but follows modals and auxiliaries; reiteration is marked by again, once more, afresh, normally placed at the end of the utterance (cf. example 2 above). For scope particles in L2, cf. Giuliano (2004a) and Benazzo (2000). In Italian, the additive relation is marked by the particles anche or pure. The following examples show their possible integration into the basic utterance ‘Cinzia è venuta al cinema’ (=Cinzia has come / came to the cinema). Anche/pure are normally placed before the constituent they affect (examples 9 and 11), but in spoken Italian they can also be placed after it (examples 10 and 14). Postposition is obligatory when the particle scopes over a simple verb (example 12). If the particle is placed between the modal or auxiliary and the lexical verb, it can affect either the predicate or one of the other constituents of the sentence (examples 13–14). (9) (10) (11) (12) (13) (14)

Anche/pure Cinzia è venuta al cinema Cinzia ánche/púre è venuta al cinema Cinzia è venuta anche/pure al cinema Cinzia corre ma balla anche/pure Cinzia è anche venuta al cinema Cinzia è anche venuta al cinema

As for the additive particles with temporal value, Italian can mark both continuity and reiteration by ancora, depending on the different aspect of the predicate.1 Continuity can also be expressed by sempre; reiteration can be signalled by the expression di nuovo as well or, particularly when marking habitualness, by sempre. (15) Cinzia studia ancora/sempre; sta ancora/sempre studiando (continuity) Cinzia studies still/always; is still/always studying2 (16) Cinzia è andata ancora/di nuovo a Roma (reiteration) Cinzia has gone again to Rome Ancora can also have an additive reading as in (17), where ancora can be replaced by the adjective altro (=’other’), since the noun phrases in question (lettera) can alternate with items of the same type. The additive reading of ancora will be marked as ancora1; the reiterative and continual readings as ancora2 and ancora 3 respectively. (17) Maria scrive ancora una lettera/Maria scrive un’altra lettera Maria writes still a letter/Maria writes another letter

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TABLE 19.2 Additive particles in Italian and English Languages

Non-Restricted Addition

Restricted Addition

Entities/places/ processes

Entities

Time spans Discrete Events

Italian

Anche

ancora1

English

also, too, as well

more

Continous Events

ancora2, di nuovo, ancora3, sempre1* (generally sempre2 habitualness) again, once more, afresh, still always (habitualness)

*Sempre1 always marks the iterative function, while sempre2 marks the continual reading

The comparison between Italian and English shows that English has items with more transparent form–function relationships in the temporal domain, as is clearly shown by the multi-functionality of Italian ancora with respect to temporal still, again, once more and quantitative more in English. As to the syntactic distribution of the items, the examples above also show the differences between the two languages. Table 19.2 sums up the functions of the discussed items, according to the criteria proposed by Benazzo et al. (2004: 81), in particular, ‘non-restricted’ refers to the items marking addition for entities, places and processes.

The Informants Our informants include both children and adults (cf. Table 19.3). The children, all native speakers of Italian, were divided into three groups according to their ages (4, 7, 10). Adults formed two groups: native speakers of Italian and native speakers of English; the latter, in their turn, were subdivided according to the language of the interview (L1 English or L2 Italian). All Italian informants are from Southern Italy (Campania & Basilicata). All children are from lower middle or middle class families, all born and living in Naples. Most of the adults have a university degree. Twelve of the English-speaking informants are from the United States, nine from England, two from Ireland, two from Australia and one from Jamaica.3

Research Hypotheses We can try to make some hypotheses with respect to the acquisitional paths our L1 and L2 learners will follow. Similar to Benazzo et al. (2004), we

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TABLE 19.3 The informants Category of informants

Age or L2 level

Number of interviews according to age/level and informant category

Total number of interviews for informant category

Italian L1 Children

4-year-old group

11

Total 31

7-year-old group

10

10-year-old group

10

Italian L1 Adults

Aged from 23 to 31

10

Total 10

English L1 Adults

Aged from 27 to 50

10

Total 10

Italian L2 Adults

Aged from 20 to 53 Beginners*

2

Intermediate

7

Advanced

7

Total 16

*We distinguished the interlinguist levels according to the more or less productive character of verb morphology and to the complexity of syntactic structures

hypothesise, specifically with respect to the use of additive particles, that very young children begin by using just one such element and overgeneralise its use with no semantic restrictions. In Italian, this overextension could be favoured by the relative overlapping of additive functions for the same particle: once they have acquired ancora, for instance, young informants could use it both for quantity and temporal addition. Benazzo et al. also suggest, for L1 French, that children are expected to cognitively follow the sequence provided below (translated into Italian, in light of the (relative) semantic equivalence between the two languages with respect to the particles in question). the function of anche > the function of ancora1,2 > the function of ancora3, sempre For obvious reasons, adult learners of Italian are not expected to respect the same sequence, given that their primary problem is the identification of the exact semantics of each item and its distribution in the utterance. Nevertheless, English-speaking learners of Italian may overgeneralise the same additive particle to different semantic contexts, similar to Italian children; but, these informants could also exploit L1 transfer, which would prompt them to the reverse hypothesis, namely that Italian has different items for continuity, iteration and quantitative addition, as found in English. Since Italian has other additive elements that are less restricted than additive particles from the semantic and syntactic viewpoint, such as the verb prefix ri- and the adverbial expression di nuovo for iteration, both children and

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L2 learners could identify these elements earlier and employ them instead of using particles. Our English-speaking informants may show similar tendencies to those displayed by other L2 learners (cf. Polish and German learners of French in Benazzo et al., 2004), such as the absence of temporal additive particles in beginner texts, attributed to their greater semantic complexity. Finally, both children and adult learners may have problems with the positioning of syntactically flexible particles with respect to their scope (cf. Andorno, 2000 on the use of anche in L2 Italian).

The Italian Data Italian Children Table 19.4 illustrates the type and number of occurrences of additive particles in the production of the Italian children. All three child groups exploit the particles anche and pure quite often with respect to the addition of entities. Nevertheless, in the production of 4-year-old children, anche/pure often mark the addition of an entity to a previously unidentified entity of the same type, as in the following example, where lui seems to be used deictically, since it refers implicitly to the man remaining in the bar, whose colour is unspecified. (18) Laura (4-year-old)4 il Signor Rosso e il Signor Blu sono al bar the Mr Red and the Mr Blue are at the bar uno se ne va a casa e uno resta al bar TABLE 19.4 Additive particles in the narratives of italian children Particles

4-year-olds

7-year-olds

10-year-olds

anche / pure (Entities)

anche 7; pure 6

anche / pure (Pictures)

anche 13 + 1?*; pure 4 8

ancora1 (Entities) ancora2 (di più)(Iteration) ancora3 (Continuity) Sempre2 (Continuity) anche = ancora1 ? anche/pure = ancora2,3?

– 1 + 1?† 3 1 1 3

– – 6 + 1?† 1 + 5? (cf. note 5) – –

anche 19; pure 8 anche 1; pure 2 1 – 2 2 + 1? – –

anche 4; pure 1

*In all of the tables, a question mark indicates ambiguous semantics of the occurrences in question. For the present occurrence, cf. ex. 32 infra (anche = ancora3?) †In some cases, it is difficult to distinguish between ancora2 and ancora3

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one refl. pro. from-there goes to home and one stays at the bar anche lui se ne va a casa also he goes to home So, despite the use of additive particles, textual cohesion is not necessarily guaranteed. In fact, the tales of 4-year-olds sound much more like descriptions of disconnected episodes than continuous narratives. Another frequent use in the production of this group, is the use of anche to scope over the picture, implicitly (as in example 19) or via a spatial deictic (as in example 20): (19) Andrea (4-year-old) qua sta seduto sulla panchina questo Uomo Rosso here is sat on the bench this Red Man e qua sta dormendo and here is sleeping e poi pure sta dormendo and then also is sleeping (20) Laura (4-year-old) e poi il Signor Rosso si è messo a dormire su un panchina and then Mr Red begins to sleep on a bench e anche qua dorme sulla panchina and also here sleeps on the bench In some contexts in the production of 4-year-olds, ancora is associated with the quantitative expression di più, which sounds strange in the context, although it is not unacceptable in adult Italian. (21) Riccardo (4-year-old) poi sta dormendo // poi sta dormendo ancora // poi sta dormendo ancora di più then is sleeping // then is sleeping still // then is sleeping even more The persistent repetition of ancora combined with di più gives the particle some scalar meaning; the sequence ancora di più is more acceptable for the quantification of entities rather the quantification of time spans, and it does not match the progressive aspect (cf. sta dormendo). The production of 7- and 10-year-old children shows a better mastering of both reference to entities and additive means: (22) Sabrina (7-year-old) l’Uomo Rosso. . . corre qui dentro a prendere la scala

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the Red Man. . . runs here inside to take the ladder anche l’Uomo Blu va qui dentro a prendere la scala also the Man Blue goes here inside to take the ladder These children also mark temporal continuity more often by ancora3 and sempre25: (23) Jacopo (7-year-old) Il Signor Rosso stava ancora bevendo al bar // poi se n’è andato anche lui the Mr Red was still drinking at the bar // then refl. pro. from-there has gone too him (24) Miriam (7-year-old) L’Uomo Blu sta andando al castello con la scala the Blue Man is going to the castle with the ladder . . . . l’Uomo Blu va sempre al castello con la scala the Blue Man goes always [= ‘is still going’] to the castle with the ladder The 10-year-old group employ ancora3 and sempre2 less frequently, since these two particles are alternated with new means of expression, as shown in Table 19.5. Child informants in all three groups use alternative additive means, although with different frequency. However, not all options are present in the production of 4- and 7-year-olds. The following passages show the persistent use of un’altra (‘another’), the expression sempre lo stesso (‘always the same’) and the verbal prefix ri- (marking iterativity). (25) Riccardo (4-year-old) poi si beve l’aranciata // poi si beve un’altra aranciata // poi si beve un’altra aranciata (then refl. pro. drinks an orange [juice] // then refl. pro. drinks another orange [juice] // then drinks another orange [juice]) (26) Martina (4-year-old) MA: il Signor Rosso si è addormentato sulla panchina the Mr Red refl.pro. is (=has) fallen asleep on the bench INT: d’accordo e dopo? Dopo? ok and afterwards? Afterwards? MA: sempre lo stesso always the same

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TABLE 19.5 Alternative additive means in the narratives of italian children Alternative means

4-year-olds

7-year-olds

10-year-olds

un altro (NP) (Entities)

2

1

8

numeral expression (“in più”) (Entities)

–

9

7

di nuovo (Iteration)

1

2

6

ri-V (Iteration)

1 riaddormentarsi

6 riaddormentarsi, ritornare, rincontrarsi, riandare

12 riaddormentarsi, ritornare, rivenire, ridormire

un’altra volta (Iteration)

1

-

3

Continuare a + Infinitive (Continuity)

-

1

2

sempre lo stesso; la stessa immagine (Continuity)

2

-

2

Fare la stessa cosa (Continuity)

–

1

4

Tornare (Iteration)

–

1

–

INT: cioè? MA: e guarda! Uguale !. . . MA: si era riaddormentato

namely? and look! Equal! he was (=had) iter.pref.-fallen asleep

Unlike adults (cf. section ‘Italian Adults’) and older children, 4-year-old informants often simply repeat the same utterance in order to mark continuity or reiteration: (27) Maria (4-year-old) sta bevendo // e qua sta bevendo. . . sta correndo // e qua sta correndo. . . is drinking // and here is drinking . . . is running // and here is running. . . In addition, the verb tornare (go/come back) is absent in these texts. This verb (as such or in the equivalent re-prefixed version ritornare) marks iteration by its Aktionsart.

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Ten-year-old children sometimes combine two additive means in the same utterance in order to strengthen textual cohesion (as in 28). (28) Sta dormendo su una panchina. . . // poi legge il giornale e ridorme di nuovo is sleeping on a bench. . . // then is reading the newspaper // and iter.pref.sleeps again But, the sequence ridorme di nuovo sounds quite strange to native Italian adults, whether in the combination of ri- with di nuovo and in the unusual use of the prefix ri- with dormire. A further additive strategy found in the production of both 7- and 10-year-olds, but not in 4-year-olds’, is illustrated by the following extracts, where the anaphoric link is created by the numeral adjectives due or tre or also by the quantitative expression in più. (29) Mario (7-year-old) il Signor Rosso si è seduto a pigliare un gelato the Mr Red refl.pro. is [=has] sat [down] to have an ice cream si è pigliato due gelati. . . refl.pro. is [=has] had two ice creams si è pigliato tre gelati refl.pro. is (=has) had three ice creams (30) Andrea (7-year-old) il Signor Rosso sta sempre là però con un bicchiere in più // con tre bicchieri in più the Mr Red is always there but with a glass more // with three glasses more With respect to the distribution of additive particles, 7- and 10-year-old children do not show problems. Conversely, 4-year-olds exploit ambiguous positions, as shown in the following passages (cf. also Tables A.1 and A.2 in the appendix): (31) Claudio (4-year-old) poi si sta sedendo e sta bevendo l’acqua // e qua sta bevendo anche l’acqua then is sitting and is drinking the water // and here is drinking also the water . . . l’Uomo Rosso è seduto e qua sta dormendo // e qua sta anche dormendo . . . the Man Red is sat and here is sleeping // and here is also sleeping e qua sta scegliendo un nome e anche dormendo and here is choosing a name and also sleeping

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(32) Laura (4-year-old) poi il Signor Rosso beve una bibita // anche il Signor Rosso beve una bibita then the Mr Red drinks a drink // also the Mr Red drinks a drink anche il Signor Rosso beve un’aranciata also the Mr Red drinks an orange [juice] (33) Andrea (4-year-old) l’Uomo Blu sta portando pure la scaletta the Mr Blue is bringing also the stepladder In example (31), it seems that, in both cases, the particle scopes over the deictic adverb qua, which is implicit in the last utterance (e anche dormendo), despite its position before the NP or the lexical verb. In (32), the first occurrence of anche seems to scope, implicitly and deictically, over the picture that the child is looking at; similarly, the second occurrence could scope over the picture or also affect un’aranciata (despite its wrong position); an alternative interpretation for the first occurrence is that anche functions as ancora3. In 33, anche seems to affect the subject l’Uomo Blu (who repeats the same action as Mr Red).

Conclusions regarding the Production of Italian Children The most relevant result in the 4-year-old group concerns anche, which is also the most frequent item in their narratives. It is used to scope over entities but also over the picture itself; the latter function, still present in 7-yearold informants, although to a lesser degree, is very rare in 10-year-olds. Such a development shows that: (a) Very young children exploit extralinguistic stimuli (the pictures and their repetitive character) to link the utterances they produce, since they have difficulty with anchoring what they say to what they have already said, namely to the linguistic context; in other words. (b) They cannot employ linguistic markings in an intralinguistic manner (for points a and b, cf. Giuliano, 2004b; Hendriks, 2000; Hickmann, 1995). There are other crucial differences in the production of 7- and 10-year-olds compared to the 4-year-olds, all concerning additive temporal relations (c) The more frequent employment of ancora3 and sempre2 by 7-year-old informants, to mark continuity, clearly shows a better cognitive distinction between continuation and iteration. (d) The complex verbal structure continuare a + infinitive is used exclusively by the 10-year-old group to mark continuity.

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(e) The suffix ri- and the expressions di nuovo and un’altra volta are more frequently used, by both 7- and 10-year-old groups to mark iteration (points d and e show no precocious preference for alternative means). (f) Particles are correctly positioned by 7- and 10-year-olds.

Italian Adults Table 19.6 illustrates the additive means employed in the production of adult Italian speakers. Here we also included occurrences of the verbs tornare (come/go back) and proseguire (go on), whose Aktionsart express iteration and continuity, respectively. The most striking results with respect to Italian children of all ages are listed below. (a) The almost complete absence of anche/pure scoping over a spatial adverb referring to one of the pictures (1 occurrence). (b) The more frequent use of ancora1 (example 34). (c) The scalar-additive function of anche or addirittura (example 35). (d) The unambiguous position of sempre; this element is typically found immediately after the verb in child production, whereas adults place it before the constituent it affects (entity or place), clearly marking referential continuity (example 36) or iteration (example 37).

TABLE 19.6 Additive means in the narratives of Italian adults Particles

Adult Italian L1

Alternative Means

Adult Italian L1

anche / pure (Entities)

anche 36; pure: 2 un altro (NP) (Entities) 7

anche (Picturse)

1

Numeral expressions (Entities)

5

additive-scalar anche/addirittura (Entities)

2

ri-V (Iteration)

8 ritornare, riprendere, riaddormentarsi

ancora1 (Entities)

5

di nuovo (Iteration)

5

ancora2 (Iteration)

1

Tornare (Iteration)

3

ancora3 (Continuity)

3 + 3?

Continuare a + Infinitive / NP(Continuity)

11

Sempre2 (Continuity)

2?

Un altro po’ (Iteration/ Continuity)

2

sempre1(Iteration)

1

Proseguire (Continuity)

1

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Par t 2: L1 and L2 Acquisit ion

(34) Rossella il Signor Rosso sta bevendo ancora una bibita the Mr Red is drinking more a drink (= one more drink) (35) Domenico gli vien voglia di prendere una bella bibita e sedersi. . . nella piazzetta. . . to-him feels like having a nice drink and sitting down. . . in the little square. . . però il Signor Rosso si sente. . .un po’ scoraggiato visto che è solo but the Mr Red refl.pro. feels a bit discouraged since is alone e ordina al barista di portargli anche un’altra bibita and orders to-the barman to bring him even another drink (36) Carmelina Il Signor Blu. . . si è acceso una sigaretta sempre davanti a un bar Mr Blu. . . refl.pro is (=has) lit a cigarette always in front of a bar The particle sempre can also take on an iterative meaning: (37) Giuseppe ad un tratto si sveglia e si incammina sempre passando davanti al caffé all at once refl.pro wakes-up and makes his way always (=again) passing in front of the café In adult production, we found several occurrences of the structure continuare a + infinitive, which is also present in the production of 10-year-olds. Both adults and 10-year-olds also share a frequent employment of the riprefix strategy to mark iteration and the use of double additive markings (e.g. ancora3 + continuare a + infinitive; ri-V. . . + di nuovo; ancora + un altro).

Italian L2 Data Table 19.7 illustrates the additive particles used by English-speaking learners in their Italian L2 narratives. Vanessa, a beginner, uses only anche, altro and altra volta; the first two are used to quantify entities and the last to mark iteration. Nevertheless, the particle anche is also used to mark iteration, a function it does not have in standard Italian (example 38). (38) Vanessa (beginner) L’altro amico + nel blu vestiti eh ha turn/ha tornato anche al villaggio sull’autobus the other friend + in blue clothes eh has co/has come-back also [=again] to the village on the bus

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TABLE 19.7 Additive particles in L2 Italian narratives of English learners Particles

Beginners

Intermediate

Advanced

anche (Entities/Processes)

2

7

20

anche (Places)

1

ancora1 (Entities) ancora2 (Iteration)

1

ancora3 (Continuity)

3 + 2?

Sempre2 (Continuity)

6 7?

sempre1(Iteration)

1? (ambiguous)

*anche = (Iteration)

1

*anche = (Continuity)

1

The same particle is used with the function of ancora3 by John, another beginner. (39) John (beginner) JO: Signor Azzurro *vai:: *the pathway* INT: lungo la strada. . . JO: Signor Azzurro e:h *vai lungo la strada + anche Mr Blue eh go-2nd sing.pers. along the street + also (=still) We found ambiguous occurrences of anche in the intermediate and advanced groups as well (as in example 40). (40) Phil (advanced) è rimasto seduto al caffé . . . a bere qualcosa ehm mi sembra anche non alcolico . . .. . . is (=has) stayed sat at the café . . . to drink something ehm [it] seems to me also not alcoholic . . . passa un po’ di tempo forse anche venti minuti . . . passes a short time maybe also twenty minutes . . . In the first occurrence (anche non alcolico), the particle does not refer back to any other alcoholic drink; the intended meaning could be concessive, or cohesive, associated with ‘inoltre’, a function that can be expressed by also in English (cf. section ‘L1 English Production’). In the second occurrence (anche venti minuti), anche has a clear concessive rather than additive meaning. As for the particle sempre, it is often impossible to distinguish between spatial and temporal continuity with this particle (as in 41), an ambiguity found in the production of Italian native speakers as well.

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(41) Joanne (advanced) quest’uomo. . . si è seduto al tavolo. . . // l’uomo *si è sempre seduto al tavolo this man..refl.pro. is (=has) sat down at the table. . . // the man refl.pro. is always sat at the table But, comparison of this scene with the equivalent passage in L1 English (example 42) clarifies the temporal meaning of this particle (cf. still). (42) Nigel The Red Man is still sitting on his chair having a drink Table 19.8 lists alternative additive means. Adult learners employ different temporal expressions to mark continuity (per tanto, per lungo tempo etc.); in the table we distinguished chronological expressions referring to the clock that appears in the pictures from all other markers. These are illustrated below. (43) Peter (advanced) e poi il Signor Rosso si:: si è addormentato a::h sulla panchina davanti alla chiesa +

TABLE 19.8 Alternative additive means in L2 Italian narratives of English learners Beginners

Intermediates

Advanced

un altro (NP) (Entities)

1

6

7

*Più = ancora1

1

Numeral expressions (Entities)

2

6

6

ri-V (Iteration)

5 ritornare

2 ritornare, risedersi

Continuare a + infinitive (Continuity)

5

Di nuovo (Iteration)

1 8

(Un’)altra volta (Iteration)

1

1

3

Un altro po’ / per tanto / lungo tempo / *un po’ più ecc.(Continuity)

2

3

1

Tornare (Iteration)

2

7

Chronological Expression

3

VP - VP (Iteration)

1

Esattamente/proprio come (ha fatto) X Nella stessa direzione di X

1 2

5

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and then the Mr Red refl.pro. is (= has) fallen-asleep a::h on the bench in front of the church + e lui + dormiva per tanto and he +slept-imperfective for long (44) Jennifer (intermediate) il tempo passa e lui dorme ancora // dopo lui legge un giornale // alle 8:00 il Signor Rosso dorme the time passes and he sleeps still // after he reads a newspaper // at 8:00 the Mr Red sleeps The use of the prefix ri-, which is quite productive in the L1 Italian production of adults and 10-year-olds, is used more rarely by learners, and almost exclusively with the verb ritornare, whose Aktionsart can mark iterativity with or without the prefix (tornare/ritornare = ‘come back/return’). In this case, the prefix could have been memorised by learners as an integral part of the verb root rather than as a separate prefix. The complex verb structure continuare a + infinitive is also employed less in L2 Italian than it is in L1 Italian, whereas ancora1 and scalar-additive particles are completely absent. For the intermediate level, we found some repetitive use of un altro to mark addition, a use comparable to sequences identified in the production of very young children (cf. example 25 in section ‘Italian Children’). (45) Jennifer (Intermediate) Signor Rosso prende un caffé al bar Mr Red takes a coffee at the bar Signor Rosso prende un altro bicchiere di arancia / Mr Red takes another glass of orange [juice] dopo lui ha un altro bicchiere di arancia then he has another glass of orange [juice]. In example (45), the first occurrence of un altro is inappropriate, since it presupposes the repetition of the same entity that appeared before, which is not the case (caffé, bicchiere di arancia). The second occurrence, despite its appropriateness, sounds stylistically monotonous to a native speaker, who would prefer a strengthening cohesive strategy, using ancora and a pronoun (ex.: e poi ne prende ancora un altro = ‘and then he takes one more’). In terms of the position of additive elements, in the production of beginner and intermediate learners, the position of the particle anche can be ambiguous, as in the following extracts. (46) Vanessa (beginner) anche com/come lui eh amico eh + ha fatto also lik/like him eh friend eh + has done

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(47) Gillia (intermediate) poi il Signor Rosso. . . ha comprato una scala anche then the Mr Red. . . has bought a ladder too In example (46), the most probable interpretation is anche lui [= Mr Blue] ha fatto come l’amico [=Mr Red]. Sentence final anche, as in example (47), is not acceptable in Italian.6 In the production of advanced learners, there seem to be no anomalous positions of additive expressions; yet, they exploit the initial position of di nuovo that never appears in the production of L1 Italian (with children or adults). (48) Peter (advanced) e poi di nuovo il Signor Rosso si è addormentato a::h alla panchina davanti alla chiesa and then again the Mr Red refl.pro. is (=has) fallen asleep on the bench a::h in front of the church The initial position of di nuovo can be due to the nature of the stimulus (I see again that Mr Red has fallen asleep).7 We also found one occurrence of ancora in a non-standard position and with a non-standard function, in the production of the advanced group (example 49). (49) Phil (advanced) ha dormito lui proprio eh:: su poltrone *avanti la chiesa ++ has slept he just eh:: on armchairs (= benches) in front of the church ++ ancora di notte lui si è svegliato still in the night he refl.pro. is (=has) woken up The unacceptability of ancora lies in the fact that it cannot quantify temporal spans without the expression of a verb (ex. era ancora notte quando si è svegliato: ‘it was still night when he woke up’); in other words, unlike sempre, ancora cannot modify an adverbial phrase with a temporal function (ex. sempre di notte lui si è svegliato).

Italian L1 Speakers (Children and Adults) and Italian L2 Learners: Final Considerations As shown in the previous sections, of the child narratives, only those produced by 10-year-old informants are very close to the production of Italian adults, in terms of greater logical coherence and linguistic cohesion and due to the more extensive and varied employment of additive means. Problems in the positioning of additive particles were identified only in the production of 4-year-olds. Conversely, the semantics of the particles does not

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seem to cause serious problems to young speakers; as a matter of fact, the ambiguity of some of their occurrences comes from the deictic use of the particles. The analysis of the L2 Italian production of learners’ demonstrates some differences relative to the production of native Italians. As shown in Table A.3 (in the appendix), L2 learners employ additive expressions in positions that are never used by Italian native speakers, for example the postposition of anche with respect to the entity it affects and a far left scope for anche. While the first position sounds unusual, but is not unacceptable, the second is completely impossible in Italian. (50) Geraldine (intermediate) e lui [Mr Blue] anche ha deciso prendere qualcosa da bere and him too has decided to have something to drink e dopo solo un bicchiere lui ha preso anche le scale and after just one drink he has taken also the ladder Comparing the production of Italian children with that of L2 informants reveals that the group of 4-year-old children and L2 beginner and intermediate learners often mistake the position of additive elements, anche in particular, in similar ways (cf. section ‘Italian Children’). Unlike the children, beginner learners also make mistakes in the semantics of the additive particles. Nevertheless, adult learners never refer ambiguously to characters, nor use anche deictically, thereby demonstrating better awareness of discourse principles compared to the children. Finally, L2 learners prefer exploiting alternative means to mark continuity and iteration, in contrast with what was found in the L1 English production (cf. Table 19.10 in section ‘L1 English Production’). This strategy may be used to avoid a poly-functional use of ancora.

L1 English Production: Does Transfer Play Any Role? Table 19.9 shows the additive particles and alternative additive means used in the L1 production of our English native speakers. In the L1 English data, one of the functions of also is similar to that of adverbs such as furthermore or moreover, in contexts where the speaker adds a new piece of information. (51) Michael Now the Red Man is sitting down in front of the café and drinking a cocktail also there’s another glass next to the Red Man but there’s nothing in it

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TABLE 19.9 Additive means in the narratives of English speakers Particles

Adult English L1

Alternative means

Adult English L1 12

Also = furthermore

2

Another/other NP (Entities)

Also (entities)

8

Numeral Expressions (Entities)

8

Continue + Infinitive/ PrepP

2 15

Too (entities)

1

Come/go/walk/fall/be back (Iteration)

As well (entities)

1

Return (Iteration)

2

Yet (= additivescalar)

1

Chronological Expressions (Continuity)

2

*Always (continuity)

2

Continue + Infinitive/ PrepP (Continuity)

2

Again (Iteration)

10

Still (Continuity)

28

*With respect to always, we identified two passages with a transfer from Italian L2 to English L1, for example The Red Man is always [=still] sitting in front of the bar

English native speakers, like Italian native speakers, sometimes overmark additivity using two methods and may even use yet as a scalar-additive while using chronological expressions to mark continuity. These same informants always describe the last scene using still. (52) Alison The Blue Man is. . . walking up the path towards the castle + meanwhile the Red Man is on the apple tree with his ladder at the tree the Red Man is still picking apples from his tree and putting them into the basket and the Blue Man is still coming up the hill + coming with his ladder towards the castle Thanks to the form–function bi-uniqueness of still, passages like (52) help us to interpret the equivalent passages produced by Italian speakers, where the use of poly-functional sempre generally sounds ambiguous (referential continuation to a place/an entity or temporal continuity?). (53) Giuseppe (Italian Adult) inizia a camminare a passo veloce seguendo sempre la stessa strada begins to walk quickly following always the same street

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According to the results just discussed, transfer from English L1 to Italian L2 (cf. section ‘Italian L2 Data’) seems to hold with respect to (a) anche = Eng. furthermore (It. inoltre), (b) più = Eng. more (It. ancora1), (c) the rare use of continuare + Infinitive. As for positional transfer from L1, as noted in section ‘Italian L2 Data’, syntactic transfer could explain the placements of anche after the pronoun it scopes over (example 50 in section ‘Italian L1 Speakers (Children and Adults) and Italian L2 Learners’) and at the end of the sentence (example 47 in section ‘Italian L2 Data’).

Crosslinguistic Considerations Comparison between the narratives in our Italian L1 adult corpus and the English L1 corpus lead to some crosslinguistic considerations with respect to the way the two groups of informants use additive elements in a task such as the one used in this study. Table 19.6 in section ‘Italian Adults’ shows that Italian speakers mark the addition of entities more robustly (51 markings), primarily through the use of the particle anche; iteration and continuity are less marked concepts (39 markings: 15 for continuity and 24 for iteration), and when they are, the speakers definitely prefer to use alternative elements instead of particles, in particular, the riprefix strategy, the verb tornare and the expression di nuovo for iteration (17 markings); the verbal structure continuare a + infinitive is used to mark continuity (13 markings). In contrast, in the L1 data of English native speakers, we ascertained a greater frequency of continuity and iteration marking (61) compared to the addition of entities (27); furthermore, whereas the latter shows relative balance between the use of particles (11, of which 8 also, 1 too, 1 as well, 1 yet) and alternative elements (16), particles are used more frequently in the marking of continuity and iteration by English speakers (40 particles vs. 21 alternative means). Iteration is marked more often than continuity (40 vs. 21 times), a fact that can certainly depend on the characteristics of the narrative task accomplished by both groups. If the frequent attention to entities in L1 Italian could hypothetically be explained by assuming a different ‘perspective’, the greater frequency of alternative means to mark iteration and continuity can depend on their desire to avoid ambiguous ancora. On the other hand, the specifics of English, such as the availability of the specific iterative particle again, verbs of movement + spatial adverb back constructions and the continuative particle still, prompts native speakers to prefer different means for iteration and continuity.

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We can also wonder whether our results with respect to Italian children have anything in common with the results discussed by Benazzo et al. (2004) for French, German and Polish children. Comparison of the data reveals striking similarities. The additive links expressed by 4-year-old children often have a deictic (and consequently an extralinguistic) meaning (cf. It. anche qua, referring to one of the pictures in the story) or a metadiscourse function (cf. It. la stessa immagine, when the following picture depicts the same scene). At the age of 7, children are definitely more focused on the construction of textual cohesion, and they are able to distinguish between the addition of entities and temporal relations. Ten-year-old children employ the specific additive means of their mother tongue: Italian children, for instance, increase the use of the ri-verb strategy. We also examined the implicational hypothesis proposed by Benazzo et al. in their study of child L1 acquisition: the function of anche > the function of ancora1,2 > the function of ancora3, sempre This sequence turns out to be only partly valid for our data, a result that could only be resolved by analysis of additional data. Italian children begin to use ancora3 from the age of 4, simultaneously with ancora2, but with the absence of ancora1 (which is rare in Italian adult data too), probably due to their preference for the alternative additive un altro. Nevertheless, the frequency of ancora3 and sempre2 increases at the age of 7, and decreases again at the age of 10. Since in the L1 production of adults these means are not particularly frequent either, we can suppose that by the age of 10, the production of Italian children reflects the spoken input of their mother tongue. A similarity with the results found by Benazzo et al. (2004) (and Andorno, 2000 for Italian L2) concerns the syntax of anche in Italian with respect to that of aussi in French. In both languages these two particles are syntactically flexible, making the acquisition of their right placement complex for both very young children and L2 learners. Finally, the production of our L2 learners also shows similarities with the production of German and Polish L2 learners studied by the authors above, in particular with respect to the appearance of temporal particles only at the intermediate and advanced levels. For obvious reasons having to do with the different L1s and L2s involved, we ascertained different semantic and positional difficulties.

Notes (1) The continual reading involves an atelic verb with imperfective aspect; the iterative reading demands a telic verb with perfective aspect. (2) All English translations in this work are literal glosses. (3) This informant has spent most of her life in the United States.

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(4) The conventions and symbols used in the transcriptions are given in the appendix. (5) In Italian sempre can lead to ambiguity since it can mark either temporal continuity/ iteration or referential continuity (with respect to a place or an entity); hence the question mark in Table 19.4 of this section, and in Tables 19.6 through 19.7 in sections ‘Italian Adults’ and ‘Italian L2 Data’; for more on this point, cf. also section ‘Italian Adults’. (6) The final position of anche is only acceptable in emphatic contexts where the particle has a scalar-additive meaning. (7) The initial position of ancora by one of our intermediate learners and one of our Italian adults can receive the same interpretation (cf. tables in the appendix).

References Andorno, C. (2000) Focalizzatori tra Connessione e Messa a Fuoco. Milano: Franco Angeli. Benazzo, S. (2000) L‘Acquisition des Particules de Portée en Français, Anglais et Allemand L2. Etudes Longitudinales Comparées. http://sites.google.com/site/sandrabenazzo/ publications Benazzo, S., Dimroth, C., Perdue, C. and Watorek, M. (2004) Le rôle des particules additives dans la construction de la cohésion discursive en langue maternelle et en langue étrangère. Langages 155, 76–104. Dimroth, C. (2002) Topics, assertions, and additive words: How learners get from information structure to target-langauge syntax. Linguistics 40, 891–923. Giuliano, P. (2004a) La Négation dans l‘Acquisition d’une Langue Etrangère. Un Débat Conclu?. Bern: Peter Lang. Giuliano, P. (2004b) Abilità Narrativa ed Emarginazione Sociale. Napoli: Liguori. Hendriks, H. (2000) The acquisition of topic marking in L1 Chinese and L1 and L2 French. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 22, 369–397. Hickmann, M. (1995) Discourse organisation and the development of reference to person, space and time. In P. Fletcher and B. MacWhinney (eds) The Handbook of Child Language (pp. 194–218). Oxford: Blackwell. Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G. and Svartvik, J. (1985) A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman. Taglicht, J. (1984) Message and Emphasis. On Focus and Scope in English. London: Longman.

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Appendix TABLE A.1 The position and scope of additive particles in VP utterances Additive particles

Position

4-yearolds

7-yearolds

anche

anche qua VP

2

1

1

1

2

VP anche/pure qua/ sotto

ancora

10-yearolds

1

Questo* anche VP

1

anche lui/NP† VP‡

2

7

5

20

V(P) anche/pure lui/ NP (. . .)$

7

7

19

16

*anche/pure NP V NP (scope?)

3

*qua VP anche. . .

2

*qua Aux anche V

1

*SN VP pure NP

1

V NP ancora1

1

V ancora1 NP/un’altra VP ancora2 di più

1

V/Aux ancora3 (Gerund/ Past Part/. . .)

2

VP ancora3 PrepP

1

4

1

3

2

5

Ancora2 or 3 VP

3

V ancora2 or 3? Adj sempre

Adults

V(P) sempre2 (. . .) Sempre1 Gerund. . .

1 1

6

3

2 1

*The demonstrative pronoun questo (‘this’) refers to the picture the child is looking at. †The NP alternating with lui is generally Mr Red or Mr Blue. ‡V refers to the finite lexical verb; VP can refer to V + NP but also to complex verb structures (e.g., Aux + Past Part/Gerund). $Three dots indicate that the full utterance may be longer.

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TABLE A.2 The position and scope of alternative additive expressions in VP utterances Additive expressions

Position

di nuovo

V di nuovo. . .

Un’altra volta

4-yearolds

VP di nuovo

1

VP un’altra volta

1

Un’altra volta VP

1

7-year-olds

10-yearolds

Adults

1

3

3

1

2

2

2

TABLE A.3 The position and scope of additive particles in VP utterances* Additive particles

Position

anche

anche lui/NP VP

Beginners

Intermediate

Advanced

2

14

V anche/pure lui/NP . . .

2

VP anche/pure lui/NP (. . .)

1

lui anche VP

1

*lui/NP VP anche (. . .)

1(= ancora3)

3

2

*VP anche PrepP = di nuovo/ 1 ancora2 *anche Conj NP VP ancora

Sempre

1

Ancora2 o 3? VP

2

V/Aux ancora3 (Gerund/. . .)

3

4

Aux V ancora2/3 (PrepP)

2

1

*ancora3 PrepP VP

1

V sempre2 . . .

6

Sempre2 Gerund. . .

1

V sempre 1. . .

1

*This table does not include occurrences of anche having the function of inoltre (‘furthermore’)

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TABLE A.4 The position and scope of alternative additive expressions in VP utterances Additive expressions

Position

di nuovo

V di nuovo. . . VP di nuovo

Beginner

Advanced

1 1

di nuovo VP un’altra volta

Intermediate

5 1

un’altra volta VP

1

1

VP (un’)altra volta (. . .)

1

1

Symbols and Abbreviations XY / // [] adj aux conj Eng. INT. fem. It. iter. past part pers. plur. pref. pro. refl. sing. V Vinf ... ** *

indicates the scope of additive expressions self-interruption or correction marks the passage from one picture to the other observations or additions by the analyst adjective auxiliary conjunction English Interviewer feminine Italian iterative past participle person plural prefix pronoun reflexive singular finite verb non finite verb eliminated passage word in L1 or a language different from the L2 under consideration ungrammatical expression or structure

20 The Role of Conceptual Development in the Acquisition of the Spatial Domain by L1 and L2 Learners of French, English and Polish1 Henriëtte Hendriks and Marzena Watorek

How it all began . . . . Marzena and I met in 1993 at the Max-Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics at a meeting of the then Structure of Learner Varieties research group (thanks Clive!). I had started a project on the comparison of child first and adult second language acquisition, and Marzena was finishing her PhD with Clive and aiming to start an APN project with a similar scope, that is, comparing L1 and L2 acquisition. The project got funded and we both were involved in it. And as you can see below, our cooperation continues . . . .

Introduction The Topic of the Chapter This study compares the developmental path of first (L1) and second (L2) language learners. The general aim of the study is to evaluate the influence of two factors on the construction of coherent and cohesive spatial discourse: the cognitive development of the learner and the structure of the language he/she is acquiring. For this purpose a poster description task was administered to monolingual French, English and Polish adults and children, and a group of Polish L2 learners of French. The communicative task was kept constant across learners, whereas the factors age and available linguistic 401

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means differ. Concerning the latter, we make the assumption that the available linguistic means change not only as a function of language itself, but also as a function of the proficiency level of the particular speaker of that language. Results show that development in first and second language acquisition is on the one hand very different, which can be explained by the fact that the cognitive maturity of the two groups of learners is very different. On the other, we find similar discourse productions in L1 and L2 acquisition as far as some aspects are concerned. In the following, we will clarify how and why discourse produced by our two types of learners, children and adults, is similar in some ways and different in others.

Plurifunctionality in Language In the functional approach to language acquisition in which this study is embedded, the two fundamental assumptions are that language is plurifunctional and that it is context-dependent. It is furthermore assumed that functions are universal, similar for all languages, and likely to be closely related to human cognition, but that the linguistic means to express these functions are languagespecific (Hickmann, 2003). Based on these assumptions, we hypothesize for first language acquisition that the functions, that is, discourse functions, semantic functions and so on, are acquired at a universal pace as guided by cognitive development, thereby also guiding language acquisition along universal paths, whereas the mapping of forms (linguistic means) and functions will be a language-dependent phenomenon, possibly resulting in different developmental paths across languages. For second language acquisition we hypothesize that functions have already been acquired during first language acquisition (given that they are thought to be universal), and that the task of a second language learner concerns only the mapping of new forms and old functions (cf. Hendriks, 2003). We will test these hypotheses with data involving a complex verbal task, which involves the use of an array of language functions.

Spatial Descriptions and Language Acquisition In this study we will look at discourse resulting from a complex verbal task, the description of a poster (see Appendix I). Similar tasks have been used before and are known as ‘static spatial descriptions’. Our analyses concern the way in which spatial information is expressed and organized in discourse by speakers of different ages (child L1 vs. adult L2 acquirers), different proficiency levels (children of 4, 7 and 10 years old, and adult absolute beginners, beginners and intermediate learners), and learning different languages (French, English and Polish as first languages, French by Polish as a second language). The poster description task is conceived in such a way that the speaker should construct a coherent discourse that allows the interlocutor (who does

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not have visual access to the poster) to make a drawing corresponding to the poster. The speaker therefore has to introduce entities (themes) and locate them with respect to other entities (relata).2 The relata may either be objects in the poster, or the poster itself. He thus has to have an understanding of the entities present in the poster; their location with respect to one another or with respect to the poster (including a familiarity with spatial concepts in general). He also has to know how to deal with the artistic perspective that translates the three-dimensional space into a two-dimensional representation, and how to interpret spatial relations as a result of that (e.g. things that are ‘higher’ up in this particular poster are, in effect, frequently a two-dimensional translation of ‘further away’). This kind of knowledge is all part of the conceptual complexity of the task. The speaker also has to have access to the linguistic means allowing him to express all this information according to target language rules. The speaker’s skill will depend on the level of linguistic mastery he has reached. Finally, the speaker will have to take decisions as to the linearization of information on the discourse level (e.g. does one frame the space to be described using obvious boundaries such as the poster itself or the buildings surrounding the square in the poster), and he has to take into account the shared (or nonshared) knowledge between him and the interlocutor, and has to anticipate what information has to be introduced for the interlocutor. The latter involves mastering of the discourse pragmatic principles.

Age and the Spatial Description Task If we depart from the assumption that the adult second language learner is cognitively mature, then he should not have any problems conceptualizing space in general, dealing with the spatial lay-out, the artistic perspective and the linearization of information in discourse. The adult learner can also be expected to take the perspective of the interlocutor into account, this being part of the discourse-pragmatic principles which are also supposedly universal. Otherwise said, the problem of the L2 learner should be restricted to a purely linguistic one, concerned with finding the linguistic expressions in the target language that map onto his conception of space in the poster. Thus, he should be able to conceptualise all possible spatial configurations, but can only express what his linguistic competence allows him to. If we look at children, however, the situation is slightly different. Even though most of them by the age of 4 have acquired most spatial concepts and their expression in language (cf. Johnston & Slobin, 1979, amongst others), some concepts, such as the lateral axis (particularly useful in this task), are still being acquired. The linearization of information may also cause more problems for children than for adults, given that it involves an overall understanding of the complexity of that information, which then has to be followed up by a strategy on how to distribute it in the discourse. We also assume children to have more problems with the above-mentioned translation of the artistic

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perspective as rendered on the poster into spatial expressions fit for threedimensional space. Finally, taking into account the knowledge shared (or not) with the interlocutor has already been shown to be problematic for the child. The studies by Hickmann et al. (1996) and Hickmann and Hendriks (1999) show that children until at least seven have difficulties controlling this factor when constructing discourse. Note that, whereas this task has previously been used in L2 acquisition (for results refer to Carroll & von Stutterheim, 1993, 1997; Watorek, 1996), it has not been used in the study of first language acquisition. Description tasks as such exist in L1, but mostly occur in a three-dimensional space (i.e. route descriptions in a miniature village (Weissenborn & Klein, 1982); the description of a living room in a doll’s house (Ehrich & Koster, 1983; Ehrich, 1982). The latter type of studies have shown a number of interesting observations: when the space (i.e. a living room) is clearly organized (with a dining space, a television corner, etc.), adult speakers tend to describe the space accordingly, in that they will linguistically divide the room into subspaces, describing each subspace’s location with respect to the overall space first, then grouping the entities in that subspace around the most salient entity or the entity defining that space. When, however, the space is filled with entities without any ‘logic’, that is all the furniture is haphazardly put into the room, speakers tend to make a tour and sequence information, locating entity B with respect to entity A, and entity C with respect to entity B and so on (cf. Ehrich & Koster, 1983). Of course, recognizing the logic/functionality of the distribution of entities in a space may be part of some more general world knowledge, and it may therefore be the case that young children have a harder time perceiving this logic than adults. Indeed, results show that children at four years will not describe the functionally organized living room as such. As a result, the linearization in discourse does not reflect such organization either. Linearization skills in this task seem to develop up to 12 years of age, and at a slow pace only (Ehrich, 1982). When referring to our poster, some haphazard distribution and some more organized/logical distribution can be found. Thus, there is an inherent organization coupled with squares, which usually concerns roads and/or houses delimiting the space such as to form a square. This is the most ‘organized’ feature in our poster. On the other hand, the entities found in the square are arranged in a more haphazard distribution. We will observe if and how different types of speakers (children, native adults, adult learners) make use of these organizing features.

Cross-linguistic Influences on Spatial Description Tasks A number of studies concerning spatial descriptions have taken a crosslinguistic perspective. They have asked speakers of different languages to describe the same spatial arrangement, and they find that across languages the

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way of locating entities varies importantly. Thus, native speakers of German and English, although their languages permit the expression of the same spatial situations with relatively similar linguistics means, construct descriptions in a very different way. German natives tend to organize the general space (the poster for example) first, independently of the entities found in that space, and then use the various deictically assured sub-spaces to locate the entities. The English natives, however, will use the entities as anchor points for other entities to be located. The overall organization of such descriptions thus looks very different from one language to another (Carroll et al., 2000; Watorek, 2003). The German description would resemble the description of a functionally organized space in the Ehrich and Koster experiment, whereas the English-type description results in the kind of sequencing that Ehrich and Koster found for unorganized spaces. In short, different factors seem to influence the linearization of spatial information at the discourse level. This study will be able to take into account all of the above issues, that is cross-linguistic differences, representation of space in terms of cognitive understanding of that space, understanding of the elicitation constraints, use of language-specific linguistic means and so on.

Method Subjects For this study, we included adults and children at 4, 7 and 10 years old in three different languages, English (10 per group), French (10 per group) and Polish (five per group). We furthermore included a group of Polish learners of French at three levels of proficiency (two absolute beginners, five beginners and three intermediate level learners).3 The L2 learner’s level is based on two productions (a narration and the description), and elements influencing the evaluation were the use of grammatical linguistic means such as verb morphology, spatial prepositions, adverbial markers and the fluency of the learner in constructing the discourse. Thus, the absolute beginners cannot construct a discourse in an autonomous way, without the help of the interlocutor, that is, they depend largely on scaffolding; learners at beginner level construct their discourse in a more or less autonomous way, but although coherent, these productions are not always cohesive. The intermediate learner constructs a more or less cohesive discourse but still shows considerable problems on the utterance organizational level, as well as being influenced by transfer on the discourse organizational level.

Material A poster from the series: Hier fällt ein Haus, dort steht ein Kran, und ewig droht der Baggerzahn, oder, die Veränderung der Stadt, ‘Here collapses a house,

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there stands a crane, and the dredge is always threatening, or, the alternation of a city’ by Müller and Ledergerber (1976). The poster presents a scene of a historical town centre. It is originally a triptych. Only the central picture showing the town square will be subject of the description.

Procedure Subjects were seen individually. There were two interviewers, one of which functioned as the naive interlocutor/drawer, present when the learner described the poster. For ‘absolute beginning’ and ‘beginning’ learners of French as a second language, the second interviewer spoke the native language of the learner so that he could also give instructions in Polish, or add instructions in case of non-comprehension. The instructions were as follows: ‘We are going to play a kind of game. I would like you to describe this poster to the person over there (pointing to the person who is sitting with his back turned towards the speaker). He/she is going to make a drawing based on your description. Be precise when you describe the poster, because the person who is drawing has never seen it. Make sure you tell him clearly where things are. If not, he will not know where to draw them on his blank sheet of paper.’ After the instructions, the learner has the poster to be described in front of him at all times. During his description, the naive interlocutor makes a drawing. When the learner is not very precise, the interlocutor may ask the learner to be more precise, saying things like ‘I need a bit more detail,’ ‘Could you be a bit more precise.’ Once the description finished, the drawer shows his drawing to the child or adult participant.

Results In the following we discuss the results of this study in three sub-sections. First, we discuss the data with respect to the general understanding of the task, that is, do speakers accommodate the information for the drawer in the sense of introducing the task as involving interaction concerning describing and drawing (cf. section ‘General understanding of the task’). In the second section ‘The expression of explicit spatial relations in the descriptions’ the data will be analysed in terms of spatial relations expressed, that is, what topological and projective relations learners express at what levels of proficiency. Finally, in the section ‘Strategies of linearization’, we will look at the linearization strategies that learners use, that is do they make use of the framing function that houses and streets can supply, do they just list entities or discuss them in groups and so forth. We hypothesize that adult learners should outperform children at general understanding of the task, including an understanding of information needed by the listener/drawer to produce a proper drawing. However, we also

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hypothesize adult learners to struggle more with the language-specific means to express the above knowledge. As a result, adult descriptions will not necessarily systematically be more appropriate than child descriptions.

General Understanding of the Task It is difficult to measure the understanding of the descriptive task by adult native speakers, child and adult learners in a quantitative way. We therefore decided to highlight one particular qualitative facet of the production: we looked for explicit references by the child/adult to the drawing, the task of drawing, seeing the drawing and so on. Adult native speakers in all three languages refer either explicitly to the poster, to the act of seeing what is in the poster, or to the act of drawing. That is, they explicitly refer to the context in which the description is given, or to the purpose of the description (cf. example 1 from an English adult description). (1) We look at the scene I guess from a high floor in a building across the street. (English Adult) Children at 4, 7 and even 10 years do not systematically refer to the task in an explicit way in their description. There is some development in that the oldest children are more explicit than the younger ones, but even 10-yearolds do not all see this information as a priority. Some first attempts are found in the 7-year-olds who start referring to the act of seeing or drawing as in example (2) below. (2) I see a café and then it’s got houses on top of it. (English sevenyear-old) The relatively simple use of ‘I see..’ indicates to the hearer (or drawer) that we have now started the description. The context of the utterance is such that ‘I see ..’ can be understood without any ambiguity as ‘I see on the poster.’ In contrast, the example by a French 7-year-old in (3) starts out immediately with y a une place, ‘there is a square’. (3) Il y a une place + y a quelqu’un qui fait du vélo et y a des arbres et y a un vélo (French 7-year-old) There’s a square + there is someone who is riding a bike and there are trees and there is a bike. For adult second language learners we find that, from the lowest level of proficiency, some adult L2 learners take the constraints of the task into account, in that they attempt to start by ‘alors je vois’ (so, I see . . .), or, ‘the image

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shows’, or, ‘it’s an image of’. An example of a description with such introductory remarks is given in (4). This is clearly not the overall pattern, though. (4) Alors je vois une place (Beginner) So I see a square. Thus, in terms of the overall anchoring of the discourse with respect to the particular communicative task, we conclude that adults in all three languages in relatively explicit ways remind the listener of the discourse situation and the task that speaker and listener have. When comparing the learner data, there does not seem to be a clear difference between the L1 and L2 learners. Children up to and including 10 years old frequently do not refer to the description and drawing task at all. Similarly, only some Polish L2 learners of French refer to the discourse situation. However, whereas age seems to be a factor in the child data, proficiency is not a factor in the adult L2 data.

The Expression of Explicit Spatial Relations in the Descriptions In an earlier publication (Hendriks & Watorek, 2008), we analysed these same data focusing on utterance structures in the descriptions, and the location of the spatial information in them. We found that the most common structure was of the type Prepositional phrase (PP) – final verb (V) – noun phrase (NP) This structure allows the learner to express the relatum in the prepositional phrase and the theme in the noun phrase. Results showed that the structure may be slightly different depending on language and learner type. That is, the PP is usually in initial position in native adult Polish and French but may be found equally frequently in initial or final position in English. Traces of these preferences in the adult data are visible in the child data from seven years onward and in the L2 data at all levels of proficiency. Children at four years, however, only infrequently add spatial information, but rather rely on a list of entities visible in the poster in a minimal response to the communicative needs, as shown in more detail in the section below (cf. example 5). (5) une voiture (EXP: soit bien précis elle voit pas l’affiche) + un camion un monsieur un vélo une voiture. (4-year-old) A car (EXP: be precise, she cannot see the poster) + a van a man a bike a car In the following sections, we analyse the spatial information as included in the prepositional phrase in basic structures as those discussed above.

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Quantity of spatial information From the outset, this particular complex verbal task was designed to have learners and native speakers describe spatial relations between objects located either with respect to each other, or with respect to the poster in which they can be found (the description cannot be communicatively effective if no spatial information is provided). We therefore now look closer at the expression of such spatial relations by our subjects. In a first instance, we will analyse the frequency of explicit spatial locations in the subjects’ descriptions of the poster; later we will analyse those spatial locations in more detail, looking at what types of spatial relations (topological or projective; vertical, lateral or sagittal axes) are expressed, and what relata are used to relate the themes to. Figure 20.1 concentrates on the spatial information specified in French, English and Polish as a first language. It shows the proportion of utterances that occur with at least one explicit spatial location. As can be seen, adults across languages tend to provide quite a large amount of utterances with explicit localizations. English adults provide explicit spatial information in 72% of the utterances in their description, French 66% and Polish 64%. Frequently, adults will provide more than one prepositional phrase per utterance. The child data show a clear development in terms of proportions of utterances with added spatial information. Note that at 4 years there seems to be a difference across languages, in that French children tend to provide more utterances with spatial information (27%) than Polish (16%) and English children (8%). This language-specific difference seems to disappear around 10 years old, which might suggest that at that age providing spatial information is only influenced by the task, not by the language spoken. Regarding the L2 data produced by the Polish learners of French, we find that these learners, from the lowest level of proficiency are aware of the requirements of the task in that 59% of their utterances are provided with spatial information, a percentage very close to that of the native French speaker data. Thus, in example (6) we find spatial locations, even if very basic, accompanying the entities enumerated (in the first utterance a simple juxtaposition of street and little car; the preposition en face de used for various spatial constellations as in, next to, etc.).

Figure 20.1 Proportions of utterances with explicit locations

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(6) e: la route peti voiture + ici camion + c’est beaucoup population [. . .] en face grand-père est petit boutique tabac + en face bureau tabac ici boulangerie (absolute beginner) e: the road little car + here truck + it’s a lot of people [. . .] across from granddad is little tabac shop + opposite the bureau tabac here bakery The L2 learners will systematically attempt to explicitly locate entities even when they have very little linguistic means to do so. Four-year-olds in all languages, even when asked for more information, do not seem to understand that locating the entities is an essential part of the task. Example 5 above illustrates this for a French 4-year-old who provides more information by enumerating more entities found in the poster, but without explicit locations. The reason that very early L2 learners (example 6) do not always manage to execute the task in an efficient way is their limitation in the linguistic repertoire in the target language. The important conclusion on the basis of this finding has to be that adult second language learners, even when treating the task in a minimal way, see the absolute necessity to add spatial information. In contrast, children seem to understand the task in a first instance as a need to inform the listener about the entities found in the poster, but with no need of further explicitation of the more exact locations of the entities. When we look at more advanced levels of proficiency, the percentage of utterances with spatial information actually diminishes (from 52% at the absolute beginner level to 40% at the intermediate level). The fact that the proportions diminish at a higher level of proficiency is related to the fact that at this level, speakers start to provide other types of information as well. Contrary to the native speaker data, in the learner data the two types of information (spatial and activity) seem to be in competition, which may be explained through complexity of structures to be used when one wants to express both in one utterance. In the child data, a lack of spatial information, we believe, is the result of cognitive complexity only.

Type of spatial relations The next section concerns the actual spatial relations as expressed by adult native speakers and child and adult learners. For this purpose, we distinguish the expression of topological versus projective relations. Projective relations are based on the conceptualization of space as defined by a system of axes (vertical, sagittal, lateral). The point where the three axes come together, the origo, gives the space its orientation. Projective relations maybe deictic, that is when the speaker functions as the origo, or intrinsic, when another entity (e.g. the poster or single entities in the poster) serves as the origo. In contrast, topological relations involve a relation between the theme and the relatum irrespective of the three axes. The use of the axis system has been claimed to be a cognitively more complex operation, which should lead

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to it being acquired later by children but not by second language learners. In principle, however, we should not find this development in our data, following the findings by Johnston and Slobin (1979) that show that by the age of four most of the axes (except maybe for the lateral one) are acquired. A first analysis concerned the relative frequency of use of topological versus projective relations. As shown below, Polish adults tend to describe the poster using a majority of topological relations (58%). English adults use 54% of projective relations, and French adults use a majority (63%) of projective relations. At 4 years, children seem uninfluenced by the patterns of their native languages. They tend to relate themes and entities almost uniquely by means of topological relations, as exemplified in (7) (78% in English, 100% in French and 76% in Polish). To explain this phenomenon in the 4-year-olds, we already mentioned that these topological relations are thought to be simpler. However, in principle, children should have acquired the localization by means of axes by this age (with the exception of the lateral axis). We therefore suggest that applying the system of axes to the description of a twodimensional representation of space causes the difficulty. At 7 years, French children relate theme and relatum a lot less frequently in topological ways, and use the projective relations more frequently. English and Polish children, however, continue to express more topological than projective relations even at 10 years, as can be seen in examples (8) and (9) for an English and a French description, respectively. Note however, that in doing so, they resemble the native speaker adults. The figures thus show that not only age but also language influences the choice of spatial relations expressed. Finally, the difference may also be related to the type of relata chosen. We will look into this latter issue below. (7) They are walking on the things (stilts) [..] a grandma who’s sitting on a bench [. . .] And another person near the stone [. . .] and there’s food in there and bread [. . .] (English 4-year-old) (8) There’s a bike behind it. There’s people ehm children on sticks and there’s an old man on the side and there’s a man reading the newspaper and there’s an old lady sitting on the bench and there’s a statue on the other side with a big helm [. . .] (English 7-year-old) (9) Il y a un vélo en bas de l’image + après il y a une voiture qui est aussi en bas de l’image + une rue qui part du milieu de l’image qui va vers le haut de l’image [. . .] (French 7-year-old) There is a bike at the bottom of the picture + and then there is a car also at the bottom of the picture + a road the starts from the middle of the picture and that goes up to the top of the picture Turning our attention to the Polish learners of French, we expect no development concerning the choice of topological vs. projective relations. However, we may find that these learners have to adjust their preferred

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choice in the source language to the preferred choice in the target language. Looking at Figure 20.2b, we find that the choice for topological vs. projective relations shows no clear development at all. Preference for one or the other category seems to switch at different points in the development. Given that the choice of topological and projective relations is also language related, however, it might be that Polish learners are indeed adjusting the type of relations expressed to fit with the target language. Developments do occur in the appropriate use of linguistic means available for the expression of spatial relations. Thus, contrary to the child data, the adult learner data include some pure juxtapositions of theme and relatum (not allowed in the target language) and some other idiosyncratic uses of prepositions which diminish with proficiency.

Figure 20.2 (a) Proportions of topological vs. projective relations as expressed in the spatial description task; (b) Proportions of topological vs. projective relations as expressed by the L2 learners

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The expression of topological relations The type of topological relations expressed in the child L1 data changes only slightly with age. At 4 years, French and English children clearly do not master the unshared knowledge factor inherent in this spatial description task, and overestimate the hearer’s knowledge, using deictic markers in 42% of the cases in English, 34% of the cases in French. Deictic topological relations such as ici ‘here’, là ‘there’, and là-bas ‘over there’ decrease clearly with age, which indicates that the child gradually starts to understand the constraints of the task, in which the speaker and hearer do not share visual information. At 7 years, English and French children use deictic markers in only about 10% of the cases. At 10 years, they have stopped using deictic markers completely (1% or less), taking the knowledge of their interlocutor fully into account. In Polish, deictic topological markers are extremely infrequent at all ages. Adult L2 learners, even at the lowest level of proficiency, seldom use deictic expressions, indicating that they understand the constraints of both the task and these particular linguistic elements, and avoid them even though they might serve an easy replacement for a more explicit locative marker in their interlanguage. They fully take into account the unshared knowledge. Note, however, that the low use of such markers in their native language may also influence the low use in the L2. Most topological relations expressed are rather vague and of the type ‘in the region of’ and ‘near’ (approx. 65% in English and up to 80% in French at all ages). Given that this pattern is found not only in the child data, but also in the adult learner and adult native data, we assume that the elicitation material is the cause of this finding. At 7 and 10 years, contact and inclusion relations occur in higher frequency as well, thereby following the emergence of spatial concepts in children in general (even though with a big delay).

The expression of projective relations Earlier studies concerning the emergence of the linguistic expression of projective axes by children have shown (Johnston & Slobin, 1979) that across languages, the vertical axis is the first one understood by children. Following is the sagittal axis, and finally the lateral axis. In this study, speakers deal with a slightly more complex task, however, in the sense that they deal with a two-dimensional representation of a threedimensional space. In order to describe such a space, one has to carefully consider the translation of the axes in the two-dimensional poster into axes in three dimensions. In such a situation, only the vertical and lateral axes stay constant, the lateral axis involving the problem of inherent vs. deictic perspective taking. The sagittal axis becomes very complex, in that front and back have to be reconstructed on the basis of the perspective created by the drawer of the poster. Figure 20.2a and b above show the use of the prepositions for the projective axes by age and language. In the figure, we named the

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columns after the axes that the prepositions typically denote. Note however, that children and adult learners may use prepositions in an idiosyncratic way. Therefore, we will have a closer look at the actual use of those prepositions to see if they are indeed used in a target-like manner. The first projective axis expressed is the vertical axis, which is used in English and French from 4 years onwards. This axis is the main one for English children at all ages. Included in this category are cases which are not strictly only of a locative kind, but may be mixed locative and functional such as ‘a woman on her bike’ and so on. The earliest cases involve entities in the poster serving as relata, rather than the poster itself. Thus, one finds occurrences such as the one in example (10) below by a 4-year-old, but not example (11). At seven years, children start using the sagittal and lateral axis to describe the spatial layout in the poster (the sagittal axis being the main one in adult descriptions), sometimes accompanied with errors (confusing left for right). In this case, it is not only the entities in the poster that serve as a relatum, but also the speaker or the poster itself. Finally, it is only at 10 years that children manage to effectively use the sagittal axis. Note that the use of all three axes shows occasional problems with respect to the artistic perspective. The expressions are not only more sparsely used, but some idiosyncrasies exist in actual usage as well. Thus, the example in (12) shows how the same 10-year-old uses above twice to refer to a ‘behind’ scene, once correcting herself, once not noticing it. (10) People on the bench + some birds on the ground. (English 4year-old). (11) On the bottom left hand corner there’s a Toblerone sign on the building [. . .] (English 10-year-old). (12) [. . .] there’s a tree and above the tree well it’s not above the tree but it’s behind the tree there’s a triangular roof (stall) [. . .] just above the purple car there’s a green car (English 10-year-old). We thus find an age-related development in this area as well. The development cannot be related to acquiring the understanding of the axes as such, but may rather relate to the understanding of the translation of perspective in a two-dimensional setting to a linguistic system made for the description of three-dimensional space. The descriptions of the L2 learners show the use of all three axes from the earliest level of proficiency onward. In these descriptions, the sagittal axis is used most frequently at all proficiency levels, the lateral axis being second, the vertical axis being least used. The frequency of use does therefore not resemble the child data, nor the developmental sequence of the axes. Adult learners master the three axes and their use for the description of twodimensional space. Their more extensive use of the sagittal and lateral axes reflects that of native speaker productions as reported in earlier studies (Carroll et al., 2000; Watorek, 2003).

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In sum, choice of spatial information expressed in this task seems to be guided by the information as presented in the poster. Development with age is found extensively in the child L1 data, but no link with proficiency was found in the L2 data. The L2 learners act as native speakers from the lowest level of proficiency onward (even though their choice of expressions may be idiosyncratic at times).

Strategies of Linearization A final analysis in this chapter concerns strategies of linearization in terms of the presence of one particular type of information in the description, that is explicit delimitations of the square by means of roads and or buildings. As mentioned previously, roads and buildings are natural delimiters for squares, and they therefore dominate the whole layout of the part of the city to be described. Let us give an example (13) of how an adult native speaker uses these features to deal with the general layout. (13)

So this er seems to be a er street scene set in a French city probably something like Paris er the buildings are 1910 according to one turn of the century sort of slightly Art Nouveau sort of ornate er it features an intersection of two streets on a kind of ninety degree corner and er next to this intersection there’s a small public place like a place (Native adult)

Although not all native adults set up this kind of spatial frame for the description, 80% of them do in more or less complex terms. If we make an inventory of the use of buildings and or streets as a frame setting in the child data, we find that 4-year-olds will list buildings as one of the entities occurring on the poster, but only seldom do so with streets. More importantly, however, they do not use the buildings or streets to frame the space to be described, in contrast to the native adults. At 7 years, three English children and two French children make a first attempt to give a more overall description of the picture before going into detail. One of the English children (14) states that the poster depicts a town and mentions the buildings, not really using them to build a frame though. Other children refer to parts of the picture, as shown in (15). At 10 years, some children attempt a more structural approach to the description task, and one English child (16) tries to describe the overall layout of the poster. (14) (15)

Looks like a town, but not a very busy one. It’s got nice tall buildings and a café (+++) children playing in it [. . .] There’s lots of buildings in a picture [. . .] some children playing football in the distance. You can see it like a shape of some hills like in the depth.

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[. . .] That’s all + (EXP: That’s all. Okay. Do you think that’s enough for the picture to be drawn?) no + (EXP: No, you don’t think so? What would you want to add to make the picture better?) Ehm there’s a kind of road shaped as a ‘b’ in between the five houses comes straight down turns right and then comes down again turns left.

If we now look at the L2 Polish learners of French, we find that these speakers also make very few attempts to give the drawer a more general outline (but see example 17 for an intermediate learner’s attempt). (17)

après le square c’est la rue à tout de suite la tour + au fond et avec square il y a la rue à droite et à gauche aussi. after the square it’s the road immediately at the tower + in the background and with the square there is a road on the right and a road on the left as well.

In short, this particular aspect of the poster description task seems to be considered as an integral part of the task by native adults. However, neither children nor adult second language learners seem able to deal with this more complex integration of information to be organized in the discourse. As a result, the logic of the square-like format is not explicitly revealed by many children, nor by adult L2 learners. A possible explanation for this is that the discourse structure (linguistic organization) may have to be more complex when the information expressed is more complex, and that adult L2 learners may not yet manage these organizational principles. In the child data, both the conceptual insight in the information and linguistic complexity are thought to influence the lack of square defining.

Conclusion The aim of this chapter was to evaluate the influence of two different factors on the construction of coherent and cohesive discourse: the cognitive development of the learner and the structure of the language he is acquiring. In order to do this, we compared the developmental path of L1 and L2 learners concerning one particular task, that is the description of a poster for a naive listener who should be able to draw whatever is in the poster on the basis of the speaker’s information only. We argued that in order to give a coherent description of the poster, speakers should have a number of cognitive skills relating to the understanding of the spatial information, the information shared between speaker and hearer, and linguistic skills allowing them to express this knowledge. We also argued that some of these skills should be acquired by the child, whereas they should be available to all adults, native and non-native speakers, whereas others might have to be acquired by both children and adult learners, or acquired only by adult learners.

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Findings show that children and adult L2 learners will only very infrequently introduce the task by referring to the drawing task of the listener (making a drawing), or to the fact that they are looking at a poster. Similarly, both children and adult L2 learners are hesitant to use the features of the poster to create an organized space in which the square is surrounded and delimited by streets and houses. These features may give a listener the feeling that productions of lower level adult learners and of younger children are very similar, being somewhat ‘minimal’. This way of dealing with the task has been called a minimal or prototypical rendering of the task. Note however, that the constructed texts are not as similar as they may seem. Thus, when we move on to the spatial information provided by the two learner groups (the essence of this description task) we find that adult L2 learners from the lowest level of proficiency onward will make any possible attempt to integrate this information into their production. In contrast, 4-year-olds will provide very few relata in their descriptions, and even at 7 years, although by then they realize that one may have to add some kind of information to enable the listener to identify one entity from another, they will not necessarily reach for spatial information in doing so. Thus, some of the buildings in the square are equally easily identified (within the realms of the poster) by their location as by their colour. Children will more systematically choose the colour (a feature which is useful for those who can see the poster but not for the drawer in our particular speech situation), whereas adult L2 learners will try and add spatial information. Looking at the spatial relations expressed, we find the clearest indications of differences in basic skills of children and adult L2 learners. The child will use more deictic expressions, especially at four years, than the adult L2 learner. This indicates the child’s lack of understanding of the communicative task in which deictic information is not informative. A clear development is also found in the type of spatial expressions the child uses. Although it has acquired linguistic expressions for all possible spatial constellations, it will start by only using vertical axes, only later referring to the other two axes. Moreover, the child seems occasionally unclear about how to translate the artistic perspective to a three-dimensional space, in that it uses prepositions referring to the ‘wrong’ axis when describing the poster. All these developments and problems do not occur in the L2 learner data. In contrast, the adult L2 learners show clear problems in mastering the linguistic means of the target language for expressing spatial relations. In order to get their message across, they will depend on a variety of options, such as (a) giving the expression in their native language, hoping for the experimenter to provide a translation; (b) provide a pure juxtaposition of theme and relatum, leaving the details of the relation to the imagination of the listener; (c) indicate a spatial relation by using a preposition without it necessarily being the appropriate one in the given spatial constellation. All three problems seem to be clearly of a linguistic type, not related to any problems in conceptualizing the spatial layout, or the task at hand itself.

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In sum, we conclude that children, even though having mastered most of the spatial concepts at the age at which they are asked to perform the poster description, do not put this knowledge into use for the construction of text with the same ease as the adult L2 learners do. It seems therefore that the 4-year-old child cannot yet perform the communicative task in an efficient way. The child has a hard time taking all the information into account, and organizing it in a coherent whole. As a result, his text is also not the best context for the use of spatial relations (which would require some minimal organization (spatial or other) of the information available on the poster). The child at this age mainly relates entities through relatively vague topological relations. The 7-year-old child seems to focus all his attention on the handling of the informational part of the task, reducing as a result of that, the spatial complexity expressed. Only at 10 years is the child a better master of the communicative aspect of the task. He is less overwhelmed by the quantity of information, and is more capable of taking a more external perspective, allowing him to see the relations between the entities in the poster. As a result, he can give more attention to the expression of the spatial relations in a linguistically explicit way. The cognitive complexity of spatial relations as such, and of those relations when translated from two- into three-dimensional space combined with the understanding of the communicative task explains the order of emergence of the spatial expressions used in this particular context. The 4-year-old is not yet aware that more useful information can be obtained by expressing spatial relations between entities. It is only at 7 years that children start to realize this. From that point on, the struggle is: what expression to use to render the situation as accurately as possible. The adult learner, in contrast to the child, clearly masters the communicative task in all aspects, that is his understanding of the hearer’s knowledge, and especially the understanding of the need for spatial information. As a result, he expresses a whole range of spatial relations from the lowest proficiency level onward, even if he has to fall back on expressions in his mother tongue, make up idiosyncratic expressions, or solicit extensive help from the experimenter. The main factor influencing the amount of spatial information in the L2 learner data is his linguistic competence.

Notes (1) We thank Stephanie Haberzettl for making publication of the chapter in this volume possible. (2) We use the terminology of Klein (1986), in which the entity to be located is called the theme, and the entity with respect to which it is located, the relatum. (3) The data presented in this study are part of a larger database including also Italian as a first language, and English and Italian learners of French as a second language. The data were collected in a two-year project financed by the CNRS (Projet APN 2JE 454: Construction du discours par des apprenants des langues, enfants et adultes) and directed by M. Watorek.

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References Carroll, M. and von Stutterheim, C. (1993) The representation of spatial configurations in English and German and the grammatical structure of locative and anaphoric expressions. Linguistics 31, 1011–1042. Carroll, M. and von Stutterheim, C. (1997) Relations entre grammaticalisation et conceptualization et implications sur l’acquisition d’une langue étrangère. AILE 9, 83–116. Carroll, M., Murcia-Serra, J., Watorek, M. and Bendiscioli, A. (2000) The relevance of information organization to second language acquisition studies: The descriptive discourse of advanced adult learners of German. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 22, 441–466. Ehrich, V. (1982) Discourse organization and sentence form in child discourse: How children describe rooms. In Papers and Reports on Child Language Development 21, 55–62. Ehrich, V. and Koster, C. (1983) Discourse organization and sentence form: The structure of room descriptions in Dutch. Discourse Processes 6, 169–195. Hendriks, H. (2003) Using nouns in reference maintenance: A seeming contradiction in L2 discourse. In A. Giacalone-Ramat (ed.) Typology and Second Language Acquisition (pp. 291–326). New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Hendriks, H. and Watorek, M. (2008) L’organisation de l’information en topique dans les discours descriptifs en L1 et en L2. Acquisition et Interaction en Langue Étrangère 26, 149–171. Hickmann, M. (2003) Children’s Discourse: Person, Time and Space Across Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hickmann, M. and Hendriks, H. (1999) Cohesion and anaphora in children’s narratives: A comparison of English, French, German and Mandarin Chinese. Journal of Child Language 26, 419–452. Hickmann, M., Hendriks, H., Roland, F. and Liang, J. (1996) The marking of new information in children’s narratives: A comparison of English, French, German, and Mandarin Chinese. Journal of Child Language, 23, 591–619. Johnston, J. and Slobin, D. (1979) The development of locative expressions in English, Italian, Serbo-Croat and Turkish. Journal of Child Language 6, 529–545. Klein, W. (1986) Second Language Acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Müller, J. and Ledergerber, H. (1976) Hier, fällt ein Haus, dort steht ein Kran und ewig droht der Baggerzahn, oder, die Veränderung der Stadt. Watorek, M. (1996) Conceptualisation et representation linguistique de l’espace en italien et en français, langue maternelle et langue étrangère. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, University of Paris 8. Watorek, M. (2003) The development of anaphoric means to refer to space and entities in the acquisition of French by Polish speakers. In C. Dimroth and M. Starren (eds) Information Structure and the Dynamics of Language Acquisition (pp. 328–355). Amsterdam: Benjamins. Weissenborn, J. and Klein, W. (1982) Here and There. Crosslinguistic Studies in Deixis and Demonstration. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

21 The Grammaticalisation of Nominals in French L1 and L2: A Comparative Study of Child and Adult Acquisition Ewa Lenart

General Introduction The acquisition of a language requires an understanding of the close correlation between constraints of various types (formal, semantic and discursive), which govern the organisation of the sentence and the text. A language learner must learn to take into account the communicative goals of this set of constraints in relation to the context and the knowledge shared by interlocutors. Thus, the Jakobsonian referential function can pose a serious acquisitional problem for both the child learner and the adult learner. Determiners, that obligatorily accompany nouns in French (excluding proper nouns and non-referential uses), are multi-functional and reflect the interaction between internal processes (constraints related to the language system) and the (external) problem of reference. In order to identify the referent, the child acquiring L1 faces the basic problem of understanding this multi-functionality (of the morphemes themselves) and the relations between the referent and the linguistic and extra-linguistic context. Within the set of determiners, the articles (definite and indefinite) are a purely surface phenomenon which is far from being a universal feature of language and does not exist in some (and even a majority of) languages. Polish, the Source Language (SL) of the adult learners examined in this study, is such a language. Consequently, native speakers of Polish who learn French are faced with the problem of acquiring certain functions which are obligatorily encoded in French by determiners but can be optionally expressed in Polish through other means. Our goal is, therefore, to define the discourse expertise displayed by learners, children and adults, in the process of grammaticalisation in the domain of reference through their performance in a film narration task. 420

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As will be shown, the process of grammaticalisation differs significantly for children learning their first language and for adults learning a foreign language. The notion of acquisitional grammaticalisation defines the increase of morphosyntactic and phonological complexity in the process of acquisition. It is clearly applicable to L2 acquisition, given that children go through several acquisitional stages within a few months, while adults require much longer periods and sometimes never achieve complete mastery of the L2. However, it is likely that similar processes are in operation in the acquisition of L1 and L2, underpinned by the communicative goals that the speaker wants to achieve. The learner seeks to give linguistic expression to a communicative need, sometimes employing erroneous forms. For the adult L2 learner, most errors are of a grammatical nature (morphological and syntactic). Errors of this type are rarely found in L1 acquisition with children aged four and older; rather, one finds ‘covert errors’ (cf. Corder, 1971) – the use of grammatically correct forms in an inappropriate context. The functionalist perspective adopted in our study postulates a double computation in the grammar (i.e. formal rules and communicative rules: contextualisation), thereby allowing the clarification of some problems related to grammaticalisation and, therefore, to the status of the error. The comparison of NP grammaticalisation in French for child and adult learners allows us to show the stages of L1 and L2 acquisition and assess the impact of cognitive and linguistic factors on language production: ‘the learner’s problem of arranging words’ (Klein & Perdue, 1989: 292–327). Thus, we would like to ascertain which structural (morphosyntactic) factors and discourse factors determine the acquisition process of nominal reference.

Theoretical Considerations Language acquisition involves complex relations between forms and functions, utterances and context. Moreover, the study of acquisition can address the question of the relations between language and cognition. These three pairs of relations are examined in the following sections.

Forms and Functions: The Typological Properties of French and Polish In French, every noun, except for proper nouns referring to animate entities or nouns employed non-referentially (such as the attributive N), is accompanied by a determiner, most frequently an article (un/une, le/la), which marks the formal properties of number and gender (in the singular). On the discourse level, determiners mark the distinction between old and new information (i.e. through local marking, cf. Hickmann, 1987): the indefinite article (un/une) is used to introduce a new entity into the universe of

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discourse (specific reference), and other nominal (le/ce/son) and pronominal (il/qui) forms mark information as old. So, local marking pertains to the accessibility of the referent. In spoken French, local marking of new information may also be associated with global (sentence-level) marking, which reflects the organisation of information on the utterance level (topic, focus). Thus, the introduction of a new referent into the discourse involves a syntactic structure which introduces it as the focus of a thetic utterance (whether presentational, as in c’est (l’histoire de) un N, or existential, as in il y a un N). In other words, the indefinite determiner cannot achieve the introduction of a referent on its own. The introduction of a referent, a topic, and its further use in predication, are two distinct operations. In contrast, Polish does not require the use of nominal determiners on the grammatical level; nouns are most frequently used in their bare form. Local marking through determiners is possible, with demonstratives (ten ‘this’), possessives (swój ‘his’) or indefinite determiners (jakis´ ‘some’), which are inflected and agree in gender and number with the noun. The presence of determiners reflects the pragmatic or stylistic choices of the speaker, except in the case of contrast, where the noun is necessarily accompanied by a demonstrative. On the clausal level, the grammatical function of the NP is morphologically marked through the case system, permitting a flexible order of constituents. Consequently, word order has a pragmatic function, indicating the information status of referents (topic, focus) (Szwedek, 1981). A topical bare noun operates like a definite expression, in principle: the referent is known, accessible to the interlocutors. However, the speaker can impose this referential status and introduce a new referent in the course of the narrative without prior preparation (cf. Topolin´ska, 1984). Maintained reference reflects a linguistic problem related to pronominalisation (obligatory or optional conditions for the replacement of full NPs with pronouns or Ø). French is an obligatory-subject language, except in certain co-referential contexts. In Polish, a zero-subject language, verbal morphology allows the use of an implicit subject in non-contrastive contexts (while contrastive contexts require the use of a subject pronoun on/ona). To summarise, the indefinite NP in French is used to introduce a new referent, while the definite NP and the pronoun ensure maintained reference and provide different aspects of reference to old entities; zero anaphora (Ø) is marginal. In Polish, there are no articles, and zero anaphora is the standard form of maintained reference.

Utterances and Context: The Acquisition of Narrative Narrative is a rich source of data relevant for the analysis of reference and consequently of the grammaticalisation of the NP. A well-formed narrative requires the introduction of a theme or topic, its development in the course of the narrative and changes in reference needed for the introduction of other

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elements (coherence). The establishment of the appropriate linguistic operations ensures informational continuity and development (cohesion). Thus, examining the linguistic aspects of narrative requires different levels of analysis (sentence vs. discourse). Given this factor, the study employs the Quaestio model (Klein & Sttuterheim, 1991), which enables the establishment of a broader perspective. The quaestio works as a bridge between the communicative intentions of speakers and their linguistic formulation. The quaestio constraints must first be analysed on the semantic level and not directly on the level of linguistic (and language-specific) tools that are used to express this content. The advantages of the model are therefore its independence of any particular language, its applicability to many types of texts, and its suitability to a dual level analysis: reference resolution and the organisation of information on the sentence level, as well as referential movement and the process of foregrounding/backgrounding on the discourse level. The study of reference, specifically the referential movement of entities, involves the linguistic context. As Hickmann (2000) argues, ‘contextual constraints (in the wider sense) are one of the most critical aspects in the performance of children in terms of discourse organisation’ (‘les contraintes contextuelles [au sens large] constituent un des aspects les plus déterminants des performances des enfants en matière d’organisation discursive.’ Hickmann, 2000: 94). The child must choose appropriate expressions to introduce and maintain the reference to entities in the narrative. The adequacy of linguistic expressions takes into account the knowledge available to the addressee: whether the referent under discussion is unknown to the addressee, known through knowledge of the world or already introduced in the discourse. This is information that the addressee must be able to infer from the linguistic form chosen by the speaker. The child must learn to guide the addressee from the beginning, through the middle and to the end of the story, while using the appropriate linguistic tools, such as temporal markers, conjunctions, articles and pronouns. The child must therefore learn the suprasentential rules needed to produce a cohesive discourse. The child should not rely on the extra-linguistic context but must anchor the narrative in the (intra-) linguistic context (through anaphoric processes). A competent speaker chooses a particular linguistic form or expression based on knowledge that is presupposed and assumed to be shared between himself and the interlocutor. The child invests great efforts in the process of learning, and becomes increasingly aware of the relation between the linguistic forms available in the language, their multiple functions, and the appropriate contexts for their use. The adult learner already has the pragmatic communicative knowledge at his disposal through the knowledge of L1. His remaining task is therefore to learn the formal methods to produce a cohesive discourse that are provided by L2.

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Language and Cognition: The Influence of Cognitive Development on Acquisition The appropriate treatment of referential movement in discourse requires not only the mastery of linguistic forms, but also cognitive abilities such as memory, temporal ordering, the conceptualisation of logical–causal relations, and understanding the perspective of the addressee. These higherlevel abilities gradually become established during the cognitive development of children. As noted in the previous section, young children are unable to identify and take into account another person’s perspective in the transmission of information. In other words, the conceptualisation of shared knowledge, that is, the degree to which referents can be presupposed, is not yet in place. Children aged four are unaware of the addressee’s perspective and do not adapt their speech to match another’s knowledge. They do not discover the concept of shared (or unshared) knowledge until the age of seven, but this is not fully integrated until the age of nine, when they use it effectively in discourse (cf. Berman & Slobin, 1994; Kail & Hickmann, 1992). These problems are directly related to the anchoring of discourse in the immediate context of utterance. During the first stage, the child uses the language of the here-and-now, and only later gradually learns to replace extra-linguistic means with linguistic means. Discourse cohesion in children depends primarily on abilities that are not strictly linguistic, contrary to adults learning L2. Adult L2 learners have already attained cognitive maturity and the task before them is in principle essentially linguistic. Thus, from the beginning of the L2 acquisition process, the adult learner can draw on different sets of knowledge that are not available to the child in the initial stages of L1 acquisition. Adult learners have already mastered their first language, and so are familiar with the formal tools of that language and with the underlying semantic and cognitive categories (such as deixis, causality and modality). Adult learners can therefore appeal to this knowledge in the acquisition of the L2. Moreover, adult learners know the rules and constraints of linguistic communication, such as the inferential abilities of the addressee and to what extent extra-linguistic elements (such as the physical environment and the context) can be used in the discourse. They also know that their own knowledge may not be shared by the addressee. Finally, they have, or believe they have, some knowledge of the target language (TL), as limited or erroneous as it may be compared to native speaker knowledge. We can, therefore, assume that the adult L2 learner can conceptualise all of the information to be transmitted without difficulty. The processes of planning and formulation are the same as in the mother tongue (MT). In other words, the learner selects the information to be expressed from memory, decides on the order of presentation of this information and

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transmits it in language. It is the stage of putting things into words (‘the grammar’) that poses the problem, to a greater or lesser extent. Further difficulties arise when the L2 grammaticalises concepts that are grammaticalised differently or not grammaticalised at all in the learner’s MT. Such a case is evident in the grammaticalisation of definiteness in French relative to the linguistic expression of the same concept in Polish. The learner’s task is to study the ‘grammatical specificity’ of the TL through the operation of semantic distinctions within a notional domain and the choice of semantic and cognitive categories that are grammaticalised in that language. The learner must identify ‘what is common and what differentiates the two languages (SL and TL) in terms of selection and delimitation of grammatical concepts’ (‘ce qui rapproche et ce qui différencie deux langues (LS et LC) du point de vue de la sélection et de la délimitation des concepts grammaticaux’, Jakobson, 1963: 81). When the two languages differ in the selection of grammatical concepts, the learner must either erase or create distinctions that are obligatory in the TL with respect to the MT. If the learner succeeds in this task, he attains mastery of the new grammatical distinctions of the TL, and may even master new conceptual distinctions. The intermediate solution is to create idiosyncratic ways to express the grammatical distinctions of the MT, through the linguistic material of the TL, transferring a function of the MT onto a structure of the TL. To summarise, the use of a L2 constitutes a particularly costly cognitive activity, even for advanced learners or for partly bilingual speakers. The learner focuses attention on the achievement of low-level processes (phonetic, syntactic and lexical aspects), thereby affecting the semantic aspects of the task. An additional difficulty stems from the reconceptualisation of semantic categories as required (e.g. definiteness in French and Polish). The high-level processes involved in language activities, such as the use of context or reference to a typical text structure, would appear to be easily transferable from one language to another in principle. Such a transfer would, intuitively, seem particularly useful to compensate for future deficits in the low-level processes, which are more language-specific and therefore dependent on the speaker’s command of the TL. There is no specific difficulty of planning in L2 (as transfer of planning competence from the MT is achieved). However, the integrative process that leads to the construction of a coherent representation of the information transmitted can only be effectively implemented if it is supported by a good level of linguistic command, ensuring the automatic function of low-level processes. Thus, we must reach a level of automatisation that would enable the allocation of sufficient cognitive resources to accomplish the task. The learner must also understand that the acquisition of another language system necessitates reconceptualisation. Consequently, the problems do not seem to be directly related to a dysfunction of low- or high-level

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processes, but appear to be an indirect result of insufficiently automatised low-level processes.

Similarities and Differences in Child (L1) and Adult (L2) Acquisition Few studies have systematically compared child and adult acquisition to measure the impact of cognitive and linguistic factors ( Dimroth et al., 2003; Hendriks, 1999; Hendriks & Hickmann, 1998; Slobin, 1993; Watorek, 2004). The starting point for the study of differences between the two types of acquisition is the fact that, by the age of 4, children have already mastered the language system of their MT, although some functions are not yet in place. Children understand and are understood through the use of language without much difficulty. Adults at the beginning of L2 acquisition are already in command of all functions of their MT, both syntactic and pragmatic (discursive). When the adult learner is unable to organise information in his L2 discourse, these difficulties stem from lack of control of specific linguistic forms of the L2 or from the need to determine differences in form– function relations between the SL and the TL. Problems related to the conceptualisation of the task do not arise (or at least, should not arise), since the adult has already mastered the necessary skills. Thus, the learner must acquire language-specific linguistic tools in order to apply the relatively universal pragmatic principles governing the organisation of discourse (shared knowledge, discourse structure, temporal–causal relations and reference relations). Children seem to manage the linguistic tools and some of their functions quite well, but they are still in the process of learning the discourse rules (discourse-internal strategies). In both cases, language learners cannot always apply the rules at their disposal due to cognitive overload. The adults’ focus on the linguistic system prevents them from appropriate planning on the discourse level. In children, the cognitive overload is linked to stages of cognitive development also manifested in relation to the planning of discourse. In other words, we can say that in adult L2 acquisition, unlike child L1 acquisition, the evolution of L2 begins with the pragmatic stage (the application of pragmatic principles) and proceeds to the syntactic stage (advanced syntactisation and morphologisation). In short, discourse management through language-internal strategies (rather than extra-linguistic means) requires the establishment, on the cognitive level, of specific decentring and relativisation operations, which undergo progressive development in children. Adult learners face difficulties that cannot be explained in terms of cognitive stages, but in terms of cognitive cost. In the early learning stages, the learner is focused on problems of formulation (in the absence of an automatised system), leading to difficulties in independent and effective organisation of discourse.

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Methodology In order to determine the role of cognitive factors, we compared the acquisition of French (FRA) by children and adults, and examined the development of the L1 linguistic skills of children aged 4, 7 and 10, and the L2 linguistic skills of beginner and advanced level adult learners (basic variety and postbasic variety, respectively). The learners are monolingual children acquiring French as their MT and adult native speakers of Polish (POL) learning French as L2. Idiosyncratic forms in L2 enabled us to examine the influence of Polish (a language without articles) as SL on the acquisition of articles in French. The corpus consists of 10 speakers per age group (eight in the beginner group). For comparative purposes, our analysis also examines the use of markers in the speech of adult native speakers of the TL. The processes used by adult native speakers establish the ‘norm’ for the learners and serve as a baseline for the comparison of the learners’ production. The three age groups of children reflect the stages of acquisition of the discourse functions associated with certain markers, such as articles and pronouns (cf. Hickmann & Hendriks, 1999). For L2 learners, the beginner level corresponds to the ‘basic variety’, characterised by the structuring of utterances around non-conjugated verbs (infinite utterance organisation). Inflectional morphology and complex hierarchical structures (subordination in particular) are absent at this stage. If an inflected form is used, it lacks the referential value associated with it in the TL (cf. Klein & Perdue, 1997). The L2 lexicon contains items belonging to open classes, but rarely to closed classes. The advanced stage reflects a post-basic level, characterised by production that is more or less appropriate syntactically. The syntax at this level is ‘adequate’, while morphology remains more deficient, depending on the transparency of morphological marking in the TL. However, there are (also) differences in the underlying grammars. Perdue (1993: 19) speaks of the imprint of the MT in the conceptualisation and organisation of information. All participants were presented with the same task involving the expression of complex informational structures (cf. Levelt, 1989): the narration of a film. All subjects watched, individually, a silent film for children titled Reksio about a dog named Reksio and a young child, his master. Having watched the film in the absence of the interviewer, participants were asked to tell the story with the following prompt: you’ve just watched a movie that I don’t know. Could you tell me the story? The interviewer was instructed not to intervene during the narrative, except for gestures indicating interest. Segmenting the narrative texts into utterances caused specific problems in the different groups of learners. We took into consideration the finite lexical verbs (except in the production of 4-year-old children and beginner L2 learners whose stories contained many elliptical verbless utterances and ‘proto-verbs’ which were transcribed phonetically (e.g. &fEr) and considered

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as utterances. Cleft and semi-cleft constructions were considered as two clauses as was the case with other non-focalising relative clauses. Our study focuses on the encoding of new entities, the procedures used for the introduction of the main protagonist (the dog) and the secondary protagonist (the child), as well as ways of presenting entities as old information (coreference), either through maintained reference in subsequent utterances or through reintroductions and changes. We did not differentiate change of referent and reintroduction (defined as the introduction of an old entity into a new sequence), given the difficulty in sequencing the narratives, which were short and often involved changes of reference between utterances (particularly with beginners and 4-year-old children). With respect to syntactic properties, we coded the subject (S), the object (O), and their various realisations (NP, pronoun, Ø), whatever their position in the sentence. Each referential movement (introduction, reintroduction/change, maintenance) was analysed with respect to referentiality, that is local marking of referent accessibility (all nominal and pronominal forms, including the dislocated form le N il), and in terms of the informational organisation of the utterance, the topic/focus status of the nominal (global marking). These two levels of analysis are related in a number of ways that reflect their interdependence. The linguistic forms used include, in general, nominal forms for the introduction and reintroduction operations, and pronominal forms for reference maintenance. Dislocations involve two levels of analysis, marking both old information (local marking) and topicality (global marking). The acquisition task involves different problems for the two types of learners. Both must learn the various realisations of the NP, but adults have the advantage of past knowledge gained in their acquisition of the MT (pragmatic knowledge), that is available from the beginning of L2 acquisition. The task facing the L2 learner is primarily linguistic: he must acquire new form– function relations to express his communicative needs. This raises questions concerning the influence the MT on new form–function relations in the course of acquisition, among other factors that determine L2 adult acquisition more generally. In contrast, the child must simultaneously develop both formal and communicative rules (contextualisation). We will examine how language development evolves with age (and cognitive development), and which structural and discourse factors determine the process whereby nominal determination is acquired.

Results The Control Group: Adult Native Speakers of French The production of adult native speakers of French demonstrates the constructions used in French to refer to entities in the narrative.

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Adult native speakers introduce the first and main referent (the dog) with a nominal containing an indefinite article in order to indicate its status as new information, while they most often introduce the second referent (the boy) with a possessive. The possessive NP is sometimes accompanied by an indefinite NP, as an appositive or a relative clause. The introduction of the first referent is almost always established through presentational or existential constructions, as shown in example 1: pres + NP (c’est [l’histoire de]; il y a). As shown in example 2, the introduction of the second referent is typically established through a nominal in an SVO structure (O stands for a complement, whether direct, circumstantial adverbial or nominal complement). (1) donc c’est l’histoire d’un petit chien qui se réveille un matin (BRU: 1–2) ‘so, it’s the story of a little dog who wakes up one morning’ (2) et il décide d’aller voir son maître qui est un petit garçon (BRU: 14–15) ‘and he decides to go see his master who is a little boy’ Once the referents are introduced, most nouns are accompanied by definite articles, marking the referents as accessible. The possessive is primarily reserved for reference to the boy. Dislocated constructions, NP il, frequent in oral French, are rare in our corpus (only some 10%). This confirms the results of previous studies (such as Hickmann, 2003), showing that adult speakers follow a fairly formal type of discourse, narrative fiction in this case, which excludes the use of dislocations. The form most frequently used for maintained reference is the personal pronoun (86.9%); Ø anaphora is rare (8.2%), and so are relative constructions (4.9%; 44% of which appear in the introductory structures beginning of the story (example 1)). To summarise, the production of French native speakers in our corpus reflects the typological properties of French, as presented in section ‘Forms and Functions’. The following sections are devoted to the analysis of referential processes in the production of children acquiring L1 (see section ‘Child Native Speakers of French’) and adult L2 learners (see section ‘Adult L2 Learners’).

Child Native Speakers of French The structures used by 4-year-old children to introduce referents differ from those used by adults. First, they use the existential il y a construction almost exclusively (example 3), while adults use a variety of structures. Yet, some forms are introduced in isolation, for example when accompanied by a verb of perception (and therefore a first-person perspective, including the

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speaker je) and used in a labelling (the use of a nominal without any verb, as in example 4). (3) i(l) (y) a un chien # avec une niche (CAR: 1) ‘there is a dog with a kennel’ (4) un (petit) garçon et un (petit) chien (ANT: 1; LUC: 1) ‘a (little) boy and a (little) dog’ All nominals are accompanied by a determiner, indicating that local marking has already been acquired by the age of four. Yet, while the form of the NP itself is grammatical, its use may not be appropriate with respect to contextual marking. Some children use a definite (example 5) or dislocated NP (example 6). (5) et ben c’était la* petite fille avec le* chien (MAN: 1) ‘well, it was the* little girl with the* dog’ (6) alors le chien il *est sorti (LOR: 1) ‘so, the dog, he * went out’ Changes of reference are most frequently marked by means of dislocations, in the form of NP S (5% of which are right dislocations). These contexts reveal problems in the use of (S) and (O) pronouns indicating that children of this age do not always respect constraints regarding the clear identification of referents; entities reintroduced with a pronoun may be too far or difficult to identify (this applies to 12% of pronouns) (example 7). (7) le p(e)tit chien il l’a sauvé et après i(l)s sont rallés dans la maison pour se &seS+ sécher et il* a bu un médicament (LUC: 25–28) ‘the little dog, he saved him and then they went back in the house to dry up and he* drank a medicine’ Some difficulties in this area persist in the production of 7-year-old children, despite a clear development in their language skills. They do not always consider the distinction between new/old information, and use definite nominals to introduce the second protagonist. Dislocated constructions are the most frequently used as local marking of reference maintenance or reintroduction (3.8% of these cases are right dislocations), although absent in two of the narratives. We also find the first possessive nominals, as shown in example 8. (8) le petit garçon revenait avec son chien son chien allait à la niche (GWE: 28–29)

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‘the little boy returned with his dog his dog went to the kennel’ Maintained reference is ensured through pronominal forms, primarily subject pronouns. Relative pronouns and Ø anaphora are used, but are still uncommon (2.8% and 0.6% respectively). Object pronouns are used more systematically, but these are isolated cases of maintained reference, which do not lead to the creation of double chains of reference. As in the production of 4-year-olds, we find inappropriate use of pronouns to reintroduce referents (3% of cases). Such problems persist until the age of 10 (7%). The narratives of 10-year-old children still show similarities with the productions of 4-year-olds, namely introductions in verbless presentative utterances (labelling) or from a first person perspective with a verb of perception. Local marking is not fully functional, particularly with respect to the second referent (in two cases), as found in 7-year-old children. With the exception of these cases, local marking is close to adult production: the dog is first introduced with an indefinite form, the boy introduced with a possessive (appearing in an introductory function for the first time in this age group). We have also found complex possessive reference (la porte de son copain ‘the door of his friend’, la maison de sa maîtresse ‘the house of his mistress’) and an apposition. Maintained reference is ensured by the use of pronouns (94.7%) and relatives (4.5%), found to be quantitatively very close to adult use (86.9% and 4.9% respectively). On the other hand, Ø anaphora is still rare (0.8%), and so is explicit marking (nominal or adverbial) of grouped maintained reference (dual reference, e.g. ensemble ‘together’, tous les deux ‘both’). Dislocations are still very present, with definite or possessive nominals. The possessive is used systematically and reserved almost exclusively for the boy, similar to adult productions (26.1% in 10-year-olds and 25.8% in adults).

Adult L2 Learners Adults at the beginner level are minimally autonomous in the TL, and their production is dominated by pragmatic and discursive methods of expression. The results show a disparity in means used for the introduction of referents; particularly varied and problematic is the introduction of the first referent, which coincides with the beginning of the narrative (the anchor). Multiple nominal forms used in this context, ranging from use of a proper noun (Reksio) to a bare Ø N (example 9), through use of the numeral un (example 9) and of the definite article (example 10). The second referent is introduced with the possessive in three of the narratives. Some nominals contain an adjectival determiner (example 11) and others include a complex possessive (example 12).

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(9) &es Ø* chien avec un garçon (BAR: 2) ‘[&es] Ø* dog with a boy’ (10) le* chien se réveille (MAG:1) ‘the* dog wakes up’ (11) je &vwar *petit chien qui s’appelle Reksio (REN: 1–2) ‘I see *little dog who is called Reksio’ (12) après on &vien pour *la maison ami (WAL: 5) ‘then one goes to *the house friend’ These examples demonstrate that nominal determination is not functional in the beginner level; formal and communicative rules of the TL are not followed. Some of the forms used are grammatical in structure (le chien), but used in an inappropriate context, and therefore cannot mark the nonaccessibility of the referent. Many of the forms used (73%) are both ungrammatical and inappropriate in the context (Ø chien, Ø petit chien), that is both formally and communicatively incorrect (communicative inappropriateness results, in this case, from formal ungrammaticality). Some parallel forms are used appropriately for the context, but contain errors of gender, that is, errors in the application of the formal rules (cette garçon ‘this (F) boy’, la escalier ‘the (F) staircase’, la patin ‘the (F) skate’). Among the nominals with determiners, we find (left) dislocations, dislocations with a proper noun (Reksio il ‘Reksio he’) or with the possessive (son monsieur il ‘his mister he’). When a NP contains an adjective or a noun complement, the article is absent (petit chien ‘small dog’, ami de Reksio ‘friend of Reksio’). The article is present when the relationship within the NP is not explicitly marked by a preposition (la maison Ø ami ‘the house Ø friend’, un film Ø Reksio ‘a film Ø Reksio’) As for referential movement, referential changes are marked in virtually every utterance by a full nominal form. This use of the NP contrasts with the use of pronouns by French children in similar contexts, where they lead to ambiguities in the identification of the referent. The narrative of advanced learners displays a qualitative shift in the organisation of referential movement. The constructions used to introduce referents are similar to those used by native speakers of French. However, the verb forms and their complements are not always appropriate, since the form of the complement is incorrect, or the verb used atypical for native speakers (il s’agit de, ce film c’est une histoire de chien, ce film raconte, décrit). In terms of local marking, the introductions are very similar to those of the native speakers: the first protagonist is introduced with the indefinite article and the second with the possessive followed by an indefinite NP in apposition. Moreover, contrary to beginners, even NPs with a qualitative

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adjective include an article (un petit garçon). Inappropriate use is found with the nominal complement une histoire de chien and the contracted article (raconte du chien), as well as two occurrences of Ø N (ami de Reksio) in a context of referential changes. Similarly, learners mark definiteness through demonstratives and possessives (example 13). (13) son maître est un petit garçon et ce garçon sort de la maison il est très glissant en au dehors ce garçon tombe de l’escalier (KAT: 12–15) ‘his master is a little boy and this boy comes out of the house it is very slippery there outside this boy falls on the stairs’ Two types of inappropriate uses occur: redundant NP repetitions in preverbal position in coreferential contexts (immediate coreference) and inappropriate pronominal forms or uses (a marginal phenomenon in comparison to the productions of French-speaking children). Given the quantitative and qualitative progress in the use of determiners between the beginner and advanced levels, we argue that their acquisition reflects a communicative hierarchy, as established by Klein and Dittmar (1979). This is a hierarchy of functions within the referential domain, according to which ‘pure reference’ (N) is primary and quantification is (or seems to be) more important in communicative terms than qualification. At the beginner level, nouns are most frequently bare and the indefinite article is rarely used, bearing a numerical value rather than qualifying the noun with respect to unidentifiability, since the productions at this level do not display a definite–indefinite contrast. The first modifying element is the adjective – at later stages accompanied by an article at a more advanced level (petit chien → un / le petit chien), when the article acquires the value of a marker of identifiability. The high frequency of nouns without an article at the beginner level (73%) may be explained by the influence of the SL, which has no articles. However, L2 learners with other SLs (in the ESF program, for example) show the same use, indicating that the transfer from Polish cannot be the only explanation. Thus, our results confirm the sequence of NP acquisition established for L2 German by the same authors, which we reproduce as below. • • •

Ø N / ADJ + N / NUM + N Ø chien / petit chien / un chien [NUM] DET + N un / le chien DET + ADJ + N un / le petit chien

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Discussion: Correlating L1 and L2 Data The Impact of Age on the Acquisition of NPs in L1 The cross-sectional study of narratives produced by children of different age groups clearly demonstrated developmental progressions in NP use in a wider perspective. Formal rules are acquired by children by the age of 4, at both phrasal and sentence levels: the N is preceded by a determiner and the syntactic structure in which it appears is grammatically correct. Rare instances of incorrect forms involve gender marking or gender agreement (un* échelle, une chaussure → le*). These forms persist in the 7-year-old and 10-year-old groups (l’autre chaussure → le* ; la* patin; l’échelle → le*). Other problems, such as the introduction of referents, stem from the use of a (correct) form in an inappropriate context (the definite article or a dislocated NP are inappropriate to introduce a referent unknown to the addressee). Such idiosyncratic uses involve both animate referents in the production of 4-yearolds and only the second referent in the production of older children. With inanimate referents, some cases of inappropriate accessibility marking of the initial introduction are found in all age groups. The anchoring of the narrative is no longer a problem for 7-year-olds. The first referent is introduced with an indefinite NP in postverbal position. The structures employed also indicate development; the il y a existential is less frequent, replaced by the presentational c’est, although not yet with the expression c’est l’histoire de, which is frequently used by adults. Some structures are unique to children: introduction in verbless utterances (labelling) or with a verb of perception (4-year-olds and 10-year-olds). Development is also evident in the local marking of NPs, particularly in the slight drop in dislocated constructions and the gradual emergence of possessive forms in 7-year-olds (Figure 21.1). The use of pronominal forms for maintained reference indicates that the (S) pronoun predominates in all age groups. Other forms appear only rarely, specifically the (S) relative from the age of four, and Ø anaphora from the age of seven. The problems observed in relation to maintained reference and the reintroduction of referents are also related to learning the correct form–function relation, with respect to pronouns, and that is the absence of nominal marking for a change of referent. Inappropriate uses involve 12.4% of (S) pronouns in the 4-year-old group and a sharp drop in the 7-year-old group: 3.4% (all in a single narrative) and 6.8% in the production of 10-year-olds, whose narratives are longer and dominated by the character of the dog.

Adult Acquisition of NPs Compared to Child Acquisition The advantage of adult L2 learners compared to children is the pre-existing knowledge at their disposal from the start of L2 acquisition, specifically

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Figure 21.1 Reintroduction/maintained reference with animate entities: Local marking in the L1 group

knowledge of the rules and constraints of linguistic communication, the formal means employed in their MT and the underlying semantic categories. It follows that the task facing adult L2 learners is essentially linguistic, and the difficulties they encounter result from the absence of the formal means of the TL. Anomalies related to the local marking of referential accessibility in the introduction of referents persist even at an advanced level. Articles rarely appear in the production of beginners, and most attested tokens involve the definite. Consequently, the introduction of the two referents is a problem on the formal level, resulting in a communicative mismarking. The advanced learners, who have already acquired the definite article, systematically mark the accessibility of the referent. The difficulties involve the first referent and are related to the anchoring of the story in context. However, they are primarily the result of a problem in noun–verb complementation. On the utterance level, the linguistic constructions that encode referent introductions in the production of both beginners and advanced learners often differ from those used by native speakers ( je VO / film; VS ). Some of these structures are also used by the French-speaking children ( je VO). Table 21.1 compares local marking of NPs in the introduction of animated entities. The fundamental difference between the two types of acquisition stems from the absence of formal rules in the L2 beginner group, in contrast to the 4-year-old group. Consequently, we find inappropriate uses in the production of children (le* N) and both inappropriate forms and inappropriate uses in the production of adult L2 learners (Ø* N). Adults show difficulties in anchoring

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TABLE 21.1 Introduction of animate entities: Local marking in all learner groups Introduction

Local marking Formal rules

Rules of contextualisation

Group specifics

4-year-old

+

–

–possessive

il y a, jeVO, labelling

7-year-old

+

–2nd referent

–possessive

c’est

10-year-old

+

–2nd referent

+possessive

jeVO, labelling

Beginners

–

–

+possessive

jeVO, VS

Advanced

+

–1st referent

+possessive

topic: film

of the narrative (introduction of the first referent), unlike the children, who have already mastered this ability by the age of 7. Children’s difficulties lie in the introduction of the second referent, using a definite NP. What differentiates (advanced) learners from adult native speakers and from children is the choice of determiner. The possessive is present from the beginner level, unlike the results in the 4-year-old group. There is over-marking of the topical entity through dislocations (that often differ from those of the native speakers: son N il; ce N il) and the demonstrative, which explicitly marks the accessibility of the referent. This excessive use may reflect the speakers’ concern to ensure clarity in marking referent accessibility, or it may indicate the influence of the SL, in which this strategy is common in oral production. It must be noted, however, that the Polish-speaking adults in our corpus use this strategy only rarely (3.9%). Dislocations are less common in the productions of the adult L2 learners than in those of the children. This trend is explained by the frequent use of the proper noun, which is rarely dislocated. This phenomenon of over-marking has been reported in the literature (cf. Hendriks, 2003, for example). Figure 21.2 shows the frequency of local NP marking among adult L2 learners, highlighting differences with adult native speakers. Advanced learners show a growing diversity of pronominal forms, although quantitatively less frequent as compared to native speakers (note that the narratives produced by learners are also shorter). Problems of reference attribution (il*) are almost nonexistent (1.5%), but in some cases the lexical NP is used to maintain reference (immediate coreference), similarly to beginners. Incorrect forms are related to non-compliance with the selectional restrictions of the verb (lui* aider) or to the absence of gender agreement. Incorrect gender agreement is also found within the NP, between the noun and the determiner. Thus, the adults display problems with the formal rules

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Figure 21.2 Reintroduction/maintained reference with animate entities: Local marking in the L2 group

of L2, contrasting with the children, who primarily display problems related to contextualisation rules. In short, the difficulties in effective management of the entities in the narrative can be explained by the fact that L2 learners are (too) occupied with problems of formulation; they must take into account the intrinsic properties of the N that refers to the character (singular or plural, masculine or feminine), as well as the syntactic function (S, O) and the semantic function (agent, patient) of the referring expression, and determine its informational status (topic, focus). The form of the NP used in context must enable the addressee to retrieve all of this information. Based on their experience in the MT, adult learners know the importance of shared (or unshared) knowledge with the addressee, and prefer to over-mark reference to avoid ambiguity, unlike children acquiring L1. Moreover, the absence of articles in Polish has an impact on the acquisition of these elements in French. Since definiteness does not have the same importance in the two languages, the Polish-speaking L2 learner must comprehend the importance of this category in the TL and learn the appropriate formal means to express it. The learner must therefore readjust the grammatical expression of this concept to suit the TL. The results of this study indicate that the difficulties encountered by adult L2 learners can be explained in terms of cognitive cost (cognitive overload), unlike the problems encountered by children in L1 acquisition, which stem from cognitive development.

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General Properties of Child and Adult Acquisition Given the properties of French, this study has shown that young children commit almost no grammatical errors at the age of four, in contrast to adult L2 learners, who display difficulties with French linguistic forms. The main problems identified can be summarised in two points: (1) Referential accessibility marking: the form–function correlation of determiners and pronouns. (2) Frequency of dislocation (NP + pro) and demonstrative ce. Idiosyncratic uses in children’s productions all result from the fact that they do not master communicative rules, which is related to cognitive factors (what Corder (op. cit.) refers to as ‘covert errors’ – grammatically correct forms used in inappropriate contexts). The contexts in which these forms are used do not allow a presupposed referent, since this referent is not immediately recoverable from the context. The child is unable to take the addressee’s perspective into account, that is, to adopt a perspective other than his own, up to the age of seven. The child gradually acquires the various functions associated with articles, pronominal forms and Ø. In effect, cognitive and language skills develop simultaneously as the child acquires the MT. In contrast, the adult L2 learner can address the complex verbal task before him with pre-existing (more or less universal) cognitive skills which were developed through his experience of the SL. The learner can transfer the existing conceptualisation to the new task and thus adopt the perspective of the addressee. Yet, the learner is faced with a cognitive overload due to incomplete mastery of the linguistic system of L2, which enables only minimal discourse planning. Furthermore, both sets of learners use certain forms much more than adult native speakers. This is the case with dislocation constructions in both L1 and L2 production and in the use of the demonstrative in the production of adult L2 learners. The NP + pro construction in French fulfils a different function in the productions of children than it does for adults, namely to signal a change of referent. These linguistic constructions are over-used by children, as they have not yet learned to restrict these constructions to contrastive contexts. Adult native speakers use few dislocations in their narrative. The use of dislocation to mark change of referent is frequent among adult L2 learners as well. These learners also show frequent use of the demonstrative. Both constructions, dislocations and the over-marking of accessibility through the demonstrative, do not seem to be sensitive to the language level of the learner. The use of the latter may result from a transfer from the SL. Thus, marking of referential accessibility reflects a problem of under-specification in children, while adult learners opt for over-specification, to prevent referential ambiguity.

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This study allows us to weigh the impact of the same factors in the acquisition of the NP in the wider context of how learners refer to entities in a narrative. However, the questions posed at the beginning of the study have complex answers. Regarding the impact of age, the study shows that children correctly encode grammatical functions, such as choosing determiners based on the inherent properties of nouns and taking syntactic function into account in the choice of pronouns (the patterns of verb complementation), before they can mark the contrast between old and new information. These results are consistent with previous studies (e.g. Hickmann, 2003), showing the delayed acquisition of intra-discursive functions, which has been linked to the cognitive immaturity of the child who must learn to ignore the hereand-now of the communicative situation and adopt the perspective of others. These functions become gradually operative, but are not yet fully acquired at the age of 10. The difficulties encountered by learners are highly dependent on the language acquired. Language offers a wide range of possibilities that force the learner to make certain choices in order to perform the task effectively. In L2 acquisition, the adult learner enters into a new language through the bias of the MT, which influences the acquisition process through transfer. However, the unambiguous interpretation of the transfer is sometimes problematic. A Polish speaker learning French, for example, does not have the class of articles in his MT, and cannot rely on MT transfer in their acquisition. The presence of bare nominals in the early stages of L2 acquisition may be explained by interference from Polish, but it may also be viewed as part of a universal acquisitional level, which is found in the L2 language of beginners in other language pairs.

References Berman, R. and Slobin, D.I. (eds) (1994) Relating Events in Narrative: A Crosslinguistic Developmental Study. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Corder, S.P. (1971) Idiosyncratic dialects and errors analysis. IRAL 9, 147–160. Dimroth, C., Gretsch, P., Jordens, P., Perdue, C. and Starren, M. (2003) Finiteness in Germanic languages: A stage-model for first and second language development. In C. Dimroth and M. Starren (eds) Information Structure and the Dynamic of Language Acquisition. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Hendriks, H. (1999) The acquisition of temporal reference in first and second language acquisition: What children already know and adults still have to learn and vice versa. Psychology of Language and Communication 3 41–60. Hendriks, H. (2003) Acquérir une langue: Facteurs langagiers et facteurs cognitifs. Thèse d’habilitation (non publiée), Université de Paris 8. Hendriks, H. and Hickmann, M. (1998) Référence spatiale et cohésion du discours: acquisition de la langue par l’enfant et l’adulte. In M. Pujol Berché, L. Nussbaum and M. Llobera (eds) Adquisición de lenguas extranjeras: perspectivas actuales en Europa (pp. 151–163). Madrid: Edelsa. Hickmann, M. (1987) Ontogénèse de la cohésion dans le discours. In G. Piéraut-Le Bonniec (ed.) Connaître et dire. Bruxelles: Pierre Mardaga.

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Hickmann, M. (2000) Le développement de l’organisation discursive. In M. Kail and M. Fayol (eds) L’acquisition du langage (Vol. 2, pp. 83–115). Paris: PUF. Hickmann, M. (2003) Children’s Discourse: Person, Space and Time Across Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hickmann, M. and Hendriks, H. (1999) Reference maintenance in children’s narrative discourse. Journal of Child Language 26, 419–452. Jakobson, R. (1963) Essais de linguistique générale. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. Kail, M. and Hickmann, M. (1992) On French children’s ability to introduce referents in discourse as a function of mutual knowledge. First Language 12, 73–94. Klein, W. and Dittmar, N. (1979) Developing Grammars. The Acquisition of German Syntax by Foreign Workers. Berlin: Springer-Verlag. Klein, W. and Perdue, C. (1989) The learner’s problem of arranging words. In E. Bates and B. MacWhinney (eds) The Cross-Linguistic Study of Sentence Processing (pp. 292–327). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Klein, W. and von Stutterheim, Ch. (1991) Text structure and referential movement. Sprache und Pragmatik 22, 1–32. Klein, W. and Perdue, C. (1997) The basic variety. Or couldn’t natural language be much simpler? Second Language Acquisition Research 13, 310–347. Levelt, W.J M. (1989) Speaking. From Intention to Articulation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Perdue, C. (1993) Comment rendre compte de la ‘logique’ de l’acquisition d’une langue étrangère par l’adulte? Etudes de Linguistique Appliquée 92, 8–22. Slobin, D.I. (1993) Adult language acquisition: A view from child language acquisition. In C. Perdue (ed.) Adult Language Acquisition: Cross-Linguistic Perspectives (pp. 239–252). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Szwedek, A. (1981) Word Order, Sentence Stress and Reference in English and Polish. Bydgoszcz: WSP. Topolin´ska, Z. (1984) Składnia grupy imiennej. In M. Grochowski, S. Karolak and Z. Topolin´ska (eds) Gramatyka współczesnego je˛zyka polskiego: Składnia (Vol. 2, pp. 301–388). Warszawa: PWN. Watorek, M. (ed.) (2004) Construction du discours par des enfants et des apprenants adultes. Langages 155, 128.

Part 3 Typological Variation and Language Acquisition

22 Typology Meets Second Language Acquisition Anna Giacalone Ramat

Introductory Remarks The Learner Varieties Project to which Clive Perdue attended for many years was based on some wide-ranging assumptions about general principles ruling the acquisition process. It was assumed that ‘adult second language learners . . . regularly develop a type of language which is perfectly wellstructured, highly efficient and very simple, the basic variety’ (Klein & Perdue, 1997: 343). It was further assumed that fully fledged languages are nothing but ultimate learner varieties (Klein & Perdue, 1992: 301). Moreover, it was maintained that, in the broader context of human language nature, learner languages can contribute to our understanding of the nature and functioning of language as a human faculty (both in its formal and functional properties) (Klein & Perdue, 1997). In this general perspective on learner languages, which I believe to be exciting and also promising, I intend to draw attention to a possible partnership between second language acquisition research and functional typology, following the idea of integrative functionalism (Bisang, 2004; Croft, 2001). ‘The integrative approach ultimately links the microlevel of the individual to the macrolevel of the distribution of types in the world languages. If we want to know more about the range of the linguistic potential of humans, each variant is relevant. In this sense, variety matters’ (Bisang, 2004: 38). In the second part of the chapter I touch upon some issues concerning prototypes and constructions and discuss the impact of constructions in language acquisition.

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What Typology can Contribute to Second Language Research First of all, the claim that learner varieties belong to the field of typology and offer validation for linguistic universals1 should be specified, since the relation between typology, Universals and Second Language Acquisition (SLA) has been frequently asserted, but systematic and wide-ranging research is still lacking. One of the pioneering figures of typological studies, Joseph Greenberg, should be mentioned here because he first recognized that L2 studies belong to the field of typology and universals: Put more generally, for all these fields [namely first language acquisition, second language acquisition, language loss in aphasia and pidgins and creoles: AGR)], one may say that universals apply equally to interlanguage and to primary language. (Greenberg, 1991: 39) One major contribution of typological studies to L2 research is represented by the theory of typological markedness, defined by Greenberg (1966), following earlier proposals by the Prague school, and reformulated by Croft (2003). In a nutshell, the theory assumes that in linguistic oppositions at all levels, the unmarked members are favored over the marked ones: ‘the phenomena described as typological markedness represent an important manifestation of the interplay between two major competing motivations, economy and iconicity, in linguistic expressions’ (Croft, 2003: 87). Typological markedness theory can contribute predictions on the development of acquisition, which have been checked against empirical data. For reasons of time and space it is not possible to review the many studies dealing with the impact of typological markedness hypotheses on acquisition. An incomplete list would include: Rutherford (1984), Hyltenstam (1986), Giacalone Ramat (1999, 2003a), Bernini (2003), Hammarberg and Koptjevskaja-Tamm (2003) and the work on morphology by Bybee and her associates (Bybee, 1985; Bybee & Hopper, 2001). Let me just mention as a particularly fruitful interaction between typology and SLA several studies on relative clause formation in SLA from the perspective of Keenan and Comrie’s (1977) Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy. As pointed out by Comrie (1984: 15), the basic assumption was that the Accessibility Hierarchy encodes the degree of difficulty of relativizing on a particular noun phrase. Second language literature has mostly confirmed that such an intuition was correct (Fiorentino, 1999; Gass, 1979; Gass & Ard, 1980 and others). In recent years, the contribution of SLA to linguistic theories has become increasingly influential through research carried out within the ‘learner varieties’ approach (Klein & Perdue, 1992, 1997), which claims that learner

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languages more directly reflect the organization principles of human languages than mature languages. In this perspective, the work done by Clive Perdue has been seminal. From these studies, it seems that ‘crosscurrents’ can be distinguished between linguistic typology and L2 research, as suggested by Huebner and Ferguson (1991). Such crosscurrents go in both directions: from the one side, implicational hierarchies established in typological studies can contribute hypotheses on acquisitional paths; from the other side, important crosscurrents can flow from experimental studies and acquisitional data towards the validation of theoretical models, thus helping to set limits on what constitutes a human language. typology

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Typological findings on cross-linguistic variation, generalizations and functional explanations are a possible reference frame for evaluating variation in learner data. A central feature of typological theories are competing motivation analyses (Croft, 2003). The competition between iconicity and economy principles is supported by second language data; to give one example, learners show a tendency to rely on strategies of morphological transparency and more readily learn those forms which are (or appear to be) analyzable in recognizable morphemes (see Giacalone Ramat, 2000, 2003: 22, on the acquisition of verbal morphology in learner varieties of Italian with respect to the acquisition pace in other European languages). At the level of clause connection, basic learner varieties of different languages frequently show juxtaposition strategies for propositions which would be expressed by complement clauses or by relative clauses in more mature varieties (Italia eh pochi c’è parla tigrino ‘(in Asmara) there are few Italians who speak Tigrinya’, Giacalone Ramat, 1999: 534). Interestingly, a comparison across typologically diverse languages (Mithun, 1988) has revealed a large variety of clause combining patterns and suggests paths along which overt marking can develop over time. Furthermore, second language research can provide typologists with additional data sources from language families outside Europe, including contact languages and creoles. Such data, often of the oral type, represent a valuable source for typological studies. Typologists who aim to discover the range of potential variation in human languages should not limit themselves to written language varieties or questionnaires, as is often the case in typological descriptions. Rather, they should also explore oral sources, dialectal variation, contact varieties and acquisitional data (both L1 and L2) (see Bisang, 2004 for an integrated view of typological research).

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At this point, it should have become clear that second language research is more than just a convenient source of data; its vital role in refining typological parameters and helping to formulate more robust generalizations allows for great expectations from future research. As a further issue, I would like to draw attention to a methodological aspect: both typological studies and second language studies recognize the crucial role of the comparative perspective. Universals are discovered via cross-linguistic generalizations reached through comparison among different languages (functional typology does not assume that universal grammar is innate: Croft, 2001: 9). Yet, the presence of two different systems in the learner’s mind is a contact situation in all respects, not only at the individual and subjective level, but also in the social context of bilingual societies. The comparison is always present in the learner’s mind and is manifest in different ways. As demonstrated in L2 transfer studies, prior language knowledge biases the process of acquisition of a second language in several ways. Transfer studies are mainly concerned with learner strategies and errors and usually do not typologically exploit the implications of contrast. There are, however, exceptions: the comparison of specific structures in both L1 and L2 is a basic tenet of research promoted within the learner varieties approach (Klein & Perdue, 1992, 1997). Within this framework, attention is drawn not only toward the explicit learning of morphological markers, but also toward the interiorization of more subtle abstract knowledge involving the conceptual level.2

The Notion of Prototypes and Tense/Aspect Distinctions In this section I illustrate some areas of concern for research in second language acquisition which appear to be relevant for functional typology and cognitive linguistics. These include the notion of prototypes and tense/ aspect distinctions. In recent years, there has been considerable interest in accounting for the acquisition of temporal/aspectual distinctions in the context of prototype theory. Linguistic categories have prototype structure (Taylor, 1989) with core, or central members of the category, but variable or even fuzzy boundaries (Croft, 2003: 162). According to Taylor, prototypical meanings would be acquired earlier because they require less elaboration (by the mind) compared to more peripheral category members. Prototype effects, namely the finding that members of a category can be rated in terms of how good they are, are now well-documented (Taylor, 2008). As suggested by a rich literature, tense and aspect form a cluster of semantic properties which learners acquire according to ‘prototypical associations’.

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telic predicates atelic predicates

perfective aspect imperfective aspect

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past tense present tense

(Bertinetto & Noccetti, 2006: 3) The prototypical past event would be the one in which past temporal reference, telic actionality and perfective aspect are associated, or converge. As a prototype effect, learners would initially mark lexical verbs with past grammatical markers just in those cases that match the prototypical association. Only subsequently would they learn to extend past marking to nonprototypical situations. This position is defended, among others, by Andersen and Shirai for both first and second language acquisition (Andersen & Shirai, 1996; Shirai & Andersen, 1995). A large body of evidence from various languages has shown that verbs like ‘to break’ or ‘to fall’ are more frequently associated with perfective past marking (for those languages that have this distinction), while less prototypical cases, such as the imperfective past emerges later (Giacalone Ramat, 2002). The role of actionality (the inherent properties of predicates referring to the Vendlerian classes of states, activities, telic predicates (Vendler, 1967)) is recognized in Andersen and Shirai’s work and formulated as The Primacy of Aspect Hypothesis. This hypothesis has been tested in a number of European and non-European languages, but is still in need of further evidence from languages with different types of tense/ aspect dominance. However, the general claim raises many problems and leaves open some questions which may be accounted for in a cognitivefunctional framework. The main question remains: where do children and L2 learners obtain prototypes? A possible answer is that they are sensitive to input (either caretaker input or native speaker input) so that a frequency factor becomes relevant for acquisition. This possibility has been recognized by Andersen as the Distributional Bias Hypothesis (Andersen, 2002; Shirai & Andersen, 1995). However, learner data do not support a simple frequentist explanation, since learners (in L1 or L2) do not behave like adult native speakers and do not simply imitate the input, but are more rigid and dichotomist in their choices. A second possibility is cognitive predisposition, according to which learners are ‘cognitively predisposed’ to notice certain associations in the input between grammatical inflections and certain verbs or auxiliaries (Andersen, 2002: 81; Andersen & Shirai, 1996).3 However, innate knowledge is not supported by empirical data either: the features of tense/aspect and actionality are intertwined in complex and language-specific ways, so that children and L2 learners struggle to disentangle the various functions of verb inflections, as shown in a number of studies on acquisition. Thus, Bertinetto and Noccetti (2006) show that when children acquire their first language, the three domains of tense, aspect and actionality form one underspecified category which is only gradually disentangled along patterns determined by

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the target language. The notion of underspecification seems adequate to describe learner data, from both children and adults. To account for the problems presented so far, a shift has taken place in recent research, moving away from tempo-aspectual morphology to focus on actional semantics and prototype learning (Bertinetto & Noccetti, 2006; Li & Shirai, 2000 on child acquisition; Giacalone Ramat & Rastelli, 2008; Rosi, 2009 on adult acquisition). The contribution of typology in this area may help clarify some issues. Thus, recent typological studies have challenged the claim that the lexicalization of event types is universal, suggesting instead that event lexicalization may vary cross-linguistically (Tatevosov, 2002). A typological survey of the actional properties of the verb ‘to die’ across 18 languages has shown that the same human event can be interpreted according to different temporal structures, giving rise to punctual or resultative meanings (Botne, 2003).4 A comparison of Japanese and English has shown that possession is conveyed by an achievement predicate in Japanese, while it is stative in English (Shirai & Nishi, 2003). Given the complexity of the learner’s task, I argue in this chapter that an empirically based theory or usage-based theory, such as Tomasello’s (2003) and Croft’s (2001), can account for the emergence of abstract utterance-level constructions like argument structure constructions without recourse to innate knowledge. Despite differences in cognitive development, the intricate form–function associations in temporal reference, aspect and actionality may pose similar problems to all learners of a specific language, thus encouraging to pursue the possibility that the linguistic competence of children and adults could share the same basic set of acquisitional processes (Tomasello, 2003: 6). In thischapter, however, we will limit ourselves to L2 acquisition. Recent empirical work on Italian as an L2 has demonstrated that learners encounter problems in using L2 predicates whose general meaning they know, both because the lexical equivalents in their L1 do not match the actional features of these predicates in L2 and because learners only gradually assemble the appropriate actional features. Learners may know the general meaning of some predicates, but do not yet master the lexical conceptual structure (arguments, thematic roles, actional semantics). In other words, the semantic properties of predicates have to be learned; to this end, beginners attempt to exploit syntactic strategies and contextual elements like adverbs to convey their view on the events discussed (Giacalone Ramat & Rastelli, 2008). The overuse of so-called ‘general purpose verbs’, such as ‘go’, ‘come’, ‘see’, ‘put’, ‘make’, is found in children acquiring English and other languages. However, ‘these verbs are gradually displaced as children add more specific verbs to their repertoire’ (Clark, 1993: 30). A process of generalization of patterns used with general purpose verbs has also been observed in L2 acquisition (Viberg, 2002, under the etiquette of ‘basic verbs’); these verbs are used

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instead of more lexically specified verbs, irrespective of actional divergence. These verbs may offer a distinct helping hand to learners in generalization tasks and in the emergence of syntactic patterns. What is relevant is that their meaning appears to be codetermined by their arguments, adjuncts, and temporal and aspectual markers. Interlanguage data show that learners are not aware, in their target languages, of properties such as telicity which are supposed to be universal. Similarly, the association with time adverbials such as in X-time, for X-time which are generally taken as diagnostic criteria for telic verbs or activities has unexpected manifestations in learner productions and cannot be taken as a reliable criterion (cf. Giacalone Ramat & Rastelli, 2008, for a discussion of the acquisition of actional properties of predicates). To illustrate the point, consider the use of the telic predicate cadere’fall’ by AB, a speaker of Tigrinya and post-basic learner of Italian (taken from the Pavia database of L2 Italian) who is talking about her slipping on the snow. (1) \I\ certo sei già caduta, qualche volta? \AB\ sì: \I\ sei scivolata? [. . .] cos’hai fatto? raccontami come hai fatto a cadere? \AB\ sono caduta e poi: sempre rido ‘\I\ sure, have you ever fallen, anytime? \AB\ yes \I\ did you slip? What did you do? Tell me, how did you fall? \AB\ I have fallen and then I always laugh’ [AB, 4] To interpret the apparent clash of the perfective form sono caduta and the present rido the actional content (+ telic) of cadere ‘fall’ has to be redetermined, taking into account the value of the adverb sempre ‘always’, which agrees with the habitual interpretation of rido ‘I laugh’ and might project the habitual meaning onto the participle caduta. Another element to be considered is the temporal value of the adverb poi ‘then’, which connects one (apparently) perfective event with a habitual event of laughing. If this interpretation is correct, sono caduta would have undergone an actional shift from [+telic] to [+stative] and the sentence would roughly mean: (quando) sono per terra rido sempre ‘(every time I fall), when I’m on the ground I always laugh’. The stative value of the participle caduta might have also influenced the conceptualization of this particular event. The above discussion suggests that learners might arrive at the meaning of lexically underspecified verbs through the meaning of the elements that compose their verb phrases. According to this hypothesis, the developmental path for the expression of actional content may progress from compositionality at the earlier stages to lexical coding at later stages, when it is likely that the learner’s vocabulary is more enriched, and many more lexical entries are stored individually (Giacalone Ramat & Rastelli, 2008: 248).

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An additional example of the actionality conflict is offered by a Chinese student who is retelling a scene from the frog story, in which the frog escapes from the jar in which it is kept while the boy is asleep. (2) dopo il bambino ha dormito, la rana ha provato di scapare after the child has slept, the frog has tried to escape ‘after the child fell asleep, the frog tried to escape’ Again we find an (apparently) perfective form ha dormito of the durative atelic verb dormire, while the context would require the telic addormentarsi, an achievement in Vendlerian terms. A concurrent interpretation could take the time conjunct ‘after’ as underspecified with respect to its punctuality feature to indicate temporal concomitance like mentre ‘while’. To conclude, I have added to arguments in favor of incorporating the study of language acquisition in the study of verb features; thus, evidence from learners’ texts and a careful observation of what learners actually do when they use language, could provide us with a better understanding of how the dimensions of tense, aspect and actionality work together, even in ways that are non-canonical with respect to the grammatical endowment of the target language. Furthermore, I have suggested that prototype effects deserve special attention; prototypes play a role in acquisition, even if they are not part of an innate equipment, but have to be learned by children and adults on the basis of linguistic experience. These are learned at a stage in the learner’s acquisition when more lexical entries are stored in the lexicon, so that the categorization activity can take place. It is plausible that high-frequency items become the central members of categories, as suggested by Bybee (2008: 228). The prototypical associations of tense/aspect/actionality mentioned above still prove to be an important tool in understanding the development of acquisition, and seem to have clear implications for L2 acquisition.

Constructions and SLA Some Potential Advantages of Constructions Over the past two decades, Construction Grammar has gained the attention of scholars working in the field of descriptive linguistics and grammaticalization processes. However, up until now, the potential of Construction Grammar has been scarcely exploited in SLA, although, Construction Grammar and usage-based grammars have particular relevance for second language teaching and learning, as argued by Bybee (2008: 217).5 This section is an attempt to verify what the notion of construction can offer the study of L2 acquisition of Italian. According to the constructionist perspective, language consists of a network of learned interrelated form–function correspondences (Croft, 2001;

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Goldberg, 1995; Goldberg & Casenhiser, 2008: 197). Thus, constructions are stored as pairings of form and function that range over units from the word level up to and including complex sentences (Bybee, 2008: 217). These pairs include simple lexical words (table, decide), grammatical morphemes and the items they appear with (the+ N, or V+ ed), idioms with fixed lexical content (going great guns), or constructions with some fixed material (he made his way through the crowd). Any linguistic pattern is recognized as a construction as long as some aspect of its form or function is not strictly predictable from its component parts or from other constructions recognized to exist. In addition [. . .] patterns are stored as constructions even if they are fully predictable as long as they occur with sufficient frequency (Goldberg, 2006: 5). The transitive construction would be such a case of a frequent construction. Constructions show prototype effects. For example, in ditransitive constructions, the central sense of transfer (as in Bill gave her a book) admits various, more peripheral, meanings, such as enabling transfer: Bill allowed/ permitted her a book (Ellis, 2003: 67). The caused motion construction is an abstract construction that can induce ‘coercion’ on an intransitive verb such as sneeze: Pat sneezed the napkin off the table (Goldberg, 1995: 9). This means that the construction itself contributes to the overall meaning of an utterance. What are the advantages of taking constructions as the basic units of linguistic analysis? A first advantage is to emphasize the role of context in language use and language change; items (verbs, nouns) are not learned in isolation, but through the repeated co-occurrence of different linguistic configurations. These learning skills reflect a basic cognitive trait of human beings (Bybee, 2008; Tomasello, 2003). Second, construction grammar recognizes the role of generalizations as part of the learning process of a language; thus, learners form generalizations by extracting abstract schemata from specific examples of constructions and extending them. Grammatical structures are built over one’s cumulative experience with language (Bybee, 2008: 218). Constructions represent, in some way, a return to a more traditional view of language with respect to the mainstream generative approach which holds that the nature of languages can best be revealed by studying their formal structures independently of their semantic or discourse function (Goldberg, 2006: 5).

How are Constructions Learned? Ellis (2003: 68) argues that ‘[i]f linguistic systems comprise a conspiracy of constructions, then language acquisition, L1 or L2, is the acquisition of constructions’.6 Studies in child language acquisition have demonstrated that

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children develop a set of slot-and-frame patterns, sequences that have a slot in which the child can place a variety of words, nouns or verbs: for example I can’t + V, where’s + Noun+ gone? (Ellis, 2003: 70 and references therein; see also Pine et al. (1998), who cast some doubts on the hegemonic role of verbs.) According to Tomasello (1992, 2003), there is no evidence for abstract grammatical patterns in the speech of 2–3-year-old children. Early verbs, usually basic, light verbs, are islands of organization; children acquire their earliest constructions on the basis of one or two initial ‘pathbreaking verbs’, which pave the way to the more abstract grammatical argument structure constructions (Ellis, 2003: 71; Tomasello, 2003: 121ff.). To date, construction grammar has primarily concerned descriptions of adult competence, although language acquisition researchers, particularly those involved in child language, are now beginning to sketch out theories of the acquisition of constructions which involve developmental sequences from formula, through low-scope pattern, to construction (Ellis, 2003: 68). Can a similar sequence of development of syntactic acquisition apply to second language acquisition? Second language learners have already learned a language, thus they do not need to elaborate from scratch notions such as noun or verb. However, despite obvious differences between first and second language learners, for many researchers there is apparently no radical different path of access to grammar between L1 and L2: ‘unless there is evidence to the contrary, it is a reasonable default expectation that naturalistic SLA develops in broadly the same fashion as does L1 – from formulae, to low-scope patterns, to constructions . . .’ (Ellis, 2003: 72). Although individual learners may follow different kinds of strategies, we do not have solid reasons to deny the expectation of similarity, at least for naturalistic second language acquisition. In the literature of second language acquisition, the presence of formulaic language is a known feature, whose relevance for both communication and acquisition has long been recognized (cf. Sinclair’s (1991: 110) idiom principle). Imitation and formulaic language are widely documented phenomena; formulae have a high communicative value because they allow learners to enter into communication (Weinert, 1995; Wray, 2002).7 In this study, we opt for the term chunk, taken from short-term memory research. Chunks are defined here as unanalyzed sequences of speech learned as a whole, which have a clear communicative function of their own and also a high frequency of tokens. At a later stage of acquisition, learners become aware that chunks have an internal syntactic structure and start analyzing them. At this point, a more abstract schema may develop, containing a variable slot restricted to items of a certain category, such as nouns or verbs, thus giving rise to lowerlevel constructions, expressing regularities of only limited scope. Such lowlevel constructions open the way to more abstract schemas and more creative constructions which can recombine parts in a new grammatical pattern, such as the interrogative structure or the negation patterns. Construction Grammar theory fits in well with this characterization of chunk development,

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since high-level constructions are flexible schemata that can be filled with any linguistic unit. The study of chunking can help understand the increase of fluency in second language learning.

The Growth of Constructions In this section, the proposal of an acquisition sequence from formulae through low scope patterns to abstract constructions is checked for the acquisition of L2 Italian. We analyze two chunks which allow learners to meet their basic communicative needs in interactions with natives. The first of these, come si dice? (‘how do you say?’), is already in use in early communicative exchanges; the second, c’è (lit. ‘there is’), is also an early learned tool, which carries different pragmatic functions, such as introducing new referents. A third expression, ce l’ho (‘I have it’) will also be discussed briefly.

The use of ‘Come si dice’? This chunk appears early in learners’ production, with a high degree of frequency. It is mostly used for asking for lexical items or signaling production problems. The data analyzed here is taken from the productions of CH, a Chinese learner of Italian.8 In the second recording, CH starts using no(n) so (‘I don’t know’) to indicate that he does not know a lexical item, or, more generally, he does not know how to answer a question (Weinert, 2007); then from the fourth recording, he starts using the sequence come si dice to ask for missing lexical items. At this point he is able to combine the two chunks that he has already learned to create a more complex pattern, according to a principle of adjacency as in (3) and (perhaps) a more target-like principle of government in (4). (3) come si dice io no(n) so (4) io no so come si dice

CH 4 CH 4

In this unanalyzed sequence, the only early use of the impersonal pronoun si is attested, an element which will emerge in its function of indefinite pronoun only after several months. The corpus of CH’s data includes 33 occurrences of come si dice and its variants. Later on, from the ninth recording, an apparently similar formula appears: si chiama/come si chiama (‘how is it called?’). However, this prefabricated chunk has a different structure, in terms of the target language, since it involves the pronominal intransitive verb chiamarsi rather than the impersonal pronoun si. (5) questo eh (che) si chiama ven/ventaio? ‘this (that). . . is called fan?’ Inteviewer: sì ventaglio ‘yes, fan’

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(6) c’è una chiesa si chiama duomo ‘There is a church, its name is dome’

CH 11

It should be noted that in (6) the chunk does not appear in a question, but has a kind of attributive relative function. In recording 14, nine months after the beginning of observation, the learner produces some variation, placing other verbs in the pattern (slot-andframe pattern): come + si + V. We can assume that at this stage, the learner has begun to analyze the chunk come si dice . (7) disegno come si fa ‘drawing how is made’

CH 14

(8) tuti familia tuti è è sente eh eh quelo c(he) nonno (ha) detto + come si fa come si fa così CH 14 ‘everybody in the family pays attention to what grandfather says, how things have to be done, how one must behave’ (talking about the role played by the grandfather in the Chinese family) The sequence come si fa contains the very frequent transitive verb fare ‘do’, which could serve as a pathbreaking form for the expansion of what is to become the impersonal si- construction. Further instances are attested in the data: come si fa disegno (CH 15), come si fa di lavoro (‘how they do this work’) (CH 15), then generalized to come si scrive (‘how is this written?’) CH 15 (again a formulaic expression in learner language), si chiu(de)? (‘(how) is it closed?’) (CH 15). This stage seems an intermediate level with partial analysis of the construction; it is likely that the meaning of si as indefinite generic subject is still not recognized (see Giacalone Ramat, 2006, on the polysemy of si in learner varieties: pronominal si as part of lexical entry in verbs like svegliarsi ‘to wake up’ and impersonal si). In the last interview, six months after the preceding one, the learner still shows some instances of come si fa, while exhibiting the more target-like sequence non lo so come si dice with the clitic pronoun lo, still unanalyzed. The most striking feature is the creation of a new schema, si può + V infinitive, with the modal verb potere denoting possibility and/or permission, as in native Italian (Palmer, 1986: 18ff., van der Auwera & Plungian, 1998). In this new schema, we find the critical context for the impersonal indefinite si interpretation. (9) non si può andare per là ‘it is not possible to pass over there’ (10) INT: questo qua può andare così? ‘This (piece of chess) can move like this?’

CH 19

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CH : non si può andare così ++ solo solo così ‘it is not possible to move like this, only only like this’

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CH 19

The context for this utterance is CH teaching the interviewer how to play chess. The context of such modalized expressions is mostly negative, although affirmative contexts are also present. (11) quelo cavalo si può fare così anche qua ‘(with) the horse one is allowed to move like this also here’

CH 19

In (11), the interpretation may be ambiguous: quelo cavalo could be the subject and si might be redundant, even though the interpretation of quelo cavalo as a topic is more in line with the overall learner’s production. In (12) and (13), the learner is telling a story about a tiger. (12) eh quel padrone dire: eh no si può and/ +no si può eh passà(re) CH 19 ‘the master says: one is not allowed to go through’ (13) anche q\uesto ri/ristorante eh quera c’è scritto ‘also (in) this inn that (?) is written’ + quando tu + bevuto eh tre bottilie eh non si eh ++ non si può andare ‘when one has drunk three bottles, one can not go through’ CH 19 Interestingly enough, in this excerpt of reported speech, the second person pronoun tu with generic meaning co-occurs with si, thus reinforcing the indefinite interpretation. We can conclude that at this stage, a generalization of an argument structure pattern with two variants has occurred: si + V,

si+ potere+ V.

The use of c’è (and ce l’ho) The development of c’è is a good case showing how a chunk is analyzed and develops into a construction. The use of c’è ‘there is’ in the learner variety of MK, a young Tigrinya speaker from the Pavia corpus, has been studied by Bernini (2005) in the wider context of Italian pronominal verbs like esserci, averci, metterci, all formed with the clitic locative adverb ci. It is interesting to note that in MK the meaning of c’è is broader than in native Italian. In Italian esserci (‘to be’ + ci) is used in presentational sentences: c’è un gatto in giardino (‘there is a cat in the garden’), to introduce a new referent and to locate it somewhere. C’è may also have existential meaning (Dio c’è ‘God exists’) and a locative meaning of ‘to be here/there’ (Giovanni non c’è ‘John is not here’).

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In learner varieties, by far the most frequent form of esserci is the present 3SG c’è, which appears very early (other less frequent forms are imperfect c’era and present 3PL ci sono). (14) \IT\ che: è in Italia anche lei? ‘who is in Italy too?’ \MK\ ah an/in Italia? nno: = lei c’è: - Asmara ‘In Italy? No, she is in Asmara’ (15) \IT\ però abita/ avete una casa vostra ‘But she lives/do you have a flat of yours?’ \MK\ sì + sì c’è a casa (in) Cinque Giornata ‘Yes we have a home in Cinque Giornata’ \IT\ ah + in Piazza Cinque Giornate ‘Ah, in Cinque Giornate Square (Milan)’ (16) ++ (la) – l’uomo - adesso c’è America ‘that man now is in America’

MK 5

MK 01 MK 01

Examples 14–16 show that the three functions, location, existence and possession, are attested in MK’s production from the beginning of recordings; location may also have zero expression, beside lexicalization via c’è. It is also worth noting that c’è is the first predicate to emerge in basic varieties (Bernini, 2005: 160). As far as the argument structure configuration is concerned, c’è may cooccur with one nominal as in (17) or with two nominals. (17) e - con/ perchè sei venuto in italia? \MK\ eh + c’è problema - la, militaria ‘Why did you come to Italy? there is the problem of military service’

MK 1

When c’è is accompanied by two nominals, one nominal takes subject position as in (15), whereas the other may be a location, as in the examples reproduced in (15) and (16). In MK’s learner variety, c’è is unanalyzed and is treated as an autonomous lexical item [‘t∫ε]: the internal morphological analysis which distinguishes the clitic locative adverb ci and be-3SG presupposes the development of the copula è, of the plural form ci sono, and of avere/averc,i to express possession. All these developments are found in MK’s later recordings, although direct evidence of structural analysis of the chunk is not documented. However, the expected evidence can be found in more advanced varieties of L2 Italian. Consider the following example from another, more advanced Tigrinya speaker, AB.

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(18) ha chiesto a: - a quei che c’è erano/che c’è eravamo davanti a lei ‘she asked those (persons) who were before her’

457

AB 5

In this example (quoted from Bernini, 2005: 161), the imperfect of esserci c’erano is segmented into two words, one of which is the invariable and familiar form c’è followed by the imperfect of essere, also known to the learner. This looks like an attempt at reanalysis, which proves that the learner is able to break down the chunk into individual constituents and change it according to the requirements of discourse. An early manifestation of the possession predicate avere is found in another chunk ce l’ho ‘I have it’ (I follow here the standard Italian writing: the IPA transcription of the chunk would be [t∫e’l ], [t∫ela’b:jamo]). The chunk is a single unit, and the presence of the clitic pronoun lo goes unnoticed. c

(19) perchè? non cce l’ho lavoro? ‘Why, don’t I have a job?’

MK 06

(20) c’è/ce l’abbiamo noi che è strano^ ‘we have a particular habit/usage’

MK 11

Note that in colloquial varieties of Italian, and consequently in the learner’s input, the string ce l’ho is quite frequent with the clitic pronoun having anaphoric or cataphoric function: (21) il libro ce l’ho io! ‘I (emphatic) have the book!’ (22) non ce l’hai il libro? ‘don’t you have the book?’ Crucially, MK overextends the pattern. This is particularly evident in the 11th recording, at the end of the observation period. At this stage of learning, he has developed a verb *celavere with a possessive meaning, and seems to have elaborated a distinction between avere as auxiliary for the past and *celavere as possessive expression (Bernini, 2005: 171). (23) ce l’abbiamo due ghitare il basso e il normale MK 11 ‘we have two guitars, the bass and the normal’ As suggested by Bernini, MK seems to be aware of the role of lo as anaphoric pronoun in the following example. (24) \IT\ avete delle ferie? ‘do you have holidays?’

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\MK\ sì sì ce li abbiamo ‘Yes we have them’

MK 11

In (24) lo appears for the first time as an independent form in the plural, agreeing in number (not in gender) with the antecedent ferie. As far as c’è and ce l’ho are concerned, the behavior of other learners of L2 Italian is quite similar: in the production of CH (the Chinese learner examined in 4.3.1), we find c’è with the meaning of possession (ex. 26) and as existential predicate (ex. 25).9 (25) Cinese c’è uguale c’è un festa di grandi ‘in China it is the same, there is a big feast (for New Year)’ (26) Un signore +++ c’è chiave ‘A man has a key’, ‘there is a man with a key’

CH 2 CH 3

CH shows a couple of instances of ce l’ho, ce l’ha as well. (27) eh sì eh lui sì eh eh ce –l-ha ‘yes, he has it (the bag)’

CH 6

(28) questo signore dire + dice eh c’è eh ce-l-hai per telefono ‘this man says do you have the telephone number?’

CH 6

The following points summarize our results. •

• •

We have traced the development of the chunk come si dice, which originates in questions to obtain lexical items, develops into a low scope pattern using a slot and frame pattern with a restricted range of predicates, and finally into an impersonal construction with generic subject: si + V, si + potere + Vinf We have shown that the chunk c’è, ci sono has developed a paradigm, has been analyzed in its component parts and has undergone meaning reduction according to the target. The chunk ce l’ho has also developed a paradigm and in (24) is analyzed in its component parts.

In the preceding pages, some empirical evidence has been adduced that chunking is relevant for L2 acquisition. Chunks are stored in the minds of language learners and are ready to be activated by filling the open argument slot(s) of the predicates si + V, c’è, ce l’ho with appropriate nominals. L2 learners are faced with a two-step task: they first learn chunks in the communicative contexts in which they frequently occur and automatize them, then, as the acquisition process progresses, learners learn to unpack

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the component parts of these chunks and analyze their internal structure. At this later point, learners are able to re-use and expand these chunks freely.10 The role of the construction si + modal verb + infinitive for the development of impersonal si has been underlined. It seems likely that through chunks, learners come to grasp the function of certain grammatical morphemes such as lo or si. Chunking ability is not limited to L2 learners; adult native speakers may learn new chunks in their own language.

Conclusions and Further Work This study was limited to a few low-level learners. In order to generalize the present findings, more advanced learners must also be examined, in order to capture the incremental use of constructions. The multiple functions of constructions should also be examined.11 Furthermore, the effects of token and type frequency should be controlled for, starting from the hypothesis that more frequent tokens may serve as a basis for generalizing constructions, but at the same time keeping in mind that chunks need not have high frequency, but be communicatively efficient (Bybee, 2008). The major point of this chapter is that the adoption of a constructionist perspective can contribute to a better understanding of the learning process, especially concerning the way in which early productions of adult learners tend to focus on a limited set of patterns which generalize into more abstract grammatical schemata over time and through prototypical instances. L2 learners of Italian provide evidence for the role of constructions in L2 productions and yield results that are coherent with functional cognitive models of acquisition (Bybee, 2008; Tomasello, 2003). The last issue to be briefly discussed concerns the relationship of Construction Grammar to the typological approach discussed in section ‘What Typology can Contribute to Second Language Research’. In Construction Grammar, syntactic constructions are viewed as directly linked to their semantic interpretation (Goldberg, 1995). In this respect, Construction Grammar is compatible with the approach of synchronic typology, in which economy and iconicity are major forces determining grammatical structures: ‘typological conspiracies, and the range of constructions in general, are determined by communicative motivations’ (Croft, 2003: 287).

Notes (1) I refer here to the universals recognized in linguistic typology, namely inductive generalizations rather than properties of the human mind. (2) See, for example, Carroll and Lambert (2003), who showed how French and German speakers, advanced adult learners of English, find it difficult to organize

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(3) (4)

(5) (6) (7)

(8)

(9)

(10)

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spatial information for expression in accordance with the grammatical principles of the target language. In psycholinguistic studies some scholars assume that event states and process are universal notions (Slobin, 1985), while in other psycholinguistic models, categories emerge gradually and in a piecemeal fashion (Tomasello, 2003). In the Vendlerian classification (which was devoted to classifying English verbs, but is usually viewed by linguists as a categorization of verbs in any natural language), die is typically classified as an achievement verb along with other verbs such as find, notice and recognize. Botne shows that die can be conceptualized in different languages as encoding durative preliminary (onset) or postliminary (coda) phases in addition to the punctual nucleus. French J’ai trouvé un pauvre homme mourant d’une maladie incurable (Botne, 2003: 247) refers to an ongoing extended state before death (durative onset stage plus a punctual nucleus); to refer to the state of death the participle-adjective mort is required. Other languages, such as Japanese, encode a stative coda phase, but not an onset phase. Goldberg (2006: 116–117) mentions some studies which replicated the caused motion experiments with second language learners of English. For a brief survey of constructions in second language learners, see Valenzuela Manzanares and Rojo López (2008). Experimental studies clearly indicate that children and adults learn to recognize the form and meaning of a novel construction with quite minimal training (Goldberg & Casenhiser, 2008: 198). The presence of formulaic unanalyzed expressions is a typical feature of learner languages: see for English: I dunno (Klein & Perdue, 1992: 89), for French [jãna], [jãnaply ] ‘il n’y en a plus’, [sepa] “(je) sais pas”’ (Klein & Perdue, 1992: 239). There are several types of prefabricated speech (Nattinger & DeCarrico, 1992): we are not concerned here with idioms whose main characteristic is that meanings are more than simply the sum of their individual parts, as in kick the bucket. Chunks have been given various names in the literature: formulae, formulaic speech, prefabricated routines, holophrases. Leaving aside the terminological discussion, we simply note that chunks are used by both L1 and L2 learners. CH (aged 18) was recorded as part of the Pavia project of Italian Second Language Acquisition for a period of one year, December 1988–December 1989, plus one recording in April 1990 (Giacalone Ramat, 2003b). Recorded data mostly include free conversations with an Italian interviewer and narratives. CH’s path of acquisition is rather slow. The learner remains at the basic variety stage (unmarked verb forms); features of a post-basic variety appear in the last recording: a verb system with present/past perfective/imperfect oppositions (Valentini, 1992). The influence of L1 typological patterns on the L2 cannot be excluded, since existence and possession are expressed by the same verb in Chinese; also in the case of MK there could be an L1 influence from Tigrinya. As a matter of fact, the possessive construction has the form of an existential sentence in many languages of the world (see WALS, 2005: map 117). At any rate, what is relevant for our approach is not a possible transfer, but the process of meaning reduction undertaken on the model of the target language. Although frequency effects are not the focus of this chapter, they deserve to be mentioned. As shown by Bybee (2008: 218ff.), a distinction must be made between token frequency (the number of times a unit appears in running text) and type frequency, which refers to some patterns of language and counts how many distinct items are represented by the pattern. For instance, the English past tense pattern of the type know knew, blow blew has a lower type frequency than the regular pattern which adds the –ed suffix. Similarly, in ditransitive constructions the pattern he gave me the change is used with only a small set of verbs.

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Token frequency effects lead to automatized grammar learning, linguistic routines and chunks. Type frequency, however, is also needed to uncover the structure of words and phrases and to promote productivity. The expansion of chunks into constructions will take place when a pattern is extended to different items occupying a position, as shown by the case of the impersonal si-construction. (11) See, for instance, Forsberg (2006), for an attempt to distinguish between ‘situational prefabricated sequences’ and ‘discursive prefabricated sequences’, used to organize discourse.

References Andersen, R. (2002) The dimension of pastness. In R. Salaberry and Y. Shirai (eds) The L2 Acquisition of Tense-Aspect Morphology (pp. 79–105). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Andersen, R. and Shirai, Y. (1996) Primacy of aspect in first and second language acquisition: The pidgin/creole connection. In W.C. Ritchie and T.K. Bathia (eds) Handbook of Second Language Acquisition (pp. 527–570), San Diego: Academic Press. Bernini, G. (2003) Learner varieties and language types: The case of indefinite pronouns in non-native Italian. In A. Giacalone Ramat (ed.) Typology and Second Language Acquisition (pp. 83–123). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Bernini, G. (2005) La costruzione del lessico in italiano L2: i verbi pronominali esseci e averci. In N. Grandi (a cura di), Morfologia e dintorni. Studi di linguistica tipologica ed acquisizionale (pp. 158–178). Milano: FrancoAngeli. Bertinetto, P.M. and Noccetti, S. (2006) Prolegomena to ATAM Acquisition. Theoretical Premises and Corpus Labeling (pp. 1–33). Scuola Normale Superiore –Pisa: Quaderni del Laboratorio di Linguistica. http://linguistica.sns.it/QLL06.htm. Accessed 14 April 2011. Bisang, W. (2004) Dialectology and typology: An integrative perspective. In B. Kortmann (ed.) Dialectology Meets Typology. Dialect Grammar from a Crosslinguistic Perspective (pp. 11–45). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Botne, R. (2003) To die across languages: Toward a typology of achievement verbs. Linguistic Typology 7, 233–278. Bybee, J.L. (1985) Morphology. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Bybee, J. (2008) Usage-based grammar and second language acquisition. In P. Robinson and N.C. Ellis (eds) Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition (pp. 216–236). New York: Routledge. Bybee, J.L. and Hopper, P. (2001) Frequency and the Emergence of Linguistic Structure. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Carroll, M. and Lambert, M. (2003) Information structure in narratives and the role of grammatical knowledge. A study of adult French and German learners of English. In Ch. Dimroth and M. Starren (eds) Information Structure and the Dynamics of Language Acquisition (Studies in Bilingualism: 26) (pp. 267–287). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Clark, E. (1993) The Lexicon in Acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Comrie, B. (1984) Why linguists need language acquirers. In W.E. Rutherford (ed.) Language Universals and Second Language Acquisition (pp. 11–28). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Croft, W. (2001) Radical Construction Grammar: Syntactic Theory in Typological Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Croft, W. (2003) Typology and Universals (2nd edn). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ellis, N.C. (2003) Constructions, chunking, and connectionism: The emergence of second language structure. In C.J. Doughty and M.H. Long (eds) The Handbook of Second Language Acquisition (pp. 62–103). Oxford: Blackwell. Fiorentino, G. (1999) Relativa Debole. Milano: Franco Angeli.

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Forsberg, F. (2006) Le langage préfabriqué en français parlé L2. Étude acquisitionnelle et comparative. Doctoral thesis, Stockholm University. Gass, S. (1979) Language transfer and universal grammatical relations. Language Learning 29, 327–344. Gass, S. and Ard, J. (1980) L2 data: Their relevance for language universals. TESOL Quarterly 14, 443–452. Giacalone Ramat, A. (1999) Functional typology and strategies of clause connection in second language acquisition. Linguistics 37, 519–548. Giacalone Ramat, A. (2000) Some questions concerning the development of inflectional morphology (Position paper by A. Giacalone Ramat and W. Klein). Euroconference ‘The structure of learner language’, San Feliu de Guixols, Spain, 7–12 October 2000. Giacalone Ramat, A. (2002) How do learners acquire the classical three categories of temporality? In S. Rafael and Y. Shirai (eds) The L2 Acquisition of Tense-Aspect Morphology (pp. 221–248). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Giacalone Ramat, A. (ed.) (2003a) Typology and Second Language Acquisition. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Giacalone Ramat, A. (ed.) (2003b) Verso l’italiano: percorsi e strategie di acquisizione. Roma: Carocci. Giacalone Ramat, A. (2006) Strategie di costruzione dell’enunciato nell’italiano di apprendenti: soggetti generici, costruzioni impersonali e passive. In N. Grandi and G. Jannaccaro (eds) Zhì. Studi in onore di Emanuele Banfi (pp. 239–258). Roma: Caissa Italia Editore. Giacalone Ramat, A. and Rastelli, S. (2008) Learning actionality: An investigation of L2 Italian data. In B. Ahrenholz, U. Bredel, W. Klein, M. Rost-Roth and R. Skiba (eds) Empirische Forschung und Theoriebildung. Beiträge aus Soziolinguistik, GesprocheneSprache- und Zweitspracherwerbsforschung. Festschrift für Norbert Dittmar zum 65. Geburtstag (pp. 239–250). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Goldberg, A.E. (1995) Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Goldberg, A.E. (2006) Constructions at Work. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goldberg, A.E. and Casenhiser, D. (2008) Construction learning and second language acquisition. In P. Robinson and N.C. Ellis (eds) Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition (pp. 197–215). New York: Routledge. Greenberg, J.H. (1966) Some universals of grammar with particular reference to the order of meaningful elements. In J.H. Greenberg (ed.) Universals of Language (pp. 73–113). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Greenberg, J.H. (1991) Typology/universals and second language acquisition. In T. Huebner and C.A. Ferguson (eds) Crosscurrents in Second Language Acquisition and Linguistic Theories (pp. 37–43). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Hammarberg, B. and Koptjevskaja-Tamm, M. (2003) Adnominal possession: Combining typological and second language perspectives. In A. Giacalone Ramat (ed.) Typology and Second Language Acquisition (pp. 125–179). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Huebner, Th. and Ferguson, Ch. A. (eds) (1991) Crosscurrents in Second Language Acquisition and Linguistic Theories. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Hyltenstam, K. (1986) Markedness, language universals, language typology and language acquisition. In P. Carol (ed.) First and Second Language Acquisition Processes (pp. 55–78). Cambridge, MA: Newbury House. Keenan, E.L. and Comrie, B. (1977) Noun phrase accessibility and universal grammar. Linguistic Inquiry VIII, 63–99. Klein, W. and Perdue, C. (1992) Utterance Structure. Developing Grammars Again. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Klein, W. and Perdue, C. (1997) The basic variety (or: Couldn’t natural languages be much simpler?). Second Language Research 13, 301–347.

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23 Linguistic Relativity: Another Turn of the Screw Rainer Dietrich, Chung Shan Kao and Werner Sommer

Introduction It is common knowledge that the language you use in everyday communication is suspected of moulding the content and the form of extra-linguistic processes such as perception (Whorf, 1956), memory (Brown & Lenneberg, 1954) and numerical cognition (Gordon, 2004). One recent line of reasoning in this field takes into focus the interface of conceptualization and syntactic computation. It is referred to as the ‘Thinking for Speaking Hypothesis’ (cf. Slobin, 1996, 2003). The authors propose that the language-specific repertoire of inflectional categories, like aspect and tense, constrain the speakers’ choice of the perspectives he or she can take when referring to an event. Psychologically, this hypothesis can be viewed as an extension of the codability theory. While the original version explains linguistically caused differences in conceptualizing and storing the world through the simplicity and frequency of lexical items, the thinking for speaking approach also explains differences in online processing by languagespecific grammatical morphemes. Simple and frequent grammatical concepts, like the -ing form in English, bias the conceptualizer’s choice in favour of the imperfective aspect when referring to the event shown in Figure 23.1. In English, this event is conceptualized as ongoing and unbounded (the men are digging), as opposed to German, in which the clause Die Männer graben ein Loch (‘the men dig a hole’) indicates a so-called bounded perspective with a right temporal boundary and the concept of ongoingness is not prevalent (cf. von Stutterheim & Nüse, 2003). The reconstruction of this theory within the framework of a parallel and serial model of incremental utterance production (Dietrich, 1999; Griffin & Bock, 2000; Levelt, 1989; Meyer, 1996; Roelofs, 1998; Wheeldon et al., 2003) results in the view that there is a language-specific bottom-up effect of grammatical categories on the conceptualizer’s navigation in utterance planning. According to the 464

Linguist ic Rel at iv it y

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Figure 23.1 Men digging a hole

Thinking-for-Speaking Model, codability originates not only in lexical properties, but also in grammatical morphemes. It does not only strip down the continuous flow of the child’s perception into language-compatible concepts, but also it shapes the processes of macro-planning. What does this tell us about the interaction of language and cognition? For most of us, it may not come as a big surprise that children’s laborious struggle with language acquisition drills their conceptualizer in serving thoughts to the computational system in manageable portions, at least as far as the content of the message is concerned.

Objective However, the question remains whether this process applies to the form of the message as well. How far down the production line does the conceptualizer peer forward? How much syntactic information does it prearrange, thereby easing the task of the formulator? And, given that this is a justifiable question, how can it be investigated experimentally? Languages differ widely in word order, as we all know, and yes/no questions provide a particularly suitable case for testing the readiness of the conceptualizer to serve the computational system. In Standard Mandarin

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Figure 23.2 Semantic–syntactic interface of the Mandarin Chinese production system processing the utterance ‘Is the telephone red?’

Chinese, for instance, a yes/no question is typically expressed by the Q-particle ma, which holds a sentence-final position, after the very end of the syntactic form of the rest of the sentence (cf. Figure 23.2). In German, a yes/no question is expressed by putting the finite verb into the sentence-initial position. Thus, German illustrates the opposite word order to Chinese. This difference raises several questions: whether the conceptualizer may be attuned to such differences in word order, and if so, how; does it anticipate the word order of the sentence to be coded syntactically? If so, can we predict that in German the illocutionary force of an utterance is conceptualized ahead of the propositional content while in Chinese it is planned only after delivery of the proposition as in Figure 23.3? This issue is illustrated and explained in more detail in the section ‘Hypotheses’ below. Let us first turn to methodological issues. How can we examine the processing of these differences and determine the process involved? Utterance production is a cognitive activity and cognitive processing takes time. The dynamics of utterance production, in particular, bear strong resemblance to a standard assembly belt procedure. The utterance emerges piecemeal. As soon as the conceptualizer has produced a fragment that possesses enough information that can be coded syntactically, the computational system starts working. Lexical material is activated and the syntactic structure is fabricated online according to the lexical features and the syntactical constraints of the particular language (cf. Figure 23.2 or 23.3 respectively). If humans are genetically equipped with a cooperative preverbal system, we should expect that, as a result of language acquisition, it will have adapted to the syntactic peculiarity of the learner’s language. The Chinese conceptualizer should, accordingly, anticipate the dynamics of the computational system and provide the syntactic coding with the propositional content first

Figure 23.3 Semantic–syntactic interface of German

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and only then with the illocutionary information ‘yes/no question’. The German speaker, on the other hand, would have set up a conceptualizer that delivers the concept ‘yes/no question’ first, followed by the rest of the message, that is the propositional content. If, however, we are genetically provided with a more rigid cognitive system, it might not be sufficiently flexible to adapt, through the acquisition process, to the word order constraints of the input language. So, it may have developed a universal standard pattern for the yes/no message, leaving the specific ordering to the syntactic component. How can we determine which is the case? How can the online processing of the conceptual system be observed?

Experiment 1 We used the lateral readiness potential in a question elicitation task in a two-choice Go/Nogo-paradigm (cf. Van Turennout et al., 1997; among others). German and Chinese native speakers responded to a target picture by pressing a button and uttering a sentence. In each trial, two pictures were presented one after the other on the screen. The first, the symbolic reference, was a picture of a coloured circle in front of or behind a grey, horizontal oblong (e.g. a blue circle behind the oblong). The second, the target, was a picture of a coloured object in front of or behind a grey lattice of iron bars (e.g. a red telephone behind or a blue telephone in front of the lattice; see Figure 23.4). One of the two target attributes, colour or position, deviated from the symbolic reference. In Go-trials the deviant symbolic reference attribute was determinable. Participants had to indicate the deviant attribute by preparing the appropriate hand – left for deviant colour, right for deviant position, for instance, or the other way around according the previous instruction – and by a verbal

Figure 23.4 Experimental setup for Go-trials. The correct response to this target picture was (1) press the ‘colour button’ and (2) say: The telephone is red

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Figure 23.5 The experimental setup for Nogo-trials (position). The correct response to this target picture was (1) withhold the button press upon the ‘position’ button and (2) ask: Is the telephone behind?

statement (e.g. the telephone is red or the telephone is behind). In Nogo-trials the deviant target attribute was indeterminable; that is, the object was either colourless (white) or stuck between the iron bars (see Figure 23.5). In this case, participants were required to not press any button, but to ask whether the deviant target attribute has the colour or the position of the symbolic reference (e.g. Is the telephone blue? or Is the telephone behind?). In this experimental design, the hand choice (left or right, as illustrated above) was coupled with a deviant attribute, a constituent of the propositional content (colour or position), and the execution decision (Go or Nogo) was coupled with the sentence mood (declarative or interrogative) of the utterance. Note that the participants were required to ask yes/no questions only under Nogo-conditions. The hypothesis that German and Chinese lead to a different planning order of interrogative mood and propositional content led to contrasting predictions about the emergence of Nogo-LRPs in the two languages. If the production system planned mood before content in a German yes/no question, the Nogo-decision (connected to mood) would occur before any reaction choice (connected to the content). Thus, no NogoLRP was expected in German. On the other hand, if in Chinese, speakers planned mood after content, they would decide not to execute a reaction only after they had chosen with which hand to press the button and prepared its movement. As a result, a Nogo-LRP was predicted to develop and to manifest itself before the preparation was subsequently suppressed.

Participants Twenty German native speakers (aged 20–39; 11 female) and 23 Chinese native speakers (aged 21–36; 11 female) participated in this

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experiment. All participants were born and raised in the environment of their native language at least until graduation from secondary school. All were right-handed and had normal or corrected-to-normal visual acuity. They were either paid for participation in this study or received credits required for the psychology curriculum.

Materials All test pictures were approximately 3.5 × 3.5 cm. Reference pictures had no explicit frame and showed a coloured circle in front of or behind a horizontal grey oblong. There were eight variants of symbolic reference: four colours (blue, yellow, green and red) in two positions (in front or behind). The target pictures showed a coloured object in front of or behind a grey lattice composed of nine bars within a frame. The stimulus set of targets encompassed 30 different objects. For Go-trials, eight variants were created for each object: four colours (blue, yellow, green and red) and two positions (in front or behind). For Nogo-trials intended to induce a question about colour, the object was white and either in front of or behind the lattice. For Nogo-trials intended to elicit a question about position, the object (in one of the same four colours) appeared inside the lattice, in front of the uneven bars and behind the even bars, seemingly stuck between them.

Design The experiment involved three independent variables: Attribute (colour, position), Execution Decision (Go, Nogo) and Language (German, Chinese). Each participant performed the two-choice Go/Nogo-task under four experimental conditions: Go/colour, Go/position, Nogo/colour and Nogo/position. There were 480 trials for each participant, evenly distributed into 20 blocks. Each block contained eight trials of each of the two kinds of Go-conditions (left/right) and two trials of each of the two Nogo-conditions. A larger number of Go-trials compared to Nogo-trials was used in light of Low and Miller’s (1999) findings that this imbalance augments the utilization of attribute information for response choice, thereby increasing the likelihood of response preparation under the Nogo-condition. Finally, four trials in each block, two trials under each Go-condition, were catch trials (with diminished target duration, see below). As opposed to the previous EEG studies of naming, in which the pressing of a button had been contingent on retrieval of lexical information, in the present two-choice Go/Nogo-design, participants could press the button independently, followed by speaking. The catch trials were, therefore, introduced to enhance the intended connections of linguistic processes to response choice and execution by constraining the duration of target presentation.

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Six lists of stimuli were created out of the prepared materials. The lists had the same trial sequence in terms of conditions and differed only in the variants of symbolic references and targets. Various combinations of the attributes (colour, position) were equally allocated under each condition in a list. The frequency of the 30 objects in all attribute combinations was balanced across the six lists. The trial sequence of each list was randomized with the following constraints: no variant of attributes or objects was repeated within three consecutive trials, and in no block were Nogo- and catch trials presented in the first two trials or in succession. Each list encompassed seven practice blocks. The first two blocks contained Go-trials exclusively. The third practice block consisted of Go and catch trials in equal parts. All trials in the fourth practice block were Nogo-trials. The remaining three practice blocks resembled experimental trials.

Procedure Participants were tested individually in a sound-attenuated and dimly lit chamber. They sat at a distance of some 80 cm from a computer screen at the centre of which stimuli were presented against a white background. For familiarization with the pictures and their names, participants were asked to first name the 30 objects presented, one after another, three times. After accomplishing six practice blocks, they carried out the 20 experimental blocks, pausing between blocks for as long as they wished. The assignment of attributes (colour, position) to hands (left, right) was reversed in the second half of the session. Hence, participants performed a practice block with the reversed assignment before the second half of the session. All the oral and written instructions were in German for the German participants and in Mandarin Chinese for the Chinese participants. Each trial began with a fixation cross that was shown for 500 ms. The target picture replaced the fixation and remained visible for 1000 ms. A fixation cross ensued for an inter-stimulus interval (ISI) of another 500 ms. The next target picture was presented for a maximum of 2000 ms if no button was pressed during this period. Otherwise, a button press terminated target presentation. In catch trials, maximal target duration was reduced to either 400 or 800 ms if no button was pressed. After the target, a cartoon of a man with an empty speech bubble appeared for 2500 ms. Trials were separated by an inter-trial interval of 2000 ms, during which participants were shown a white screen with no stimulus. The task consisted of two active parts, button pressing and speaking. Participants were instructed to compare the target with the previously presented reference picture upon target presentation. According to the outcome of the comparison, they were required to press one of the buttons as soon as possible under Go-conditions (including catch trials) but to refrain from pressing under Nogo-conditions. Upon the appearance of the cartoon, participants

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were asked to utter the appropriate sentence. In a Go or catch trial, they had to articulate immediately upon the presentation, whether they had pressed a button or not. In Nogo-trials, they had to await the figure before speaking. Figures 23.4 and 23.5 show the components of the experimental procedure. In addition to the Nogo-LRP observation, data analysis also involved comparison of the LRP onset latencies between the two speaker groups. The reaction time of a hand movement (i.e. the duration between the stimulus and the response) can be bisected by the LRP onset into two parts: the interval from the stimulus to the LRP onset (the S-LRP-interval) and the interval from the LRP onset to the response (the LRP-R-interval). If there are significant differences in reaction times between conditions or groups, these effects should be reflected in the S-LRP-interval and/or in the LRP-R-interval (see Osman et al., 1995). In a study of specifying the functional locus of the LRP, Masaki et al. (2004) found that the LRP begins after response selection, but before motor programming. Therefore, the LRP onset in the present experimental design would reflect the time point after which the response hand has been selected. If the designed connection of the hand choice with the propositional content planning succeeded, the LRP onset could reflect the time demands for processing the question content.

Hypotheses Hypothesis 1: The Conceptual-Origin Hypothesis If incremental processing is determined by the temporal order of conceptualization, we would expect the development of a Nogo-LRP in the question-final type of languages (Chinese) but no Nogo-LRP in the question-initial type (German).

Hypothesis 2: The Syntactic-Origin Hypothesis The null hypothesis assumes no influence of the purely formal difference of question-final versus question-initial type languages. Hence, no differences in the development of Nogo-LRPs are expected in spite of contrasting word order properties of the languages on the syntactic level (Figure 23.6). The assumption of incremental utterance production leaves open the question whether sequential ordering affects the process at the conceptual level or at the formal level of syntactic linearization. For instance, the semantic processing of a question entails the generation of a global structure in the form of a hierarchical constellation of local function/argument structures and the coding of the global structure with an interrogative marker. The mood marker represents a function that modifies the whole proposition of an utterance and therefore takes a high position in the semantic structure. We posit that during semantic processing of an utterance the sentence mood

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Figure 23.6 Diagram of a typical Go-LRP (broken line) and a Nogo-LRP (solid line)

is encoded either before or after the entire proposition. However, the encoding order of the proposition and the mood of a specific sentence type should not vary from utterance to utterance. Rather, in a given language the two sentential parts are always encoded in the same order, proposition before mood or mood before proposition. A plausible determinant of the fixed encoding order in a given language arises from the incremental processing of speech production. The processing of an utterance at the syntactico-semantic interface would be maximally incremental when sentence constituents are encoded semantically and syntactically in the same sequence. Since the syntactic encoding order of the proposition and the sentence mood of an utterance is contingent on the grammar of a language, their semantic encoding ought to be implemented in the same order as well. In Polish, for example, a declarative (1) differs from a typical polar interrogative (yes/no question) expressing the same informational content (2), as the latter is marked by an initial question particle. (1) Telefon jest z tyłu. telephone is behind (the lattice) ‘The telephone is behind (the lattice).’ (2) Czy Telefon Jest z tyłu? Q-PART. telephone is behind (the lattice) ‘Is the telephone behind (the lattice)?’ In order to incrementally construct the sentence frame of a Polish polar interrogative, the interrogative mood should be syntactically encoded prior to the proposition. If the two sentential parts are encoded semantically in the

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same sequence, the interrogative mood will be encoded before the proposition during generation of the semantic structure in Polish (a closer look at Polish is provided in the section ‘Experiment 3’ below). By the same token, the interrogative mood of a typical yes/no question in German (4) is marked, in comparison to its declarative counterpart, by coding the finite verb in the sentence-initial position. (3) Das Telefon ist Hinten. the telephone is behind (the lattice) ‘The telephone is behind (the lattice)?’ (4) Ist das Telefon hinten? is the telephone behind (the lattice) ‘Is the telephone behind (the lattice)?’ In a strictly incremental feed-forward system, the interrogative mood would also be encoded before the proposition during semantic structuring of a polar interrogative in German. In Chinese, by contrast, the interrogative mood is marked by a particle at the end of a typical yes/no question (6). (5) dianhua Zhaihoumian telephone behind (the lattice) ‘The telephone is behind (the lattice)’ (6) dianhua (shi) Zhaihoumian telephone (be) behind (the lattice) ‘Is the telephone behind (the lattice)?’

ma? Q-PART.

Consequently, on the incremental tenet of utterance production, the sentence mood of a Chinese polar interrogative would be semantically encoded after the proposition. On the other hand, it is possible that the encoding of sentence mood is not implemented incrementally by virtue of the special mood marker function, which takes the complete proposition of an utterance as its argument in the semantic structure. Instead, it may be the unique status of the proposition-modifying function of the mood marker that determines the semantic encoding order of the two sentential parts. In this regard, the proposition and the sentence mood of an utterance are supposed to be encoded in a predetermined sequence across all sentence types and all languages. For instance, during the semantic structuring of a polar interrogative, sentence mood may be encoded consistently either before or after the proposition in all languages. That is, the semantic encoding order of the two sentential parts may not differ between languages despite the aforementioned disparity of the syntactic encoding order, as exemplified in Chinese, German and Polish.

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According to this assumption, we would predict no button press in the Nogo-trials, and a Nogo-LRP in all languages if all are Q-final utterances or no Nogo-LRP if all are Q-initial utterances.

Results: Chinese and German Go-LRP The S-LRP-interval of the Go-LRP was somewhat shorter under the Go/ colour condition than under the Go/position condition, F(1, 37) = 3.47, p = 0.07. The interval of the two speaker groups did not differ from each other, F(1, 37) = 0.34, p = 0.57. The interaction of the S-LRP-intervals was non-significant, F(1, 37) = 0.08, p = 0.78. The LRP-R-interval was comparable under the Go/colour condition and the Go/position condition, F(1, 37) = 2.79, p = 0.10. The two speaker groups showed similar LRP-R-intervals, F(1, 37) = 1.31, p = 0.26. The interaction of the LRP-R-intervals between attributes and languages was also non-significant, F(1, 37) = 0.30, p = 0.59.

Nogo-LRP The LRP in Chinese participants (N = 20, 480 trials each) showed a distinct Nogo-curve. It started at a mean of 364 ms and peaked (1.7 μV) at 540 ms, which is what we had expected, given the Q-final marking of yes/ no questions in Chinese (Figure 23.7). For German, we expected Go-LRPs, of course, but no significant Nogocurve. As a consequence of the utterance-initial planning of the Q-component,

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Figure 23.7 Chinese yes/no questions: Nogo-LRP (solid line)

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Figure 23.8 German yes/no questions: Nogo-LRP (solid line)

there is no need for preparing a hand for button press since no button has to be pressed. However, the data analysis yielded a clear Nogo-pattern for German as well (Figure 23.8).

Preliminary Discussion The aim of the experiment was to investigate the temporal ordering of processing interrogative mood and sentence content during the planning of a polar interrogative in German and Chinese. In the two-choice Go/Nogodesign, the interrogative mood was coupled with a Nogo-decision and the question content with hand choice. When the processing of question content preceded that of interrogative mood, and hand choice consequently occurred before Nogo-decision, a Nogo-LRP was to develop. In the reverse case, no Nogo-LRP would emerge. We hypothesized that the interrogative mood is planned before the content in German but after the content in Chinese. In consequence, we predicted the absence of a Nogo-LRP during planning of a German yes/no question, but its appearance in Chinese. Both patterns that emerged from the experiment are not in line with the predictions of the conceptual-origin hypothesis (Hypothesis 1 above). One reason for these data could have been that there was no linguistic effect at all, and therefore, no language factor observable.

Experiment 2 To control for this possibility, another experiment was run without the linguistic task. The design was the same as in experiment 1. Twenty-two

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Figure 23.9 Control condition ‘without speaking’: Nogo-curve (solid line)

German students (aged 19–32; 15 female) took part in this control experiment. Two participants (one female) were discarded from the analyses because they made errors in more than 25% of the trials in the Nogo/position condition. All participants were right-handed and had normal or correctedto-normal visual acuity. They were either paid or received credits required for the psychology curriculum. The subjects were only required to decide whether the target was different than the reference picture or not, and to push the appropriate button (colour or position respectively) in case of a difference. In case of uncertainty, the subjects were not asked to push any button, just as in the linguistic experiment. Note that a conclusion might be drawn only if the result of a Nogo-condition in the control experiment contrasts with its counterpart in the main experiment. This experiment did not result in a Nogo-Pattern (Figure 23.9). As this control group generated no LRP in the Nogo/position condition, we must conclude that the linguistic processes are responsible for its presence in the main experiment.

Preliminary Discussion Continued The contrast between the first experiment and the control experiment indicates that the Nogo-reaction is specifically related to the linguistic condition, and cannot stem from the non-verbal part of the task. The next question to be asked is what could have evoked the Nogo-LRP in the cognition of German speakers. Although German polar interrogatives involve a sentenceinitial finite verb, this is not the basic word order of German. In typological terms, German is generally classified as an SOV language. Therefore, one

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Figure 23.10 Polish yes/no questions: Nogo-LRP (solid line)

cannot exclude the possibility that the conceptual system of a German speaker is trained to create the question component of the message only after the propositional content, thereby allowing for a fast mapping onto the syntactic processor, which begins to move the finite verb into the sentence-initial position only at this stage.

Experiment 3 In order to examine this possibility, the main experiment was run with 19 Polish participants (aged 19–27; 10 female). In Polish, a yes/no question is syntactically marked by a sentence-initial question particle czy, while the rest of the sentence is left unchanged in main clause SVO order. Again and unexpectedly, the Polish experiments yielded a clear significant Nogo-result (Figure 23.10).

General Discussion The collected data indicate that speaker groups in all three languages encoded the interrogative mood at a comparable time point. The following discussion begins with a scrutiny of the validity of the experimental paradigm. We argue that the findings remain viable within methodological limitations of the experiments. Next, we discuss the theoretical account of the findings, concluding that the results suggest a consistent order of encoding for the interrogative and the proposition during the generation of the semantic structure of a polar interrogative in the three languages studied. The contrast between the findings of the main and the control experiments (presence vs. absence of a Nogo-LRP) hint at the effectiveness of the

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experimental manipulation of this design. That is, the hand choice is connected to the encoding of the propositional content, and the Nogo-decision to the encoding of the interrogative mood in this condition. The emergence of Nogo-LRPs in all three speaker groups, which arose from the hand choice followed by the Nogo-decision, therefore indicates that the propositional content was processed before the interrogative mood. Therefore, when semantically structuring a polar interrogative, the native speakers of Chinese, German, and Polish all encoded the two sentential parts in the implicated order. However, the conclusion regarding the encoding sequence, namely proposition before interrogative mood, is not tenable in light of the analyses of the LRP onset latencies. The analyses yielded the following results: (a) the S-LRP-intervals were comparable in the Go/position conditions of the control and the main experiments and (b) the S-LRP-intervals of the speaker groups did not differ between the Go/position condition and the Nogo/position condition. The two results suggest that the LRP onset latencies were similar in the Go/position condition of the control experiment and in the Nogo/position condition of the main experiment. That is, according to the S-LRP onsets, the hand choice required the same amount of time whether or not the speaking task was involved. Following the reasoning that no certain conclusion should be drawn from the absence of a difference between the control and the speaker groups, we can no longer ascertain that hand choice is connected with the encoding of the propositional content in the Nogo/ position condition of the main experiment. Nevertheless, we argue for a consistent order of encoding of the two sentential parts in all three languages, although the specific order cannot be ascertained on the basis of the data collected. The argument is based on the analyses of the processing latencies of the interrogative mood. First, the Nogo-decision is effectively connected with the encoding of the interrogative mood: The presence of Nogo-LRPs in the speaker groups reveals the sequence – selection of the hand response precedes Nogo-decisions, whereas the absence of a NogoLRP in the control group implies completion of the Nogo-decision prior to hand selection. Given that hand selection latency was comparable in the Nogo/position condition of the main and the control experiments, the presence of a Nogo-LRP in the speaker groups indicates that the Nogo-decision was postponed by speaking. The effect is, therefore, related to the linguistic processing of utterance production, plausibly due to the effective manipulation in the experimental design, namely the connection of the Nogo-decision with the encoding of the interrogative mood. Second, the analyses of the Nogo-decision latencies yielded no difference between the three speaker groups in the Nogo/position condition. Given that the Nogo-decision can be connected to the processing of the interrogative mood, and given that its latencies in the three speaker groups are similar, it can be inferred that the interrogative mood was encoded at roughly the same time in Chinese, German and Polish. This inference may

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be applied to assess two hypothetical orders of encoding the proposition and the interrogative mood during the semantic structuring of a polar interrogative. According to the incremental hypothesis, the two sentential parts are semantically processed in the sequence of their grammatical formulation. That is, the interrogative mood is encoded in German and Polish before the proposition, but following it in Chinese. However, given the concurrent encoding of the interrogative mood in the three languages, the incremental hypothesis implies that the generation of the semantic structure of a polar interrogative is implemented in Chinese (where it is triggered by processing the proposition before the interrogative mood) earlier than it is in German and Polish (where it is triggered by encoding the interrogative mood before the proposition). This implication must reasonably be challenged in light of the results of the experiment – given identical target stimuli, Chinese speakers did not initiate speech earlier than speakers of German and Polish. In contrast, according to the consistency hypothesis, the order of encoding the two sentential parts is the same in all three languages. Whether the interrogative mood is consistently encoded before or after the proposition, the semantic structuring of a polar interrogative starts concurrently in Chinese, German and Polish. Thus, the findings of the present study corroborate the consistency hypothesis rather than the incrementality hypothesis. A methodological concern bears on the processing level of utterance production measured in the main experiment. An LRP was elicited from the speakers in the Nogo/position condition, which hints at an effective connection of the Nogo-decision with the interrogative mood processing. Yet, the experimental design did not impose constraints on the processing level at which the connection was established. Therefore, the encoding of the interrogative mood could have been connected with the Nogo-decision at a different linguistic level, be it the grammatical formulation, the phonological specification, or the motor programming for articulation. However, the incremental tenet of utterance production rules out these other possible loci for the connection. Whereas incrementality may be limited from the semantic processing to the syntactic framing (Bock et al., 2003), the mapping of linguistic forms and articulatory gestures is quite straightforward. In order to construct the sentence frame of a Polish polar interrogative, for instance, the interrogative particle has to be syntactically ordered before the proposition. In the ensuing processes, its phonological shape, the phonetic gesture, and the corresponding motor program are all produced before the components of the proposition. In Chinese, form encoding and articulatory programming of the two sentential parts are implemented in the reverse order. Consequently, if the encoding of the interrogative mood had been connected to the Nogo-decision at any of these levels, the Nogo-decision would have been made at disparate time

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points in Chinese and Polish. Since the derived anticipation contradicts with our observations, it seems unfeasible that the connection was established beyond syntactic word ordering. In conclusion, the preliminary results of the present study suggest that, with respect to processing order, the encoding of the interrogative mood is consistent across languages when the semantic structure is generated for a polar interrogative in a specific form. On the basis of these findings, we propose that sentence mood in other forms of interrogatives is semantically encoded in the same way, irrespective of differences in syntactic encoding of surface structures. The hypothesis of the conceptual level origin of incrementality has to be rejected in favour of the syntactic origin hypothesis. Note, however, that this conclusion applies only to purely formal differences between languages which do not express semantic differences.

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von Stutterheim, C. and Nüse, R. (2003) Processes of conceptualisation in language production: Language-specific perspectivation and event-construal. Linguistics 41, 851–881. Wheeldon, L.R., Meyer, A.S. and Smith, M.C. (2003) Language production, incremental. In I. Nadal (ed.) Encyclopaedia of Cognitive Science (pp. 760–764). London: Nature Publishing Group. Whorf, B.L. (1956) Language, Thought and Reality. The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behaviour to Language. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

24 Paths in L2 Acquisition: The Expression of Temporality in Spatially Oriented Narration1 Annie-Claude Demagny

Introduction Research into the expression of temporality in L2 acquisition has been sufficiently extensive over the last 30 years to allow for generalizations (see Andersen & Shirai, 1994, 1996; Bardovi-Harlig, 1999, 2000; Bardovi-Harlig & Reynolds, 1995; Bartning & Schlyter, 2004; Carroll et al., 2008; Dietrich et al., 1995; Klein & Perdue, 1997; Shirai & Kurono, 1998). These studies have led to a more detailed definition of the stages and paths followed by learners during L2 acquisition, particularly in the area of temporality, where two theories have been proposed: the Defective Tense Hypothesis (DTH) and the Aspect Hypothesis. Yet, the interaction between the spatial and temporal domains, which are closely related in language, has rarely been addressed. In the present study, this relation is examined among learners at different competence levels during their acquisition of a foreign language. Specifically, this study aims to examine the expression of temporality in discourse involving numerous references to motion events as well as requiring the expression of simultaneity. The speakers examined were young adults, native speakers of English, who are studying French L2 in a semi-guided context in France. These learners were confronted to different typological properties of their source language (English) and target language (French). The two languages differ in several respects that are central to our study. First, they belong to two language families which employ distinct ways of expressing of motion, known as satellite- and verb-framed languages (cf. Talmy, 2000). Aspectual marking also differs between the two languages. Verbal marking in English presents a more symmetrical and transparent system compared to French. We examine the implications of these cross-linguistic differences for second language acquisition in the spatial and temporal domains as reflected in the production of narratives. The narrative discourse used was designed to collect data 482

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on voluntary and caused motion that invited speakers to describe events that included both different paths and different manners of motion in the same temporal region.

Typological Perspectives Temporal–Aspectual Marking: General Properties Most traditional grammars define temporality along a temporal axis that progresses from past to future, through the present. Various relations between situations can be added to this linear perspective, such as temporal jumps (virtual or real) and overlaps (inclusion, complete or partial simultaneity). The present is considered a central reference point that corresponds to the moment of speech, from which the timing of an event is measured. In this way, a past event can be situated as preceding the moment of speech and a future event as following that moment, although the future should be considered as a modality, since, unlike the past, a future event has not yet taken place at the moment of speech. Verbal morphology in the languages studied (English and French) distinguishes both tenses and aspectual markings. Grammatical aspect can be defined as providing ways of presenting situations either as a point without internal structure (the perfective) or as an ongoing interval (imperfective). This category of languages distinguishes different phases of events: the initial phase, or left boundary, which marks the beginning of a situation (elle commence à manger ‘she starts to eat’); the final phase, or right boundary (elle a fini de manger ‘she finished to eat’, elle a mangé ‘she ate’), which marks the end of a situation; and the intermediary phase, the interval between the two boundaries; English expresses the intermediary phase by means of the progressive in all tenses (she is/was eating), while French does so differently depending on tense: it uses the imparfait in the past (elle mangeait ‘she ate’), but the present is not marked for grammatical aspect (elle mange ‘she eats’), requiring a periphrastic construction (elle est en train de manger ‘she is in the process of eating’). The semantic properties of verbs also contribute to the expression of aspectual distinctions. Thus, the verb traverser (‘to cross’) implies an endpoint, but the verb marcher (‘to walk’) does not; the presence of additional elements in the predicate can modify the aspectual properties of a verb: elle a couru jusqu’à la barrière (‘she ran up to the barrier’) is bounded, while elle a couru dans les bois (‘she ran in the woods’) is not. Lexical and grammatical aspects interact in language. Specifically, bounded verbs are incompatible with temporal devices that express duration and/or an interval (*elle traverse longtemps ‘she crosses a long time’) and inversely, unbounded verbs are incompatible with temporal elements that express a boundary (*elle court en trois heures ‘she runs in three hours’).

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Space and Time in English and French Following Talmy’s (2000) typology concerning the spatial domain, English belongs to the set of satellite-framed languages, in which manner of motion is prototypically expressed through the verb root while path is expressed by other elements: particles, prepositional phrases, adverbials or adjectivals. In contrast, French belongs to the family of verb-framed languages, in which path is expressed through the verb and manner is expressed through an adverbial or a peripheral construction, frequently realized as a subordinate verbal form that may not be marked for tense and/or aspect (such as gerunds or infinitives). In the temporal domain, the verbal morphology of English allows imperfective progressive forms in all tenses (past and non-past), thereby forming a relatively transparent system. Furthermore, since English is a satellite-framed language, the marking of boundaries in the expression of motion is frequently connected to spatial particles or prepositional expressions in the verbal network. Examples (1) and (2) illustrate the spatio-temporal role of these markers, which direct the speaker to use a spatial particle or preposition to express boundaries in the verbal network. In fact, the expressions across in (1) and up to the top in (2) indicate both a path and a boundary simultaneously, regardless of other forms marking tense (present, past) or aspect (progressive, non-progressive) (1) She pushed her bicycle across the road./She’s pushing her bicycle across the road. (2) She’s walking all the way up to the top of it./She was walking all the way up to the top of it. French morphology marks the distinction between perfective and imperfective aspect only in the past by means of two distinct forms (elle a mangé (passé composé)/elle mangeait (imparfait)). However, unlike English, this distinction is not morphologically marked in the present, therefore requiring the use of a periphrastic construction (elle est en train de manger ‘she is in the process of eating’) or of a subordinate clause (such as a gerund: en mangeant ‘while eating’) to express simultaneity and/or imperfective aspect (see Riegel et al., 1999: 339–341). As noted above, the expression of a change of location is tightly linked to the use of path verbs, verbs which frequently incorporate a left boundary in their lexical meaning. As illustrated in (3), French speakers do not need to add boundaries through satellite constructions, in contrast to English speakers. However, it is harder for French speakers to express both path and manner of motion syntactically in a single clause, thus motivating the use of a gerund to express the simultaneity of these two sub-events (4). The same example also illustrates the morphological–aspectual contrast with English (cf. examples (1) and (2)).

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(3) Elle a traversé la rue. (perfective) ‘she crossed the street’ (4) Popi descend la colline (unmarked aspect) en poussant la valise (imperfective). ‘Popi goes down the hill, while pushing the suitcase’

Implications for Acquisition and Hypotheses These differences in the temporal and spatial properties of the two languages raise questions regarding the paths of acquisition followed by Englishspeaking learners of French. First, given the tendency in English to express manner of motion in the verbal root, the expression of path incorporated into the French verb is likely to constitute a stumbling block for learners (see Hendriks et al., 2008). In addition, these learners are expected to encounter particular difficulties in the expression of temporal boundaries, since they cannot always rely on the morphological expression of aspect and integrate it into lexical aspect in order to mark temporal boundaries. Furthermore, they are confronted to the absence of phonological transparency in the morphology of the present and past in French: silent e or the verb stem in the present, the choice of auxiliaries and the past participle2 in the past. Finally, the expression of simultaneity requires syntactic knowledge of both the morphological (the gerund inflection) and the syntactic rules governing their use (subordination). The discourse context must also be a decisive factor in the choice of temporal and aspectual marking. In fact, it is predicted that imperfective marking should be produced primarily with background information while the perfective should be part of the foregrounded information. Let us turn to two hypotheses that have been proposed regarding the acquisition sequence of tense and aspect. We examine these hypotheses below in light of the diverging characteristics of the two languages examined, particularly, the highly systematic nature of English aspectual–morphology (symmetric in the present and past), contrasted with the French marking of aspect (solely marked in the past). The DTH, first proposed by Bronckart and Sinclair (1973), suggests that in the process of first language acquisition, children use past tense marking to indicate aspect rather than tense, for example associating perfective forms with bounded predicates. Bardovi-Harlig (1999), Bardovi-Harlig and Reynolds (1995) and Starren (2001) have shown that this hypothesis also applies to L2 acquisition and that therefore the observed associations cannot be attributed uniquely to cognitive development. On the other hand, the Aspect Hypothesis, proposed by Andersen and Shirai (1994), proposes that L1 and L2 learners are initially influenced by the aspectual semantics of verbs and predicates in the acquisition of tense and aspect markings. As a result, the perfective past is associated with bounded verbs, while the imperfective marking is produced only with unbounded processes. This

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point remains under debate for L2 acquisition. The participation of English learners of L2 French in our study should allow us to examine the extent to which uses of tense–aspect marking by learners of a strongly aspectual source language are determined by the semantic aspect of the verbs in a target language that exhibits little morphological marking of aspect. Linguistic constraints of both languages have a huge impact on learners and require command of the linguistic means of encoding in the spatial and temporal domains. In order to explore these issues, we have examined the acquisition of devices necessary for the expression of temporality (boundaries and simultaneity) and spatiality (motion and change of location) among native speakers of English learning French. These students participated in a task (the ‘Popi video clips’, see below) designed to elicit predicates expressing (voluntary or caused) motion as well as succession and temporal overlap of situations (simultaneity and inclusion). In the task, each participant was asked to describe clips for a ‘naive’ addressee, who did not see them. Our analysis allows us to examine the acquisitional path followed by learners when expressing temporality, specifically, the marking of temporal boundaries and of simultaneity in relation to the expression of motion in the organization of discourse. It is predicted that the typological differences between the two languages should have a strong influence on event descriptions (for research on this subject, cf. Hickmann et al., 2009; Hendriks et al., 1998; Ochsenbauer, 2008). In particular, boundaries can be expressed by particles in English, but depend more on the lexical content of verbs in French (specifically, path verbs). We therefore expected to find evidence for a conflict in the expression of boundaries that the learner must face as a result of this difference. In English, simultaneity between situations can be expressed by verbal morphology in simple clauses (e.g. example (5)). Simultaneity is harder to express in French, particularly in the present, a fact which strongly invites the speaker to use subordination or periphrastic aspectual expressions (e.g. example (6)), that are presumably not yet acquired in the early stages of acquisition. These differences lead to the assumption that the learners, who have already acquired their L1, would have difficulties in expressing simultaneity between events, since this requires familiarity with subordination constructions of the target language. (5) So Hopi pulled the car up the roof at the house. (adult native speaker of English) (6) Alors Popi monte sur le toit [c] en tirant la voiture de course (adult native speaker of French) ‘So Popi climbs on the roof, pulling the race car’ Adopting ‘the rhetorical bias’ of the target language is one of the final stages of L2 acquisition (cf. Bartning & Schlyter, 1997; Perdue, 1993; Lambert et al. 2008). This rhetorical bias requires the acquisition of the discursive

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functions of the grammatical categories in the target language. In order to ignore the rhetorical bias induced by their L1, learners must develop the capacity to implement new linguistic means, both on the sentence level and on the discourse level, which may involve a conceptual reorganization (cf. Levelt’s model discussed in Perdue, 1993).

Methodology Tasks, Stimuli and Procedure The task given to speakers consisted of describing a series of 32 mini-clips, about four seconds each, presented on a computer. In each clip, a character (called Popi in French and Hopi in English) performed an action that caused the movement of an object while the character was himself in motion (cf. Hendriks et al., 2008). This task required the speaker to mark both boundaries and simultaneity in relation to different types of paths and different manners (manner of action and manner of motion). At the end of each clip, the experimenter gave participants some information (the names of objects and backgrounds), and then asked them to recount what had happened in the clip. Given the multiplicity of events presented in the stimuli, and the resulting difficulties facing learners in expressing them all, the experimenter could use general questions to encourage them to continue (‘what happened?’, ‘and after?’ or ‘and then?’).

Subjects Our target groups were composed of two groups of young adult native speakers of English learning French: 12 at an intermediary beginner level, and 12 at a more advanced level. All learners were students at the American University of Paris during the recordings. Therefore, all were studying in a guided environment and in complete immersion in the native country of the target language. Tests for competence levels administered by the university upon registration in their first year (the French Level Exams of the American University of Paris), and students had been regularly tested in order to progress from year to year. At the time of experimentation, they were classified into two levels: intermediate beginner (N1) and advanced intermediate (N2). In addition, control groups of 12 native speakers of French and 12 native speakers of English performed similar tasks. The inclusion of these control groups allowed us to compare the learners’ productions in their L2 French with native productions in the source and target languages.

Data The recorded data were transcribed and coded using the CHILDES software (McWhinney, 2000). The presented results focus particularly on

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analyzing the different means used to express temporality in a discourse that involves multiple spatial references (locations, motion and changes of location). The analysis includes all types of temporal–aspectual distinctions and marking (lexical aspect, verbal morphology, adverbs, subordination), as well as other expressions that are relevant for the representation of spatiality (prepositions, particles, adverbials, subordination), on both the sentence and discourse levels. Verbs were classified into two categories, following the theories of Vendler (1967) and Klein (1994): verbs expressing states and unbounded activities (Vendler’s ‘state’ and ‘activity’ verbs, Klein’s ‘0-State’ and ‘1-State’ verbs), and verbs expressing bounded activities and/or change-of-state (Vendler’s ‘accomplishment’ and ‘achievement’ verbs, Klein’s ‘2-State’ verbs). Other types of semantic content was also coded: the path of motion (monter ‘to climb’), the manner of motion (courir ‘to run’), the cause (mettre ‘to put’) and the manner of action causing motion (pousser ‘to push’). Coding takes into account boundaries implied by the verb as well as by other expressions in the verbal network. For example, the French statement alors Popi rentre dans la grotte (‘so Popi enters the cave’) is coded as containing a verb that expresses an intrinsic boundary, while the English phrasing so Hopi rolled the tire into the cellar is coded as containing a verb that expresses the manner of motion (roll) and a particle (into) that expresses the spatial path and the temporal boundary. Thus, it is possible to determine whether the boundary is encoded in the type of verb or in other linguistic elements produced by the learner. The morphology was coded according to the forms available in each language for temporal marking (past or non-past) and aspectual marking (perfective, imperfective, unmarked). Some temporal or aspectual markers were coded as indeterminate, especially if they showed ambiguity (e.g. forms that may be either a past participle or an infinitive), as illustrated in example (5): (5) il . . . [tire] . . . avec une . . . petite . . . chevau . . . (Level 1 learner)3 All other markers that can express temporality (connectives, adverbial expressions) were also coded according to the following semantic criteria: simultaneity (pendant ce temps-là ‘during that time’, pendant que ‘while’), continuity (toujours ‘always’), precedence (avant (que) ‘before (that)’), posteriority (après (que) ‘after (that)’), inclusion (aussi ‘also’), iteration (encore une fois ‘again’), duration (un moment ‘a moment’), immediacy (à ce moment-là ‘at that moment’), temporality (quand ‘when’) and punctuality (d’un seul coup ‘in one stroke/go’). Non-verbal expressions that indicate spatiality were also coded so as to identify elements that expressed a boundary (e.g. jusqu’en haut ‘until the top’ in clauses such as (Il monte jusqu’en haut de la colline ‘He climbs up to the top of the hill’). Finally, clauses were classified into different types depending on whether they were simplex (independent) or complex with subordination, allowing for the analysis of inter-clausal relations.

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Results Morphological Marking of Time and Aspect on the Verb Figures 24.1 and 24.2 show the use of verbal morphology to mark temporal distinctions (past vs. non-past) and aspectual distinctions (perfective vs. imperfective), respectively. Native speakers of English showed much greater use of the past tense, progressive or not, as compared to native speakers of French, who showed a preference for the non-past (présent de l’indicatif ), which is not marked for aspect, or for imperfective forms, which are unmarked for temporality (primarily gerunds, ‘Other’ in Figure 24.1). Level 1 learners produced in equal proportions present, past and morphologically indeterminate forms (see example (5) above), the latter indicating difficulties with the non-transparent morphology of French. In contrast, level 2 learners primarily used forms in the present, similar to the native speakers, demonstrating an emerging control of gerund constructions. Native speakers of French primarily used forms that were unmarked for aspect (66%) and imperfective forms (25%). Native speakers of English produced more forms that were either imperfective (43%) or perfective (55%), and used unmarked aspectual forms to a much lesser extent than native speakers of French. Level 1 learners used perfective markings with a frequency that was comparable to the one demonstrated by native speakers of English, a fact which may indicate L1 transfer. However, these speakers did not yet use imperfective markings that would allow the expression of simultaneity in the target 100%

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language. Consequently, they could not resolve the complex expression of verbal simultaneity highlighted by the task. Level 2 learners were closer to the patterns of French native speakers in their use of the aspectually unmarked present and the perfective past. They also began to use gerund forms (marking imperfect aspect), which enabled them to produce complex structures (main clause and a gerundive subordinate, see also below). Level 1 learners encountered difficulties using morphology (showing 37% of indeterminate marking). In this sense they are close to the stage of acquisition called Basic Variety (as defined by Klein & Perdue, 1997), in which morphological marking is ambiguous. In contrast, N2 learners have clearly managed to master their knowledge of the morphology and choose to use the aspectually unmarked present in French. Yet, it is interesting to note an increasing preference for imperfective marking in this task that systematically required the expression of simultaneity in each item. The linguistic means they used in this case included gerunds and a variety of subordinate constructions, which situated the events in the same temporal region, although they did not always express simultaneity as such (example (6) and (7)), as well as temporal adverbs, periphrastic constructions or incomplete subordination markers (example (8)), and traces of level 1 attempts to use gerunds, as illustrated in example (8). (6) Il tire. . . la. . . la malle. . . quand il descend. . . le. . . la colline. (7) M(ainte)nant il. . . tire un p(e)tite chevaul. . . chev. . . pendant il traverse la route. (8) Il pousse. . . la cercle. . . et la cercle. . . tournu. . . tourni [tourne]. . . quand il. . . il dre(passant). . . (dre)passant [traversant ?]. . . la rue. (B1&L05 _ Janice)

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Relations between Types of Verbs and Verbal Morphology Figure 24.3 shows the percentages of all morphological markers found in our corpus with bounded and unbounded verbs. The analysis examined whether learners’ use of verbal morphology was dependent on the predicate type, in particular in the expression of motion. These figures show that native speakers of English primarily used the past perfective forms with bounded dynamic predicates (89%), and non-past imperfective ones with unbounded predicates (57%). This clear correlation between morphology and verb type demonstrates the salience of temporal– aspectual features in English (cf. Smith, 2006). By contrast, native speakers of French had a clear preference for the present form (aspectually unmarked non-past), both with unbounded predicates (58%) and with bounded predicates (61%), while the imperfective was more common with unbounded predicates (30%) than with bounded predicates (18%). These important cross-linguistic differences suggest that language learners should have difficulties with this system. In addition to numerous indeterminate forms, level 1 learners produced perfective past forms with unbounded predicates (33%) and with bounded predicates (24%) in almost equal proportions. This is a typical case of an interlanguage, in which some rules of the target language seem to have been acquired (the aspectually unmarked present), while some rules of the source language are also transferred (such as the passé composé (perfective past) construction). At this level, learners use the present almost only with bounded verbs (41% vs. 4% with unbounded verbs) and ambiguous forms are more frequent with unbounded verbs (59% vs. 33% with bounded verbs). At level 2, the learners’ language is closest to native production, particularly through the acquisition of the present morphology. These learners still continue to use unbounded predicates in the passé composé (perfective past), that seem more resistant to acquisition. The fact that their rate of unbounded verbs marked for the perfective (33%) is higher than for native English speakers does not conclusively support the Aspect Hypothesis (Andersen & Shirai, 1994), according to which learners use perfective markers with bounded verbs and imperfective markers with unbounded verbs. We will return to this point in the discussion.

Types of Event Boundaries Figure 24.4 shows the relative use of different procedures to mark boundaries: types of predicates (lexical aspect), morphology (grammatical aspect), other procedures relating to space (such as prepositional expressions and spatial particles) and indeterminate verb forms in the clause. The first observation concerns how the expression of boundaries evolves during acquisition. In addition to the numerous indeterminate forms already

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mentioned, level 1 learners tend to express the boundary of events through grammatical aspect (perfective morphology: passé composé), but the use of bounded verbs is also evident, particularly traverser ‘to cross’, which is most common. Level 2 learners express event boundaries through all linguistic means available (lexical aspect, morphology and spatial prepositional phrases), revealing preferences specific to each learner. Yet, there is an increase in the diversity of bounded verbs such as entrer ‘to enter’, indicating that their production is gradually becoming more similar to that of native speakers, who tend to express boundaries through lexical aspect. Still, resistance to the expression of boundaries through prepositional elements remains even after the morphology of the aspectual unmarked present is acquired. The most commonly used prepositions express a path with a goal (e.g. jusqu’à la maison ‘up to the house’ (example (9))). Note in this context the use of expressions whose grammatical function (as verbs or prepositions) is difficult to disambiguate, as illustrated in examples (10–12) below: (9) Ok . . . il pousse le bouée jusqu’ à . . . le . . . . . .. le . . . parte de haut . . . de la colline. (Niveau. 1) (10) Il [rulE] le roue dans – entre le ferme (Niveau 1) (‘He rolled the wheel in – enter the barn.’ – Lev 1) (11) Donc il pousse le. . . le panier de pommes au travers la. . . la route de. . . dans une ville. . . un village. Popi est [=?] . . . [tire] une. . . popette [= poussette] . . . uh [=? a] [travErse] le rue. (Niveau 1) (‘Popi is pull(ed) a pram cross(ed) the street.’ – Lev 1) (12) Il a une poussette et il tire une poussette au croisé d(e) le rue. . . (niveau 2) (‘He has a pram and he pulls a pram at-the-crossing of the street . . .’ – Lev 2)

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Syntactic Development Figure 24.5 shows the syntactic properties of subjects’ responses, particularly the relative percentage of clauses that involve no subordination (coordinated or independent clauses), as compared to matrix and subordinate clauses (MC and SC) in sentences involving subordination.4 Native speakers of French use more complex clauses involving subordination in comparison to native speakers of English. In particular, English speakers primarily use simple, compact structures to express the combination of different types of information, such as the manner of motion encoded in the verb and the path encoded in a satellite (e.g. example (12)). French speakers rarely express these two types of information in the same clause, and prefer to use subordination, thus more complex syntactic structures, to mark simultaneity (e.g. example (13)). Our results clearly demonstrate the higher frequency of subordinate clauses in French (38%), including further embedding, as compared to its low frequency in English (6%). (12) ‘eh Hopi rolled the wheel across the road.’ (English NS) (13) Popi a traversé la route. . . la petite rue du village en faisant rouler la roue de charrette. (French NS) Only 5% of the productions of level 1 learners involve subordinate constructions. Subordination is particularly difficult for these learners, since it involves the simultaneous mastery of several skills: the use of subordinate conjunctions to express various semantic relations between clauses, additional constraints such as temporal agreement in certain cases and the appropriate verbal morphology (see Figure 24.1); this combination poses serious problems at the first level. Given the complexity of subordination, learners establish ways to avoid such grammatical constructions and primarily, use independent clauses. In contrast, level 2 learners have already acquired the principles of verbal morphology in the target language, which enables them to express 100% 80% 60% Independent Clause 40% Matrix Clause 20% Subordinate Clause 0% French NS English NS Lnrs Lev.1 Lnrs Lev. 2

Figure 24.5 Utterance types

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simultaneity and to develop subordination (cf. II.2) (23%). Different types of subordination occurs at this level, particularly clauses marking precedence, simultaneity, co-temporality with the main clause, goal, causality, restrictive and non-restrictive relative clauses and an additional category including all other cases. As illustrated in examples (14–16), level 2 learners primarily use subordinated gerunds (example (14)), but also subordination expressing goal (example (15)), as well as relative clauses expressing repetition, for instance (example (16)). Since this task strongly invites speakers to express simultaneity, it is quite reasonable that subordination is the primary linguistic method used by level 2 learners, whose performance in this respect is similar to that of the control group of French native speakers. However, these learners use more subordination to express goals as compared to the group of native speakers (10% more). This type of simple structure is certainly one of the easiest to be implemented by the learner. (14) heu il traîne le petit cheval en bois . . . ahm en traver . . . [travErse] traversant la route. (15) main(te)nant il . . . pousse la valise pour descendre la colline. (16) il a poussé un ballon qui roule de un colline jusqu’à le bas de la colline.

Analysis of Discourse Phenomena Further analysis examined whether discourse factors played a role in subjects’ uses of verbal morphology. In particular, although each experimental item elicited a target reply, many replies took the form of a scenario that included initial events and/or background states (‘Beg’), the target response (‘Mid’) and end-of-scene information (‘End’), as in examples (17) and (18). Figure 24.6 shows the distribution of morphological markers as a function of these discourse components. (17)

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There is a big snowy hill. Must be in the Alpes. And Hoppy is on top of the hill. He rolls a beach ball down the hill. and when he is at the bottom of the hill, he smiles.

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alors c’est Popi dans la forêt heu, il marche heu, jusqu’à la grotte. en traînant derrière lui, heu, un caddie. et après il rentre dans la grotte [c].

These results show that discourse context had an impact on uses of verbal morphology. With respect to native speakers, Figure 24.6 shows cross-linguistic

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Figure 24.6 The impact of discourse context on time and aspect marking

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differences. While English speakers use the present simple primarily in background descriptions, target responses are frequently in the present progressive (51%) and in the simple past (31%), while the use of the simple past is predominant in responses providing end-of-scene information (73%). French speakers primarily use the unmarked present, regardless of discourse context, except for the use of gerund constructions, required by the task, in the target responses. The responses of level 1 learners show similarities with both native groups, reinforcing the results described above regarding the interlanguage stage. Indeed, while background responses are mainly in the aspectual unmarked present (61%) (as found with native speakers of French), end-ofscene responses are marked as perfective through the use of the passé composé (80%), a result that is closer to the productions of native speakers of English. Target responses present more significant morphological difficulties and no specific temporal or aspectual marking is particularly evident. Level 2 learners are much closer to the native speakers of French in their frequent use of the aspectual unmarked present. Note, however, the emergence of gerunds that allows them to express imperfective aspect as well as its simultaneity among events. The following examples illustrate these results. Native speakers of English: (19) Mr Hoppy is in a village [=BEG], he’ s pulling the pram across the road to the other side of the road [=MID] and stopped with it [=END]. Native speakers of French: (20) Donc Popi est en haut de la colline [=BEG], il pousse la grosse valise jusqu’ en bas de la colline en la faisant glisser heu jusqu’ au bas de la colline [=MID] et il s’arrête [=END]. (‘So Popi is on top of the hill [=BEG], he pushes the big suitcase until the bottom of the hill by making it slide heu until the bottom of the hill [=MID] and he stops [=END]’) Level 1 learners (21) Il commence . . . sur . . . l’hor [: haut] . . . du le montagne [=BEG], il est poussé le bôle [: balle] sur le . . .montagne de neige [=MID] et . . . il a fini . . . à la fin de la montagne [=END]. (‘He starts on the top of the mountain [=BEG], he is[=has] pushed the ball on the snow mountain [=MID] and he finishes at the end of the mountain [=END].’) Level 2 learners Il est dans un village [=BEG], il traîne la poussette . . . en traversant la rue . . . [=MID], donc il monte le trottoir, après [=END]. (He is in a village [=BEG], he is dragging the pushchair . . . in crossing the street . . . [=MID], so he is climbing up the pavement after [=END].)

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Discussion This study examined the use of various linguistic methods to express temporality among adult native speakers of English learning French at two levels of competence, in an environment of guided immersion, in comparison to the production of native speakers (of English and of French). The same task was used in all groups allowing direct comparisons of how speakers expressed temporality when describing motion in space. While each of the languages examined provides a range of means to express the same spatial and temporal distinctions, they also display striking differences. This study was designed to determine the impact of these differences on the acquisitional path. In the spatial domain, English (satellite-framed language) expresses the manner of motion in the verb root and the path in satellites; in French (verb-framed language) the path is encoded through the lexical content of the verb, but the manner of motion is either not expressed or expressed through peripheral devices. In the temporal domain, English presents a systematic aspectual opposition between progressive and non-progressive markers, while no aspectual opposition is marked in French verbal morphology in the present, forcing learners to acquire periphrastic constructions. At level 1, the learner’s language displays properties of both the source language and the target language. Differences between the two languages are particularly evident in our results in two ways: (i) a clear relationship in English between morphology and verb types, which is not found in French, where the aspectual unmarked present is used regardless of lexical aspect and (ii) the impact of the discourse context on the use of temporal and aspectual marking. At level 1, learners can express temporal boundaries through grammatical aspect, but forms that are morphologically indeterminate remain most frequent. However, the perfective past is used with bounded verbs, indicating that the lexical properties of verbs contribute to the expression of temporal boundaries. Moreover, these boundaries are primarily associated with utterances describing end-of-scene elements, thus demonstrating the impact of discourse factors. These learners primarily use perfective forms, since they do not yet know how to express the imperfective aspect at this stage. This difficulty is partly due to their syntactic ability at this stage, which enables the production of independent simplex clauses, but does not extend to subordination that allows the use of the French imperfective gerund. The most notable change in the language of level 2 learners is the use of an additional means of marking boundaries, namely the use of lexical aspect (with bounded verbs). The morphology of the French present is well acquired at this stage, as indicated by the significant decrease in the use of indeterminate forms as compared to level 1 learners. Use of the imperfective is growing,

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but this construction is still used less frequently, even by advanced learners, as compared to native speakers of French. This remains a rhetorical bias of the target language that must be developed in later stages of acquisition. Finally, mastery of the target syntax is much more extensive, and includes subordinate constructions. Thanks to this range of linguistic means, simultaneity can be expressed, even though the forms chosen are not always correct, as shown by the absence of the preposition en ‘in/while’ before gerunds and in the use of a subordinator expressing simultaneity (quand ‘when’) or goals (pour ‘for’ + infinitive). Level 1 learners have retained some specific features of their L1, especially in the marking of temporal and spatial boundaries. They have not yet acquired the morphological marking of the target language and their output shows many cases of L1 transfer. Gass and Selinker (1994) describe the psychological process by which knowledge of an initial learning situation is used in a new learning situation. Interference of the source language is common among learners, regardless of their level of competence, in the temporal– aspectual morphology of the source language or in the expression of manner through the verb and of the path through satellites. Nonetheless, the results indicate a progression between the two levels, despite the fact that the learner’s language still shows properties of both source and target languages. The impact of L1 appears to be particularly strong with respect to the discourse context and the lexical properties of the verb. The verbal morphology of level 2 learners is less influenced by the verb types, and clear progress is shown by the use of the aspectual unmarked present with both bounded and unbounded verbs. In addition, imperfective markers emerge, coupled with an increase in syntactic complexity. There is, therefore, a development in the expression of simultaneity and of temporal boundaries. In conclusion, we can see the impact of various factors on two levels of linguistic organization, the sentence and discourse, in the course of L2 acquisition: the type of predicate plays a role on the clause level and the anchoring of information is determined on the level of discourse. The effect of language-specific properties only provides partial support for the Aspect Hypothesis. Consequently, cross-linguistic variability as well as different levels of competence and different levels of linguistic organization must be taken into account in the examination of this hypothesis. Our study shows a development in how adult learners mark boundaries when expressing motion during the process of L2 acquisition. According to our interpretation of the results, typological differences between the source and target languages (English and French respectively) should lead to a reconceptualization during acquisition, a process that is probably cognitively taxing. This interpretation is supported by the fact that English-speaking learners have difficulties in expressing some types of information in L2 French, such as the path in the verb, and continue to mark event boundaries

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through satellites, although they manage to mark some boundaries by lexical means. Spatial satellites remain their preferred means of micro-planning in L2 French. In contrast, organizing information in discourse like native speakers requires complex means, such as the use of subordination, particularly for the expression of simultaneity. During the process of re-conceptualization necessary in the acquisition of a foreign language, learners import and overgeneralize linguistic means from their source language, encoding information for which they lack the means in the target language, notably in the expression of perfectivity. The imperfective gerund in the target language (French) requires complex constructions both at the level of macro-planning and at the level of micro-planning. Learners must therefore acquire both the appropriate morphology and the corresponding subordination that are needed in L2, which take longer to learn. Future studies will examine in more detail other relevant discourse contexts and other types of linguistic means used to mark temporal boundaries and simultaneity (such as adverbs and connectors). In addition, the role of cognitive development in this process will be examined through a comparison of adult L2 learners with monolingual children.

Notes (1) I would like to thank M. Hickmann, H. Hendriks, S. Benazzo and M. Watorek for their valuable advice. (2) For example: Linda monte sur une colline, est montée sur une colline, a monté une colline, a descendu une colline. (3) Ambiguous elements in the examples are phonetically transcribed in brackets. The symbols ‘. . .’ represent pauses. (4) A matrix clause may contain one or many subordinate clauses.

References Andersen, R.W. and Shirai, Y. (1994) Discourse motivations for some cognitive acquisition principles. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 16, 133–156. Andersen, R.W. and Shirai, Y. (1996) Primacy of aspect in first and second language acquisition: The pidgin/creole connection. In W.C. Ritchie and T.K. Bhatia (eds) Handbook of Second Language Acquisition (pp. 527–570). San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Bardovi-Harlig, K. (1999) From morpheme studies to temporal semantics – Tense-aspect research. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 21, 341–382. Bardovi-Harlig, K. (2000) Tense and Aspect in Second Language Acquisition: Form, Meaning, and Use. Oxford: Blackwell. Bardovi-Harlig, K. and Reynolds, D.W. (1995) The role of lexical aspect in the acquisition of tense and aspect. TESOL Quarterly 29, 107–131. Bartning, I. and Schlyter, S. (1997) Itinéraires acquisitionnels et stades de développement en français L2. Journal of French Language Studies 14, 281–299. Bronckart, J.P. and Sinclair, H. (1973) Time, tense and aspect. Cognition 2, 107–130.

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Carroll, M., Natale, S. and Starren, M. (2008) Acquisition du marquage du progressif par des apprenants germanophones de l’italien et néerlandophones du français. Aile 26, 31–50. Dietrich, R., Klein, W. and Noyau C. (1995) The Acquisition of Temporality in Second Language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Gass, S. and Selinker, L. (1994) Second Language Acquisition. Hillsdame, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Hendriks, H., Hickmann, M. and Demagny, A-C. (2008) How adult English learners of French express caused motion: A comparison with English and French natives. Aile 27, 15–41. Hickmann, M. (2003) Children’s Discourse: Person, Space and Time across Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hickmann M. and Hendriks H. (in press) Time talk in child discourse. In J. Guéron et al. (eds) Tense, Aspect and Modality: from Sentence Grammar to Discourse Grammar. Oxford University Press. Hickmann, M., Taranne, P. and Bonnet, P. (2009) Motion in first language acquisition: Manner and path in French and English child language. Journal of Child Language 36, 705–741. Klein, W. (1994) Time in Language. London: Routledge. Klein, W. and Perdue, C. (1997) The basic variety (or couldn’t natural languages be much simpler?). Second Language Research 13, 301–347. Lambert, M., Carroll, M. and von Stutterheim, C. (2008) Acquisition en L2 des principes d’organisation de récits spécifiques aux langues. Aile 26, 11–29. McWhinney, B. (2000) The CHILDES Project: Tools for Analyzing Talk (3rd edn). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Ochsenbauer, A-K. (2008) The expression of caused motion in German and in French: New insights form L1 acquisition. Exposé le 9 juillet 2008 à la 5th International Contrastive Linguistic Conference, Louvain. Perdue, C. (ed.) (1993) Adult Language Acquisition: Cross-Linguistic Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Riegel, M., Pellat, J-C. and Rioul, R. (1999) Grammaire méthodique du français. Paris: PUF. Shirai, Y. and Kurono, A. (1998) The acquisition of tense-aspect marking in Japanese as a second language. Language Learning 48, 245–279. Smith, C. (2006) The pragmatics and semantics of temporal meanings. In P. Denis, E. McCready, A. Palmer and B. Reese (eds) Proceedings, Texas Linguistics Forum 2004. Austin: Cascadilla Press. Starren, M. (2001) The Second Time: The Acquisition of Temporality in Dutch and French as a Second Language. Utrecht: LOT. Talmy, L. (2000) Towards a Cognitive Semantics. Harvard: MIT Press. Vendler, Z. (1967) Linguistics in Philosophy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

25 A Cross-Linguistic Study of Narratives with Special Attention to the Progressive: A Contrast between English, Spanish and Catalan1 Carmen Muñoz

Introduction English, Spanish and Catalan encode the concept of ongoingness morphologically on the verb, while languages such as German and French use lexicalised rather than grammaticised means. This cross-linguistic contrast between grammaticised and non-grammaticised encoding has received much more attention than the cross-linguistic comparison between the grammaticised constructions, such as the English progressive and its counterparts in Spanish or Catalan. English, Spanish and Catalan have both simple and progressive forms, but the relationship between the simple present and the present progressive is not identical in these languages. In the two Western Romance languages, these forms overlap in meaning: the habitual interpretation is only possible for the analytic form while the progressive interpretation is available for both. In English, there is a clear one-to-one mapping: the progressive interpretation is associated with the analytic form and the habitual interpretation with the synthetic form. This chapter presents a specific contrastive study of the use of the progressive in English on the one hand and Spanish and Catalan on the other, as well as a preliminary study of the use of the English progressive by advanced learners who have either Spanish or Catalan, or both, as their first language. The empirical data of the study come from a series of oral film retellings performed by four groups of participants: narratives in English by advanced learners of English, narratives in English by English 502

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native speakers, and narratives in Spanish and Catalan by native speakers of these two languages, respectively. The aim of the study is to shed light on some of the differences which may exist, in spite of the apparent similarities, in the use of the progressive in English and in Spanish/Catalan,2 and to explore traces or evidence of L1 in the English productions of advanced learners. Such traces may be found at different levels, from the frequency with which relevant forms are used in L2 production to the way in which the same events are conceptualised for production. Regarding the former, the fact that the progressive interpretation in Spanish/Catalan is possible for both the analytic and the synthetic forms, whereas in English it is only possible for the analytic form, may have consequences for the relative frequency of these forms in the productions of the different groups of participants. As for conceptualisation patterns, the study of the means used by advanced learners of an L2 may reveal whether conceptual knowledge and patterns of thought are transferred from their L1 to their L2 in subtle ways (Slobin, 1991, 1993, 1996; von Stutterheim & Klein, 1987). 3 Conceptualisation patterns are understood to be distinctions that go beyond the formal properties of language. They relate to preferences in a given language for selecting and structuring information, such as motion events in speech, time or space. According to von Stutterheim and Nüse (2003: 855), ‘[g]iven a particular situation in the external world, there are options with respect to the cognitive representation of this situation as an event, and there are again options in presenting an event linguistically.’ These options concern the level of granularity, the components selected for representing this particular situation, as well as the perspective from which the situation is viewed. Following these authors, within Levelt’s (1989) model of speech production, all these decisions need to be taken before the linguistic form is activated, that is, within the conceptualiser. The conceptualiser, the first of the three components of the model, comes into play when a communicative intention is formed by the speaker. It precedes the two components that involve linguistic structures: the formulator and the articulator, in turn. One of the central questions concerning the conceptualiser is the role of language in this component, and in particular the role of the specific language used in the production process. In that respect, von Stutterheim and Nüse argue that all information that is relevant for the selection of lexical and syntactic form has to be provided by the conceptualiser. From this perspective, language is considered one of the factors that play a role in structuring processes within the conceptualiser.4 Specifically, the fact that English, Spanish and Catalan code the concept of ongoingness morphologically on the verb may result in similar ways of viewing dynamic situations in the narrative sequence as ongoing. In sum, the two specific aims of this preliminary study are: first, to contrast relevant aspects of the use of the progressive in English and Spanish/Catalan; second, to examine to what extent advanced learners of

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English with Spanish or Catalan as L1 show L1 traces in their narratives, including patterns of frequency, as well as evidence of L1 event conceptualisation patterns.

The Progressive in English and in Spanish/Catalan The progressive aspect focuses on the development of an event, its progress; in English, it is realised by the progressive or continuous form. The distinction in English between simple and progressive has grammatical status, and be +V-ing is considered part of the verbal paradigm. In Spanish and Catalan, aspect as a grammatical category is not based on the simple vs. progressive distinction, but on the perfective vs. imperfective distinction. In these two Romance languages, estar + gerund is a member of a set of periphrases, but not the only one that expresses ongoingness. In addition, Spanish and Catalan differ from English in that this aspectual–temporal notion can be expressed in two forms: the simple tense form and a periphrastic verb combination, estar + gerund (not considered part of the verbal paradigm).5 In Spanish and Catalan, both forms can have a progressive interpretation, as the following examples illustrate: (1)

La madre prepara la cena ahora (Sp.) La mare prepara el sopar ara (Cat.) *The mother prepares supper now

(2)

La madre está preparando la cena ahora (Sp.) La mare està preparant el sopar ara (Cat.) The mother is preparing supper now

On the other hand, the simple form also has a habitual interpretation in these languages, which makes the clauses in (4) unacceptable in all the three languages (when no special emphasis is added): (3)

La madre prepara la cena cada día (Sp.) La mare prepara el sopar cada dia (Cat.) The mother prepares supper every day

(4)

*La madre está preparando la cena cada día (Sp.) *La mare està preparant el sopar cada dia (Cat.) *The mother is preparing supper every day

On the basis of this difference, it is interesting to see whether advanced learners of English who are native speakers of Spanish/Catalan

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tend to overuse the analytic progressive form, which is accepted in English (as in 2), instead of the synthetic form, which is not (as in 1). A second interesting difference concerns the existence of two, not one, periphrastic constructions in Spanish and Catalan, which express two distinct progressive perspectives (Espunya, 1996). The first periphrasis (in 2 and 4 above) is based on estar, one of the two copula verbs found in several Romance languages (the other copula is ser in Spanish and ser or ésser in Catalan). Estar comes from Latin stare ‘to stand’. It attributes a physical location and, to a certain extent, a specific temporal location of the properties of individuals: accidental, variable properties, and properties that are the result state of an action (Luján, 1981). In the periphrasis, the grammatical–lexical meaning of the copula shifts to the denotation of location within the internal structure of an event. The sequence estar + gerund has the same properties as English be + V-ing, marking events which may be in progress for some time (Espunya, 1996). The second periphrasis is based on the verb ir (Sp.) or anar (Cat.), ‘go’. Ir/ anar denote physical motion from a source to a goal. The sequence ir/ anar + gerund realises a dynamic progressive perspective, that is the development of an event is viewed as ongoing, progressing (Badia, 1962; Espunya, 1996; Fabra, 1956). Specifically, it expresses the development of an event viewed as a succession of stages, each different from the previous one. According to Espunya (1996), this interpretation depends on two factors: (a) whether the arguments of the predicate denote one or more individuals, and (b) whether the event denoted by the predicate is telic or atelic. In this study, these constructions are illustrated by extracts from the narratives of our participants, elicited through a task of film retelling6 (see below). (a) If one of the arguments denotes multiple individuals The period of time under discussion is characterised by the occurrence of the same type of event gradually to each individual denoted by the argument, giving rise to a distributive reading, as in 5–7. (5)

hay mecanismos metálicos que van surgiendo del suelo (Sp.) there are metal artifacts that go-present appearing out of the ground

(6)

hi ha com uns petits pilars de roca que van sortint del terra mateix (Cat.) there are like small rock pillars that go-present coming out of the ground itself

(7)

constantment van caient pedres (Cat.) constantly go-present falling stones

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The same notion tends to be realised in English lexically, through adjuncts such as gradually or as (see 8), and grammatically, through the comparative construction, although the combination of the present perfect with the progressive can adequately convey the same meaning (see 9). (8)

but as he digs more and more gradually there’s machines coming in

(9)

Els poemes que la Júlia ha anat escrivint aquests anys es publicaran aviat. (Cat.) The poems that Júlia has been writing all these years will soon be published.

Other means found in the data include the use of the verb keep with a plural subject (as in 10 and 11). (10) rocks keep appearing out from nowhere (11) things keep falling on him (b)

telicity If the event is telic (an accomplishment or achievement), ir/anar + gerund denotes a period of time characterised by the gradual development of an event, stage by stage, allowing for gaps between different stages of the process. (12) intenta romper el cristal y va rompiéndolo poco a poco (Sp.) 0 tries to break the glass and 0 go-present breaking it little by little This interpretation is conveyed in English through adjuncts and the comparative constructions, as well as by verbs whose inherent lexical content is gradual change (such as spread, percolate, become, grow, darken, widen). (13) he’s being sucked down and down (14) a hole begins to be formed and gets bigger and bigger If there is no inherent endpoint, ir/anar + gerund denote consecutive and possibly discontinuous instances of the activity along the timeline (Espinal, 1983; Gili Gaya, 1990). Two possible interpretations are habit and repetition, usually with a modal value (a dull, tiresome succession of instances of the same activity).

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(15) va picant (Cat.) 0 go-present banging According to Espunya (1996: 298), in English there are two possible ways to express the same notion. First, if the iterative reading is more prominent, the non-progressive forms of the present, past and future may be used, given that they express plurality of occurrences of events (among other notions). In our data there are instances of the present simple used with an iterative reading that convey the notion of repetition, either through repetition of the verb, or through an accompanying adjunct, as illustrated below. (16) as he knocks and he knocks and he knocks (17) he bangs and he bangs (18) he starts digging but as he digs more and more (19) she is scratching in the sand and scratches in one direction and then in another direction If the process reading is prominent, progressive forms may be used, as in 20–23. (20) va caminando (Sp.) (21) he was walking along (22) he’s walking around (23) and started digging and digging

The Study Participants The participants in the study were divided into four groups. The first group was composed of 12 advanced learners of English whose L1 is Spanish and/or Catalan. These participants were recruited from the Spanish community in Dublin by means of a notice posted in the library of the Instituto Cervantes in Dublin. The candidates were selected after a telephone conversation in English and on the basis of their command of English and length of residence in an English-speaking environment (a minimum of six years was required). The average length of residence was 10 years (ranging from 6 to 20 years). The average age of participants at the time of the study was 35 (age ranging from 28 to 47), and their average age of learning, defined here as the age of initial substantial immersion in an English environment, was 22.5 (ranging from 18 to 28), so they could be considered a group of late learners. All participants were college graduates and some had also pursued postgraduate

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studies while living in Ireland. The second group was composed of 10 native speakers of English of the same age group and educational level as the group of advanced learners. The English language data were collected in Dublin at Trinity College. The third group was composed of five Spanish/Catalan bilinguals who identified Catalan as their L1 and were dominant in this language. They were asked to perform the task in Catalan. The fourth group was composed of five Spanish native speakers; none of these were monolingual, but they all identified Spanish as their L1. The Spanish and Catalan language data were collected in Barcelona on the premises of the University of Barcelona.

Method Speech was elicited by means of an oral task of film-retelling. This is a seven minutes silent film, titled Quest, structured into five episodes, which are clearly distinguished as taking place in different ‘worlds’ through which a figure passes in search for water: worlds of sand, paper, stone and iron, and a machine world.7 Participants viewed the film twice. In the first viewing, they were shown the entire film as a whole. In the second viewing, the film was stopped after each episode and participants were prompted to narrate what had happened in that episode by means of the question: ‘What happened?/¿Qué ha pasado?/Què ha passat?’ The analysis presented in this chapter is based on the narratives elicited by the first three worlds (the worlds of sand, paper and stone). The oral recordings were transcribed and coded with the help of the CHILDES sub-programme CHAT.

Results The first part of this section presents comparative results of the linguistic means used in the narratives in the three languages. Particular attention is given to the two different perspectives found in the two Romance languages. The second part presents a comparison of the linguistic means used by the four groups of participants in their film narratives. A comparison of the means used in the retelling of the same scenes by different participants is followed by a preliminary examination of the use of -ing in relation to a temporal frame of reference for the narratives.

The two progressive perspectives In spite of the apparent similarity between the three languages with respect to the morphological marking of the progressive aspect, a distinctive trait of the progressive in Spanish and Catalan has been identified that does not have a formal equivalent in English, namely, the existence of two slightly different perspectives, one more dynamic and the other more stative. The Spanish and Catalan narratives in this study show instances of the two

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TABLE 25.1 Frequency of use of the two progressive perspectives

L1-Sp L1-Cat Total

Estar + gerund

Ir/anar + gerund

8 10 18

19 14 33

different perspectives, and their respective frequencies are displayed in Table 25.1. As evident from the data, the dynamic perspective is used much more frequently than the stative perspective, particularly in the Spanish narratives, where there are 19 instances of the ir + gerund construction versus eight occurrences of estar + gerund. The prevalence of the dynamic perspective in the Spanish and Catalan narratives leads us to examine how English speakers express this interpretation linguistically. To that end, an examination was made of the linguistic means used in English, both as L1 and as L2, in relating the events that tend to elicit a dynamic perspective in the narratives in Spanish and Catalan. Table 25.2 shows this comparison. As shown in Table 25.2, native speakers of English use a variety of linguistic methods, particularly a wide range of adjuncts, in order to express the meanings conveyed in Spanish and Catalan by this progressive periphrasis. In contrast, the advanced learners of English in this study make a much TABLE 25.2 Means used in E-L1 and E-L2 to express the dynamic perspective of Spanish/ Catalan ir/anar + gerund E-L1 (n = 10)

E-L2 (n = 12)

Adjuncts expressing iteration, distributive meaning

Gradually; each way; down and down; insistently; all the time; each time; more and more; (walking, wondering) along (4)* / around (5)

(walking) along (3) / around (8)

Verbs

Get (bigger and bigger); carry on; keep (3)

keep (19)

Lexical repetition

Digging and digging; he knocks and he knocks and he knocks; he bangs and he bangs

Engulfs him and engulfs him down; digging and digging and digging; digging, digging, digging; quickly, quickly;

*Figures within parentheses refer to the number of occurrences of the particular item when it appears more than once.

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lower use of adjuncts and make frequent use of the verb ‘to keep’. On the other hand, the use of lexical repetition seems to parallel native speaker use.

The same scene viewed by the different participants This section presents the means used to narrate the last scene in each of the first three episodes of the film Quest. The three scenes parallel each other, showing the little figure trying to find water in the ground of each world (sand, paper and stone, respectively) at a spot where he has seen traces of water. His digging, tearing or knocking creates a hole, through which he falls into a different world. The different verb forms used in the narratives are compared (see Table 25.3). This is followed by a comparison of the linguistic means used to mark the temporal sequence of the scene in the different languages (see Table 25.4) in order to examine whether speakers encode different or similar events given identical visual input. Table 25.3 shows interesting differences between the four groups of speakers. We find a greater use of -ing forms in English than in Spanish or Catalan. On this basis, one would expect learners of English who are native speakers of Spanish or Catalan to use fewer -ing forms compared to native speakers of English. Contrary to this expectation, use of this form by the TABLE 25.3 Use of verb forms in the last scene of the first three worlds E-L1 (n = 10)

SP (n = 5)

CAT (n = 5)

E-L2 (n = 12)

Progressive (be / estar)

4 4.16%

0

0

10 7.19%

Progressive (ir / anar)

−

2 3.45%

3 6.38%

–

Other progressive periphrases

1 1.04%

1 1.72%

2 4.25%

2 1.44%

Inchoative + V-ing

10 10.41%

−

−

24 17.27%

Gerund

3 3.12%

2 3.45%

2 4.25%

8 5.75%

Total -ing

18.73%

8.62%

14.88%

31.56%

Inchoative + toinfinitive

9 9.37%

12 20.69%

6 12.76%

3 2.16%

Try + to-infinitive

6 6.24%

1 1.72%

2 4.25%

10 7.19%

Other non-progressive

63 65.62%

40 68.96%

32 68.08%

82 58.99%

Total

96

58 47

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TABLE 25.4 Temporal relationship between the two successive events Temp-concomitance (as, when, while)

Temp-resultative (until, hasta/fins)

L1-E (n = 10)

4 (66.66%)

2 (33.33%)

Sp (n = 5)

0

4 (100%)

Cat (n = 5) L2-E (n = 12)

1 (20%) 8 (66.66%)

4 (80%) 4 (33.33%)

advanced learners of English in this study is almost double that of native speakers of English. The higher frequency of -ing forms is similarly distributed in the different categories: mainly be + V-ing, inchoative verbs + V-ing, and gerunds. On the other hand, native speakers of English use nonprogressive forms and inchoative verbs followed by to-infinitive much more frequently. As for the speakers of Spanish and Catalan, their frequencies are very similar (if not identical, although it should be noted that the number of subjects in each group is small). As shown above, among the progressive forms used by advanced learners of English, the inchoative construction with the -ing form is chosen very frequently, more frequently than the inchoative construction followed by to infinitive. In the production of native speakers of English, on the other hand, both constructions show very similar use.8 Extracts 24 and 25 illustrate the use of the two inchoative constructions by native speakers of English (the examples also illustrate the use of the present and the past perspective respectively).9 (24) so begins to dig and as he digs he is actually swallowed up by the sand (25) and started digging and digging until he ran into a hole or quicksand I suppose and he got sucked in and he fell down and the bottle went with him In contrast, extracts 26–28, produced by the same advanced learner, show the recurrence of this form, and of the gerund as well, in the three parallel scenes. (26) so he starts digging in the sand hoping to find some water somewhere he falls through into a paper world

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(27) so he starts tearing the paper hoping to find the water underneath and just to fall somewhere else (28) and starts hitting the stones with the rock to split them trying to get to the water underneath and ends up falling into a hole The two following extracts illustrate the narration of one such scene in Catalan (29) and in Spanish (30). (29) i comença a excavar a la sorra i com més cava ell més s’enfonsa i fa un gran forat i ell es va enfonsant enfonsant fins que acaba enfonsat del tot and 0 begins to dig in the sand and the more digs he the more 0 sinks and 0 makes a big hole and he is sinking sinking until 0 ends up totally sunk (30) y empieza a buscar de donde viene esa agua cava y al cavar poco a poco se va hundiendo en la arena y desaparece and 0 starts to look from where comes that water 0 digs and as he digs little by little 0 is sinking in the sand and 0 disappears It is also interesting to note that the temporal relationship between the two successive events is marked differently in English compared to Spanish and Catalan. As shown in Table 25.4, English and Spanish/Catalan show differences in speakers’ preference: in English, speakers tend to express concomitance between the two events, while in Spanish/Catalan, a resultative relation is expressed. The English preference for expressing concomitance in this scene has been observed by Lambert et al. (2003) as well, and contrasted with other types of subordination that are preferred by speakers of French

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and German (see Lambert et al., 2003 for a functional analysis of these English temporal clauses). Native speakers of English produce four concomitant temporal clauses (illustrated in 24, repeated here as 31), only one of which contains a progressive form (32): (31) so begins to dig and as he digs he is actually swallowed up by the sand (32) when he was digging in the sand it came like quicksand and he fell through Advanced learners of English produce eight temporal clauses expressing concomitance, seven of which contain a progressive form, as in extract 33 below: (33) and tries to dig a hole again or take those rocks apart somehow to get more water and as he’s doing this he falls through again On the other hand, the Spanish narratives do not contain any concomitant temporal clause, and the Catalan narratives contain only one. The temporal relation that is most frequently expressed in the narratives in both languages is the temporal-resultative introduced by ‘until’ (hasta/fins), as illustrated in extracts 34 and 35 (Spanish and Catalan respectively). (34) se pone a excavar en el suelo hasta que se forma un agujero y es de nuevo tragado por el suelo 0 starts to dig in the ground until is formed a hole and 0 is again swallowed by the ground (35) comença a picar fins que d’alguna manera es va obrint la terra fins que també se’l torna a engullir and 0 starts to bang until somehow goes-opening the ground until also 0 engulfs him again

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The -ing forms and the temporal frame of reference of narratives In retelling the content of a film, speakers have to decide how events with different temporal structures can be related so as to form a sequence. It is interesting, from a cross-linguistic perspective, to examine the extent to which advanced learners of English with Spanish or Catalan as L1 choose the same type of temporal frame of reference as that chosen by English native speakers in order to link events in sequence, and in particular, whether these advanced learners also choose to view events as ongoing. A number of studies that have focused on the role that grammaticised aspect (be + V-ing) plays in the construction of an underlying temporal frame of reference have observed that the majority of English speakers follow a deictic frame of reference. According to Carroll and Lambert (2006), English speakers tell the sequence of events in the film from an external reference point, organising the events on the basis of ‘what you can see’, either ‘now you see . . .’ or ‘then you see . . .’. In the first case, the concept of ongoingness, as expressed by be + V-ing, plays a central role in that the time span that the speaker views as ‘now’ can cover a set of events that are hooked up to this point of reference. In contrast, speakers of languages that do not grammaticise aspect, such as French or German, choose different perspectives that are not centred on expressing ongoingness (see Carroll & Lambert, 2006; Lambert et al., 2003). For learners of these languages, the difficulty lies in uncovering how the simple and the progressive forms are integrated into the narrative sequence in order to move the storyline forward. A preliminary analysis of the present data seems to indicate that the advanced learners of English with Spanish or Catalan as L1 tend to approach the narrative task in a similar way: the -ing form is used as a frame of reference for a series of actions or activities expressed by simple forms (often the simple present). As an illustration, see the two following excerpts from advanced learners’ narratives: (36) 01 he keeps walking 02 and he hears again some drops 03 and goes closer to the place (37) 01 he’s seeking for the source of water 02 and he hears the sound again 03 and goes to the place The events mentioned in 02, 03 are included in the temporal interval of the event mentioned in 01 (see Lambert et al., 2003 for a discussion of this and alternative organisational structures in French and German).

Final Discussion and Further Research In this final section, the different findings of this preliminary study are presented together with suggestions for further research. The results,

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although sketchy, contribute to the small body of evidence in existence on this topic. The first aim of this study has been to contrast and compare the use of the progressive in English and in Spanish/Catalan. The analysis has yielded two relevant findings related to the two progressive periphrases of Spanish and Catalan. First, in the narratives of this study, the dynamic progressive perspective ir/anar + gerund is used more frequently than the estar + gerund construction. Second, in the narratives of English native speakers, the iterative and distributive meanings associated with ir/ anar + gerund are expressed both lexically and grammatically. The repertoire of the advanced learners of English is more limited, especially in their use of adjuncts, and relies more heavily on one verb (keep). Further research should look at the use of the two progressive periphrases by learners of Spanish and/or Catalan with English as L1 in order to examine the ways they choose to express this distinction. The second aim of this study has been to examine the extent to which advanced learners of English with Spanish or Catalan as L1 show traces of L1 in their narratives. The analysis has revealed that L2 English speakers use progressive forms much more frequently (31.56%) than L1 English speakers (18.73%) in the three scenes analysed, while the proportion of progressive forms in Spanish and Catalan is even lower (11.75% on average). In addition, L2 English speakers overuse the inchoative construction start + V-ing and underuse start + to infinitive compared to English native speakers. This may suggest that these advanced learners do not show direct traces of their L1, at least with respect to the frequency of progressive forms. The fact that they overuse progressive forms compared with English native speakers is intriguing. One possible explanation, from an acquisitional perspective, could be that the -ing form is very salient in learners’ input (see Goldschneider & DeKeyser, 2001), and is acquired very early, both by learners of English as L1 (e.g. Brown, 1973) and as L2 (e.g. Dulay & Burt, 1974). Progressive forms are also very frequently produced in the narratives of children acquiring English as L1 retelling the story of a picture book. According to Berman and Slobin (1994), young children treat the progressive aspect as the basic way to describe events which are construed as applying at the time of speech (see Carroll & Lambert, 2006). From the language contact perspective, the fact that the analytic and synthetic forms in Spanish and Catalan are optional in many contexts seems to make these speakers choose the analytic forms in order to minimise differences between the L1 and the target language. Some confirmation that bilinguals tend to minimise this difference can be drawn from Klein (1980), which examined English and Spanish in contact. Klein found evidence of indirect transfer: Spanish/English bilinguals in the United States used the analytic form in Spanish more frequently than Spanish monolinguals. The use of L2-influenced options has been observed in a number of studies, coupled with the discontinuation of the original L1-based alternatives, seemingly pointing to a process of L1 attrition (e.g. Jarvis, 2003).

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Moreover, another form of language contact, the influence of English through translations, seems to lead to the increase in the frequency of the estar + gerund construction in Spanish and Catalan at the expense of the simple form, the former apparently taking over the functions of the latter (see Espunya, 2001). Further research should examine a larger sample of learners of English with different levels of proficiency to examine the frequency of the progressive form in learners with lower proficiency, and to identify the nature of the trend. The use of the -ing form in the type of scene analysed in this chapter does not seem to reveal important differences regarding the conceptualisation patterns of these advanced learners of English in their L1 and L2. However, an unexpected and interesting finding concerns the marking of the sequence of events in the scenes examined. In our data, English speakers seem to select a different type of subordinate clause compared to speakers of Spanish/ Catalan. As observed above, this sequence of events tends to be marked by concomitant temporal clauses in English, and by temporal-resultative clauses in Spanish and Catalan. Specifically, in English, the first event (digging, tearing, knocking) is presented in a subordinate clause while the result of that action (falling) is presented in a matrix clause. A similar pattern is reported in Lambert et al. (2003), following an analysis of the same scenes. According to Lambert et al. native speakers of English show a clear preference for concomitant temporal clauses that is not observed in the narratives of German or French native speakers. In the narratives of Spanish and Catalan speakers, the first event is presented in a matrix clause, and the result of that event in a subordinate clause. The advanced learners of English seem to have acquired the English sequential organisation, and their performance is similar to that of native speakers of English on this point, that is, their temporal organisation of the narrative is characteristic of L1 English speakers. This may indicate that these learners have already acquired English-specific principles for the organisation of information. If this is indeed the case, this result constitutes evidence that very advanced learners of English learn to focus their attention on certain aspects of the situation that differ from the aspects selected in their first language (see Slobin, 1991, 1996; von Stutterheim & Nüse, 2003). This finding requires further study using a larger sample of participants with different levels of proficiency, with particular attention to the process by which the L2 perspective is adopted in relation to the learners’ level of proficiency. It would also be interesting to explore the means by which learners of Spanish and/or Catalan who are native speakers of English express such sequences of events in their L2. Another related avenue for research is the examination of the production of these advanced learners in their L1, Spanish or Catalan, in order to determine L2 influences on their conceptualisation patterns in L1 (see Jarvis, 2003). Since English, Spanish and Catalan grammaticise the progressive aspect, no major differences between conceptualisation patterns were expected to

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emerge (in contrast to the comparison with languages that do not morphologically mark the progressive, such as German or French; see, for example, Carroll & Lambert, 2006). A preliminary analysis has revealed that the Spanish or Catalan advanced learners of English approach the narrative task in a similar way, using the -ing form as a frame of reference for actions expressed by simple forms. Future research should analyse these data further in order to ascertain whether Spanish/Catalan advanced learners of English do indeed use the -ing form in the construction of the timeline in the same way as English native speakers (see Carroll, 2008; Carroll & Lambert, 2006; von Stutterheim & Carroll, 2006). To conclude, in view of the preliminary but suggestive findings of this study, and particularly bearing in mind the many avenues for further research in this area, we agree with Perdue (personal communication, 11th November 2005) that this topic can indeed be a very fruitful area for crosslinguistic research.

Notes (1) This research study was funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación through grant FFI2010-21478 and the Agència de Gestió d’Ajuts Universitaris i de Recerca of the Catalan Government through grant 2009SGR137. (2) When there are no relevant differences between the two languages, I will refer to them jointly, marked with a slash notation. (3) See Jarvis (2007) for a discussion of conceptual transfer and its relationship to Slobin’s ‘thinking for speaking’ (e.g. 1991, 1996). (4) Other factors that have been investigated are situation factors such as attention (Tomlin, 1997) or contextual factors (Brown & Dell, 1987). (5) Another important difference between English and Spanish/Catalan is that the progressive may have a future meaning in English (she is coming tomorrow), but not in Spanish/Catalan. (6) All but number 9, for which there was no illustration available in the data from this study. (7) The fi lm Quest was produced by T. Stellmach in 1997. Sincere thanks are due to Mary Carroll, Monique Lambert and Christiane von Stutterheim for allowing me the use of this fi lm and for their most suggestive ideas and fi ndings. (8) According to Quirk et al. (1985: 1192), while in some cases there is no observable difference of meaning between the participle and infi nitive constructions, in other cases a contrast between ‘potentiality’ (infi nitive) and ‘performance’ (participle) may influence the choice. In addition, the association of the -ing participle with the progressive aspect may also influence a preference for the participle where multiple activities are involved, as in he began opening all the cupboards. (9) In this study, past tenses are much less frequent in Spanish and Catalan narratives than in English narratives. Specifically, past tenses appear only in 1.3% of productions in Spanish and 5.9% in Catalan, vs. 10% in productions by advanced learners of English and 32.6% in productions by native speakers of English. It is interesting to note that the group of advanced learners show frequencies of past tense use that are higher than those shown in the narratives in their L1s, and hence they seem to be moving towards English-L1 use, but their frequencies are still much lower than those shown by English native speakers in their narratives. Although the use of the

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past tense has been considered a feature characteristic of narratives (e.g. Biber, 1988), there exists strong evidence that research participants in different studies have tended to use the present form of verbs (the so-called narrative present) in narrating a story in tasks such as the one performed in this study (see Carroll 2008; Carroll & Lambert 2006; Carroll et al., 2008; von Stutterheim & Carroll 2006). Specifically, in retellings elicited by means of the Quest fi lm, a much higher use of present tense forms than of past tense forms was found. For example, Carroll and Lambert (2006) note that although the elicitation question was formulated in the past tense almost all speakers retold the story in the present tense.

References Bedie, A.M. (1962) Gramática Catalana. Madrid: Gredos. Berman, R. and Slobin, D.I. (1994) Relating Events in Narrative: A Crosslinguistic Developmental Study. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Biber, D. (1988) Variation Across Speech and Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, P.A. and Dell, G.S. (1987) Adapting production to comprehension: The explicit mention of instruments. Cognitive Psychology 19, 441–472. Brown, R. (1973) A First Language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Carroll, M. (2008) Macrostructural planning and topic shift in narrative discourse: Advanced English learners of German. In G. Bernini, L. Spreafico and A. Valentini (eds) Competenze testuali e discursive nell’acquisizione do lingue seconde (pp. 285–300). Perugia: Guerra. Carroll, M. and Lambert, M. (2006) Reorganizing principles of information structure in advanced L2s: A study of French and German learners of English. In H. Byrnes, H. Weger-Guntharp and K. Sprang (eds) Educating for Advanced Foreign Language Capacities (pp. 54–73). Georgetown: Georgetown University Press. Carroll, M., Rossdeutscher, A., Lambert, M. and von Stutterheim, C. (2008) Subordination in narratives and macrostructural planning: A comparative point of view. In C. Fabricius Hansen and W. Ramm (eds) ‘Subordination’versus ‘Coordination’ in Sentence and Text (pp. 161–184). Amsterdam: Benjamins. Dulay, H.C. and Burt, M.K. (1974) Natural sequences in child second language acquisition. Language Learning 24, 37–53. Espinal, M.T. (1983) Els verbs auxiliars en català. Servei de Publicacions de la UAB, Bellaterra (Barcelona). Espunya, A. (1996) The realisation of the semantic operator progressive in English and Romance languages. Language Sciences 18, 295–303. Espunya, A. (2001) Contrastive and translational issues in rendering the English progressive form into Spanish and Catalan: An informant-based study. Meta 46, 535–551. Fabra, P. (1956) Gramàtica Catalana. Barcelona: Teide. Gili Gaya, S. (1990) Curso superior de sintaxis española (15th edn). Barcelona: Biblograf. Goldschneider, J. and DeKeyser, R. (2001) Explaining the ‘Natural Order of L2 Morpheme Acquisition’ in English: A meta-analysis of multiple determinants. Language Learning 51, 1–50. Jarvis, S. (2003) Probing the effects of the L2 on the L1: A case study. In V. Cook (ed.) Effects of the Second Language on the First (pp. 81–102). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Jarvis, S. (2007) Theoretical and methodological issues in the investigation of conceptual transfer. Vigo International Journal of Applied Linguistics 5, 153–171. Klein, F. (1980) A quantitative study of syntactic and pragmatic indications of change in the Spanish bilinguals in the U.S. In W. Labov (ed.) Locating Language in Time and Space (pp. 69–82). New York: Academic Press.

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Lambert, M., Carroll, M. and von Stutterheim, C. (2003) La subordination dans les récits d’apprenants avancés francophones et germanophones de l’anglais. AILE 19, 41–68. Levelt, W. (1989) Speaking: From Intention to Articulation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Luján, M. (1981) The Spanish copulas as aspectual indicators. Lingua 54, 165–210. Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G. and Svartvik, J. (1985) A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman. Slobin, D.I. (1991) Learning to think for speaking: Native language, cognition and rhetorical style. Pragmatics 1, 7–26. Slobin, D.I. (1993) Adult language acquisition: A view from child language study. In C. Perdue (ed.) Adult Language Acquisition: Cross-Linguistic Perspectives (pp. 239–252). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Slobin, D.I. (1996) From ‘thought and language’ to ‘thinking for speaking’. In J.J. Gumperz and S.C. Levinson (eds) Rethinking Linguistic Relativity (pp. 70–96). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. von Stutterheim, C. and Carroll, M. (2006) The impact of grammatical temporal categories on ultimate attainment in L2 learning. In H. Byrnes, H. Weger-Guntharp and K. Sprang (eds) Educating for Advanced Foreign Language Capacities (pp. 40–53). Georgetown: Georgetown University Press. von Stutterheim, C. and Klein, W. (1987) A concept-oriented approach to second language studies. In C.W. Pfaff (ed.) First and Second Language Acquisition Processes (pp. 191–205). Cambridge, MA: Newbury House. von Stutterheim, C. and Nüse, R. (2003) Processes of conceptualization in language production: Language-specific perspectives and event construal. Linguistics 41, 851–881. Tomlin, R. (1997) Mapping conceptual representations into linguistic representations: The role of attention in grammar. In J. Nuyts and E. Pederson (eds) Language and Conceptualization (pp. 162–188). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

26 Reference to Entities in Fictional Narratives of Russian/French Quasi-Bilinguals Tatiana Aleksandrova

Introduction The productions of highly advanced L2 learners, or quasi-bilinguals, while being perfectly grammatical, differ in some ways from the productions of monolingual native speakers. Both terms, advanced learner and quasibilingual, are often employed interchangeably in the literature, although they imply differences with respect to the acquisition situation of the L2 and the contexts in which it is used. The term quasi-bilingual is adopted here since it is better suited to characterise the participants of this study. These learners have been living and working in the L2 country and therefore have daily contact with it. The term advanced learner seems more appropriate for users who have attained a high level of proficiency in the L2 through academic instruction and have not left their country of origin (see Bartning, 1997). Our goal in this study is twofold: first, to describe the phenomena related to advanced L2 acquisition, and second, to determine the extent to which a high level of proficiency in L2 is reflected in the L1 productions of quasi-bilingual speakers. The initial stage of this study is the analysis of quasi-bilingual productions in L2 French, intended to characterise the learner language of the participants (Corder, 1980). To better understand the characteristics of L2 discourse, the productions of quasi-bilinguals are compared to the productions of monolingual French speakers. Quasi-bilinguals have mastered the morphosyntactic patterns of the L2; therefore, their productions are not ungrammatical, although they may not be identical to those of monolingual speakers of the language. The difference between the two resides in the way information is presented in the discourse (Carroll & von Stutterheim, 1993, 1997). A comparative analysis is therefore necessary to identify and 520

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define these differences. However, differences between the L2 productions of quasi-bilinguals and those of monolingual French speakers are not limited to competence (of L2 vs. L1), but may also be due to the impact of the L1 (Russian, in this case). Consequently, the L1 production of Russian monolinguals in the same type of narrative is also examined, to determine whether and to what extent informational and linguistic choices of quasi-bilinguals may be influenced by the linguistic structure of their first language. Research concerning the second objective is based on several studies in the field of bilingualism, according to which L2 structures can influence the L1 production of such speakers (Cook, 2003). These authors also discuss the phenomenon of attrition, that is the loss of some elements of L1 in various linguistic domains. In light of this body of research, the productions of the quasi-bilinguals in their L1, Russian, are compared with the productions of Russian and French native monolinguals, in order to determine whether the informational and linguistic choices of quasi-bilinguals in Russian are influenced by the linguistic structure of their L2 (French). Two more specific questions guide this study: (a) how the different linguistic means of referring to entities used in Russian and French determine the organisation of referential information and (b) how these differences are reflected in the production of quasi-bilinguals in both languages. These issues are examined through the expression and presentation of information relevant to the identification of referents in the fictional narratives of the three groups of speakers (Russian/French bilinguals, French monolinguals and Russian monolinguals). This choice is motivated by the prominent cross-linguistic differences between the two languages, particularly in the use of different linguistic strategies to mark the informational status of referents: (i) marking through determiners, which is obligatory in French and optional in Russian, and (ii) marking through free word order in Russian, which is not found in French. This chapter is organised as follows. The section ‘Analytical Framework’ presents the theoretical background and the methodology of the study regarding discourse analysis, the system of conceptualisation underlying bilingualism and the contrasts between the two languages, French and Russian. The section ‘Data Collection’ is devoted to the collection and analysis of data. The results of the study are outlined in the section ‘Results’, followed by a discussion of these results from a wider perspective in the section ‘Summary and Conclusions’.

Analytical Framework Speech Production Discourse is the product of communicative needs which depends on the interlocutors, their shared (or unshared) knowledge, and the extra-linguistic

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context. According to Levelt (1989), speakers define their communicative intentions, select the information to be expressed and sequence it, establishing the order in which various bits of information will be presented in the discourse. These mental activities are part of the conceptualisation phase which allows the construction of a pre-verbal message that is to be linguistically encoded during the formulation phase. This latter phase consists of grammatical and phonological encoding, leading to the production of speech. Levelt’s model, therefore, leaves open the question of whether the organisation of information on the conceptual level may be determined by the structure of the language used by the speaker. The results of comparative studies (e.g. Carroll et al., 2003) show that languages systematically differ in the grammatical methods used for the resolution of complex communicative tasks (such as description or narration). When speakers of different languages are faced with the same task, their linguistic production shows variations in the organisation of information, which are linked to the grammaticalised devices available in the various languages (von Stutterheim, 2003). Thus, in the acquisition of an L2, learners have to not only discover these grammatical devices, but also to understand how to implement them in accordance with the organisational principles of the language. To this end, learners must abandon the organisational principles operative in their L1, a difficult task in itself.

The Conceptual Bilingual System Studies of bilingualism have examined the relations between the linguistic systems of the bilingual speaker and the nature of cross-linguistic transfer. According to Kecskes and Papp (2003), monolingual speakers have grammatical knowledge and socio-cultural representations that are linked to their L1 and learned through it. The authors argue that a high level of proficiency in an L2 and its regular use lead to the emergence of a common conceptual system, the Common Underlying Conceptual Base (CUCB), which contains the grammatical rules, vocabulary and socio-cultural knowledge of both L1 and L2. To understand the impact that an L2 might have on an L1, the authors assume Kroll and Stewart’s (1994) Word Association Model, and consider the process whereby an adult learns new words in L2. They assume that learners draw a link between a new L2 word and its L1 equivalent and try to find the concept that underlies the new word in their conceptual system. Since the learner’s conceptual system is based on the L1, the closest concept that can be reached through this link is the concept of the L1. Therefore, at the beginner stage of L2 acquisition, it is very difficult to establish a direct link between the L2 word and the concept itself. The strength of the links between the L2 word and the conceptual system vary depending on the speaker’s fluency in the L2 and the relative

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dominance between the two languages of a quasi-bilingual. As the learner’s skills and competence in the L2 develop, the conceptual system changes to accommodate the knowledge regained through the L2, thereby reducing the learner’s need to resort to the conceptual representations of the L1. Consequently, this ceases to be the conceptual system of the L1 and becomes the CUCB, which is responsible for operations in both languages. Speakers who are constantly exposed to two linguistic systems, and to two cultures may begin to interlace elements of the L2 into their L1 production. These elements may intervene at different linguistic levels: phonetic (pronunciation), lexical (introduction of L2 words in an L1 discourse), syntactic (the formulation of clauses) and others. This phenomenon is often seen as a transfer of L2 elements, which alter the L1 production.

The Model Of Discourse Analysis For data analysis, we adopted the Quaestio model proposed by Klein and von Stutterheim (1991). This model considers a discourse to be a response to a global question (Quaestio) which guides production. A discourse type such as the story has a Quaestio that can be formulated as: ‘what happens to P (protagonist) at T (the given time interval)?’ All of the information that constitutes a direct response to this question is part of the foreground of the story. Thus, in the following example, statements b, c and d are part of the main structure of the narrative, while other types of information, such as descriptions, comments or utterances that do not relate directly to the protagonist, constitute the background of the narrative (see Example (1)a, e). (1) (a) Et puis on voit une espèce de personnage ‘And then you see a kind of character’ (b) Qui se réveille ‘That wakes’ (c) Qui se lève ‘That gets up’ (d) Qui attrape une bouteille ‘That grabs a bottle’ (e) On entend un bruit bizarre ‘One hears a strange noise’ (f) Et puis il commence à gratter le sable ‘And then he starts to scrape the sand’ The Quaestio also determines the topic/focus structure of the foreground utterances. Information that is given in response to the Quaestio (the protagonist and time frame, in this case) represents the Topic of the utterance, while information that is specified about a given topic (the process, in this case) constitutes the Focus of the utterance.

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Depending on the Quaestio, the referential domain of the discourse is relatively salient. Thus, the narrative is organised around three central referential domains: time, process and referents (the protagonists). The information in these domains is introduced, maintained and changed in successive utterances of the discourse which define the referential movement.

Typological Differences Between the Languages The languages under consideration, French and Russian (Romance and Slavic, respectively), are typologically different. The French system of obligatory pre-verbal pronouns allows the specification of grammatical relations between the verb and its arguments. The SVO order is relatively rigid with full nouns, although it may be altered under certain conditions, such as a reversal of the SV order with an intransitive verb (arrive un bonhomme). An obligatory determiner marks information status of the referent in discourse. Thus, the definite article typically marks continued reference, while the indefinite article is systematically used to mark new information. Russian reflects greater freedom in word order, which is linked to its rich morphology including the morphological marking of Case. Agreement is heavily marked, not only between subject and verb (showing systematic marking of person and number, or of gender and number, in the past), but also between nouns and adjectives, as well as some numerals (showing number, gender and case agreement). This rich morphology is associated not only with a ‘pragmatic’ organisation of components (focus last), but also with the absence of a pronominal subject (zero subject) except in contrastive contexts, and with the absence of obligatory determiners. Continued reference or the introduction of new information can be marked through the use of optional determiners, such as the demonstrative etot/eta ‘this (m./f.)’, tot/ta ‘that (m./f.)’, or the indefinite pronouns kakoi-to/kakaia-to ‘a certain (m./f.)’.

Data Collection The participants of this cross-sectional study were asked to retell the story of a short silent film (about seven minutes long), entitled ‘Quest’,1 in which the sole protagonist, a sand character, is searching for water. The character goes through a series of hostile worlds in which he is threatened by various elements (sand, paper, stones/rocks) and through which he passes from one world to the next. After viewing the film, the subjects were asked to retell its story, answering the interviewer’s leading question: ‘est-ce que tu peux me raconter ce qui s’est passé?’ ‘Could you tell me what happened?’ The informants, aged 25–35, share the same socio-cultural background and all have higher education. The quasi-bilinguals started learning French after the age of 13–15. They

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arrived in France at around the age of 20, and have lived there for at least five years. They have all studied in France and have a professional activity. Their narratives in French and Russian were transcribed and compared to those of the control groups, monolingual native speakers of each language. There were 15 informants in each group. To reduce the effect of familiarity with the task, the recordings of quasi-bilinguals in Russian and French were separated by an interval of at least 30 minutes, during which they were involved in an informal conversation in Russian. Variation in the order of languages in which the task was performed was also ensured; half the group were recorded in French and then in Russian, while the other half were recorded in the reverse order.

Results Introducing Referents The linguistic resources in use The introduction of the referent (protagnist) in the data is performed by three types of strategies: (1) existential or presentational constructions, such as il y a + NP or c’est + NP, (2) an external predicate, such as on voit + NP and (3) constructions with a lexical verb, NP (subject) + V. The choice of construction determines whether the introduction of the referent is marked as background information (strategies 1 and 2) or as part of the foreground (strategy 3). The use of these three strategies for introductions differs across the control groups. In the production of native French speakers, the protagonist is usually introduced into the background either through a presentational or existential construction (46% of cases), or through an external predicate, specifically a verb of perception (42%). (2) (a) Donc c’est un petit bonhomme de sable/il y a un homme de pierre ou de sable ‘So it’s a little fellow of sand/there is a man of stone or sand’ (b) Alors on observe un bonhomme de sable face contre terre ‘So, one sees a fellow of sand lying on the ground’ The introduction of the referent through the lexical verb construction (strategy 3) is almost non-existent in French; only a single case of this type is attested in the data of the monolingual group. In contrast, Russian speakers introduce the protagonist by a foreground utterance in the majority of cases (70%), and use strategy 3 to do so. (3) Tchelovek prosipaetsa ‘Man wakes’ The use of an external predicate including a verb of perception (strategy 2) is somewhat less common in the production of Russian monolinguals (30%).

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(4) Ia ouvidela tcheloveka ‘I saw man’ The presentational construction (strategy 1) is never used by monolingual Russian speakers in this context, although the structure does exist in Russian (eto dom ‘this [is] house’). This structure is most often found in a demonstrative function. An existential construction equivalent to French il y a does not exist in Russian. The results therefore show a striking difference in the constructions used for the introduction of the protagonist in the production of both control groups (Figure 26.1). French monolinguals clearly prefer presentational structures (strategy 1) and external predicates (strategy 2), both of which mark the introduction of the referent as background information. In contrast, Russian monolinguals opt for the third strategy, the lexical verb construction, thereby introducing the protagonist into the foreground. The second introduction strategy, the external predicate, is used by both control groups, although it is less frequent in the production of Russian speakers (see Figure 26.1). Comparing the narratives of the monolinguals in both languages with those of quasi-bilinguals in those languages reveals some interesting differences. As noted above, strategy 1 is characteristic of French speakers, while strategy 3 is chosen by the vast majority of Russian speakers. Both strategies are clearly used by quasi-bilinguals to introduce the referent in French (1) and Russian (3) respectively. It appears, therefore, that quasi-bilinguals adopt strategies that are appropriate for the language used (Figure 26.1). When speaking in Russian, they introduce the referent by the same means chosen by Russian monolinguals, and when speaking French, they choose the means chosen by French monolinguals. 80 70 French native speakers

60 50

Russian native speakers

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Bilinguals in French

30 20

Bilinguals in Russian

10 0 1

2

3

Figure 26.1 Introduction of the protagonist (1. Existential or presentational structure; 2. External predicate; 3. NP + lexical verb)

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Strategy 2, the use of an external predicate construction, is used to a similar degree by both monolingual groups, and attested in the production of quasi-bilinguals in both languages. However, quasi-bilinguals use this procedure in their French more frequently than French monolinguals. Their narratives in Russian show a similar frequency of use as compared to those of the monolinguals.

Introduction of the protagonist and SV order A series of earlier studies on the relations between information structure and morphosyntactic structure has shown that new information, which is part of the Focus, tends to be placed at the end of the utterance, if the structure of the language spoken allows it (Hendriks & Watorek, 2008; Klein & Perdue, 1997). Thus, the extensive use of presentational constructions and external predicate constructions for referent introduction in French is, in our opinion, the result of an interaction between the available sentence structure in French and the Focus Last principle which affects information structure. Both strategies allow an utterance-final position for the indefinite NP introducing the new referent; such a sequence cannot be produced in French using the SV structure, given the relatively strict word order in French. Given the free word order of Russian, the overwhelming preference for the lexical verb construction by Russian monolinguals does not conflict with the final position of the NP introducing new information. (5) (a) Tchelovek rodilsa ‘Man is born’ (SV) (b) V poustine prosipaetsa tchelovek ‘In desert wakes man’ (VS) Consequently, the word order of all relevant clauses in the data that utilise the lexical verb construction was further examined (see Figure 26.2). Control groups. As evident in Figure 26.2, when native French speakers choose to introduce the new protagonist with the lexical verb construction (strategy 3), word order is always SV. The use of this clausal strategy forces French speakers to place the new information, expressed by the pre-verbal subject NP, at the beginning of the utterance. Thus, the competition between the SV structure and the pragmatic principle of Focus Last can explain the tendency of French speakers to avoid the introduction of referents through the lexical verb construction.2 Example (6) illustrates the one case in which an indefinite NP subject grammatically encodes new information in the French data. (6) Une créature composée de sable se réveille dans un désert ‘A creature made of sand wakes in a desert’

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French native speakers

60

Russian native speakers

40

Bilinguals in French

20

Bilinguals in Russian

0 S-V

V-S

Figure 26.2 Introduction of the protagonist using SV and VS word orders

This result confirms the results of other studies on French discourse, whether focusing on narratives (Lambert & Lenart, 2004) or on other types of discourse (e.g. Hendriks & Watorek, 2008 on descriptive discourse). In contrast, the lexical verb construction is the primary strategy of referent introduction for Russian monolinguals (see Figure 26.1), but examination of the word order configuration in these cases reveals a fairly equal division between SV and VS (Figure 26.3). In Russian, the NP subject referring to the new protagonist in both SV and VS configurations can be accompanied by an optional determiner that corresponds either to the numeral odin ‘one’ or the pronoun kakoi-to ‘a certain’ (see Figure 26.3). These determiners enable optional local marking of new information in Russian, which lacks articles. In the productions of Russian monolinguals, such an optional determiner is found in 40% of referent introductions using the SV order. (7) (a) Odin tchelovek prosipaetsa ‘One man wakes’ (b) Kakoe-to soushestvo ochnuvshis v poustine ‘A certain being woke up in desert’ Most cases of the VS order include a bare nominal subject (Figure 26.3b). This result confirms that word order in Russian serves as a global marker of information status. Postposing the NP subject that refers to the protagonist after the verb is sufficient to indicate the new status of the referent for Russian speakers. Yet, if the NP subject is sentence-initial and precedes the verb, speakers employ optional local marking of the new referent in place of the global word-order marking. Quasi-bilinguals. The French productions of quasi-bilinguals show a low percentage of referent introductions using the lexical verb strategy (Figure 26.1).

Reference to Ent it ies in Fic t ional Nar rat ives (a)

(b)

60

60

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50

50 40 30 20 10

Russian native speakers

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Bilinguals in Russain

20

Russian native speakers

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Bilinguals in Russian

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0 Determiners

Determiners

Figure 26.3 The use of optional determiners in Russian. (a) SV word order; (b) VS word order

When this strategy is used, the word order employed is consistently SV, as in the production of French native speakers. In their Russian production, the SV order is used in 60% of introductions (Figure 26.2), a higher percentage than found in the productions of Russian monolinguals. In addition, the choice of the SV order in the Russian productions of quasi-bilinguals is not coupled with the use of optional determiners (Figure 26.3a). (8) Tchelovek prosipaetsa ‘Man wakes’ On the other hand, optional determiners are employed in 25% of cases using the VS order (Figure 26.3b) (9) Zdes poiavlaetsa kakoi-to personage ‘Here appears a certain character’ This result clearly differs from the pattern found for Russian monolinguals who do not resort to the use of determiners with a post-verbal NP subject. This use among quasi-bilinguals could be regarded as augmenting the global marking of new information through word order, the standard strategy used in Russian, by additional local marking, which is typically optional in Russian but obligatory in French. In contrast, the French productions of quasi-bilinguals reflect the same preferences for the introduction of a new referent found among French monolinguals: preference for strategies 1 and 2 with only rare use of strategy 3, which is consistently used with an SV order.

Summary The production of quasi-bilinguals in French. Our analysis has shown that quasi-bilinguals occasionally employ the lexical verb construction (strategy 3) to introduce the protagonist in their French narratives. While this strategy is characteristic of the production of monolingual Russians, quasi-bilinguals

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employ it only sporadically in French, thereby approaching the patterns of their L2. Yet, traces of L1 influence are evident in their use of strategy 1 (existential and presentational constructions) and strategy 2 (external predicate constructions). The external predicate is the preferred strategy for referent introduction in L2 French. This strategy is used by both control groups to a similar degree. Both strategies, the use of the external predicate and the use of existential and presentational constructions, are backgrounding strategies that introduce the referent as a side comment; thus, they contrast with the third strategy, which introduces the referent into the foreground of the narrative. The narrative function of strategies 1 and 2 is therefore similar. The absence of the existential construction and the relatively frequent use of the external predicate construction in Russian explain the choice of introduction strategy by quasi-bilingual speakers. This result also allows an explanation that combines the influences of both French (L2) and Russian (L1). Quasi-bilinguals tend to introduce the new referent in backgrounded utterances, as do French monolinguals. However, to do so, they choose the second strategy, which is available in both languages, rather than the first strategy, which is specific to French. The production of quasi-bilinguals in Russian. In their Russian production, quasi-bilinguals introduce the protagonist in lexical verb constructions (strategy 3), the sole introduction strategy found in the productions of Russian monolinguals. However, they employ the SV order more frequently than Russian monolinguals, and do not accompany the preverbal NP subject with optional determiners. Instead, optional determiners appear with post-verbal NP subjects. Thus, the influence of L2 French is evident in the extent to which quasi-bilinguals feel the need to mark the introduction of new information by a determiner, an unnecessary strategy in Russian. This influence results in overmarking the new referent, both through word order (a Russian strategy) and through a determiner (as in French).

Reference Maintenance to the Protagonist Once speakers have introduced the protagonist into their narratives, they can continue to refer to him in the rest of their discourse. As discussed in the section ‘Typological Differences between the Languages’, one of the elements that distinguish Russian from French is the absence of an obligatory (lexical) subject. This difference has a significant impact on the establishment of referential continuity in the narratives. Three ways of establishing continued reference to the protagonist are found in our database: (1) the use of a personal pronoun, Fr. il/Rus. on ‘he’, (2) the use of a relative pronoun Fr. qui/Rus. kotorii ‘who’ and (3) the use of zero anaphora. The choice between these options varies significantly in the production of French and Russian monolinguals (Figure 26.4).

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100 French native speakers

80 60

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0 Personal Relative pronoun (il) pronoun (qui)

Ø

Figure 26.4 Means of maintaining reference to the protagonist

French monolinguals consistently use the personal pronoun il to signal reference maintenance, although the use of zero anaphora is not excluded in some contexts. (10) (a) Et il tombe ‘And he falls’ (b) Il se fait mal ‘He feels pain’ (c) Et donc par la suite il se dirige ‘And so afterwards he goes’ In contrast, Russian monolinguals primarily maintain reference through zero anaphora. (11) (a) V poustine prosipaetsa tchelovek ‘In desert wakes man’ (b) I Ø vidit poustouiou boutilkou pered soboi ‘And Ø sees bottle empty before him’ (c) Dolgo ee Ø triaset v poiskah vodi ‘Long Ø shakes it’ (d) I Ø nachinaet kopat’ pesok ‘And Ø begins to dig sand’ The production of both monolingual groups contains few cases of continued reference in subordinate clauses using a relative pronoun. This result confirms our expectations given the systemic differences between these languages, as well as the results of other studies (e.g. Lenart, 2007). The preferences identified in the productions of both control groups are adopted by quasi-bilinguals in their productions in both languages

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respectively. Figure 26.4 clearly shows that maintained reference to the protagonist is established through the use of the personal pronoun in French, as it is in the productions of French monolinguals, and through zero anaphora in Russian, as it is in the productions of Russian monolinguals. Thus, reference maintenance is guided by the properties of the language used, unlike the introduction of a new referent. This result could plausibly be explained by the cross-linguistic contrasts between the two languages in this area, which lead to the use of clearly distinguishable structures for this function.

Summary and Conclusions We must now consider the results of this study in light of the original research questions: (i)

How do the different linguistic resources available in Russian and French determine informational choices in the domain of reference in a narrative discourse? (ii) How are these differences reflected in the discourse of Russian/French quasi-bilinguals? The first question can be addressed through the analysis of the two control groups. The various linguistic devices available in both languages for the introduction of new information interact with pragmatic principles, notably the placement of new information at the end of an utterance, thus leading to differences in the organisation of discourse information in the two languages. In French, the SV word order is relatively fixed, and blocks the introduction of the protagonist through a lexical verb construction in this discourse context. In this case, information regarding the protagonist must be expressed by a sentence-initial subject NP in pre-verbal position. French speakers therefore employ alternative constructions, in order to circumvent this syntactic constraint and to obey the pragmatic principle of Focus Last (Hendriks & Watorek, 2008). Consequently, the predominant strategy for referent introduction is the use of existential and presentational constructions (il y a un bonhomme/c’est un homme) which enable an utterance-final position for the NP referring to the newly introduced protagonist. This strategy inevitably leads to the systematic introduction of the protagonist in the background of discourse. The protagonist is then incorporated into a foregrounding utterance as the agent of an action, and reference maintenance is established through a personal pronoun. Russian allows free word order, thus, allowing the subject NP introducing the new referent to appear in post-verbal position. Russian monolinguals exploit this possibility and carry out the introduction of the protagonist through a lexical verb construction with a VS configuration in some 50% of cases. When the SV order is used, the data indicate the systematic use of another marking strategy, the addition of linguistic units that optionally fulfil the role of an indefinite determiner. This strategy involves the

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introduction of the referent directly into the foreground of the discourse, in contrast to the French strategy. Continued reference to the protagonist is maintained through zero anaphora, since Russian allows a zero subject. Our second research question can be addressed through the production of the quasi-bilingual group, focusing on the influence of the L1 on L2 productions and vice versa. The relative influence of both languages on bilingual production is most evident in the introduction of a new referent. Thus, we have observed that quasi-bilinguals adopt the lexical verb strategy in French more frequently than French monolinguals, while consistently maintaining the SV order required in French. The impact of L1 Russian on L2 French may also be evident in the limited use of the existential construction il y a, a construction which has no equivalent in Russian. The majority of referent introductions employ the external predicate construction, a strategy that is shared in the productions of both control groups. A potential explanation for this result is that quasi-bilinguals choose strategies from the linguistic inventory of the L2 that remain as close as possible to the model of the L1. Influence of the L2 (French) on L1 production (Russian) has also been established. Thus, while quasi-bilinguals’ predominant strategy for referent introduction in Russian is the lexical verb construction, as it is for Russian monolinguals, they show a preference for an SV configuration for these sentences. This tendency can be explained by the influence of L2 French, in which this order is clearly preferred. In addition, bilinguals tend to support the NP subject introducing the new protagonist by an optional determiner even in the VS configuration, a phenomenon completely absent from the production of Russian monolinguals. This result may also indicate the influence of L2 French, in which determiners are obligatory. Due to this influence, quasi-bilinguals feel the need to locally mark the new status of the referent, leading to overmarking in their Russian production. The more intensive use of optional determiners for the introduction of referents in Russian may reflect the high level of proficiency and frequent use of L2 French by these speakers. The results of this study show that the productions of quasi-bilingual speakers reflect both the influence of the L1 on their L2 and vice versa. Thus, their L2 production reveals certain discourse-organisational principles of the L1, but their high level of proficiency and regular use of the L2 lead to changes in their productions in L1. These results are in line with support studies in bilingualism which assume the existence of a common conceptual system within which interactions between the languages are unavoidable (Kecskes & Papp, 2003). Pavlenko’s (2003) research on Russian/English bilinguals and on the phenomenon of L1 attrition discusses parallel phenomena of structural transfer from L2 to L1, demonstrating significant changes in the L1 productions of bilinguals. These studies enable us to observe the production of learners not only in terms of the negative influence of L1 on L2 production, but also in such a way as to better understand the impact of L2 on the use of the mother tongue in the case of highly advanced learners and quasi-bilinguals.

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Notes (1) Methodology used by researchers at the University of Heidelberg, Germany (von Stutterheim et al., 2003). (2) In fact, in all French data, there was only a single occurrence of strategy 3, in an SV order.

References Bartning, I. (1997) L’apprenant dit avancé et son acquisition d’une langue étrangère: tour d’horizon et esquisse d’une caractérisation de la variété avancé. Aile 9, 9–50. Carroll, M. and von Stutterheim, Ch. (1993) The representation of spatial configurations in English and German and the grammatical structure of locative and anaphoric expressions. Linguistics 31, 1011–1041. Carroll, M. and von Stutterheim, Ch. (1997) Relations entre grammaticalisation et conceptualisation et implications sur l’acquisition d’une langue étrangère. Acquisition et Interaction en Langue Etrangère 9, 83–115. Carroll, M., Klein, W. and von Stutterheim, Ch. (2003) Two ways of construing complex temporal structures. In F. Lenz (ed.) Deictic Conceptualisation of Space, Time and Person (pp. 98–133) Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Cook, V. (2003) Effects of the Second Language on the First. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Corder, P. (1980) Dialectes idiosyncrasiques et analyse d’erreurs. Langages 57, 17–28. Hendriks, H. and Watorek, M. (2008) L’organisation de l’information en Topique dans les discours descriptifs en L1 et en L2. Aile 28, 149–171. Kecskes, I. and Papp, T. (2003) How to demonstrate the conceptual effect of L2 on L1? Methods and techniques. In V. Cook (ed.) Effects of the Second Language on the First (pp. 247–265). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Klein, W. and von Stutterheim, Ch. (1991) Text structure and referential movement. Sprache und Pragmatik 22, 1–32. Klein, W. and Perdue, C. (1997) The basic variety (or: couldn’t natural languages be much simpler?). Second Language Research 13, 301–348. Kroll, J. and Stewart, E. (1994) Category interference in translation and picture naming: Evidence for asymmetric connections between bilingual memory representations. Journal of Memory and Language 33, 149–174. Lambert, M. and Lenart, E. (2004) Incidence des langues sur le développement de la cohésion en L1 et en L2: Gestion du statut des entités dans une tâche de récit. Langages 155, 14–33. Lenart, E. (2007) Acquisition des procédures de détermination nominale dans le récit en français et polonais L1, et en français L2. Etude comparative de deux types d’apprenants: enfant et adulte. PhD thesis, University of Paris 8. Levelt, W.J.M. (1989) Speaking: From Intention to Articulation. Cambridge: MIT Press. Pavlenko, A. (2003) ‘I feel clumsy speaking Russian’: L2 influence on L1 in narratives of Russian L2 users of English. In V. Cook (ed.) Effects of the Second Language on the First (pp. 32–62). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. von Stutterheim, C. (2003) Linguistic structure and information organisation: The case of very advanced learners. In S. Foster-Cohen and S. Pekarek Doehler (ed.) EUROSLA Yearbook. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. von Stutterheim, C., Carroll, M. and Klein, W. (2003) Two ways of construing complex temporal structures. In F. Lenz (ed.) Deictic Conceptualisation of Space, Time and Person (pp. 98–133). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

27 The Cohesive Function of Word Order in L1 and L2 Italian: How VS Structures Mark Local and Global Coherence in the Discourse of Native Speakers and of Learners Cecilia Andorno

Introduction Word order is subject to several constraints in the Italian language. Unlike English, Italian does not show word order variation linked to the pragmatic type of sentence (affirmative, negative and interrogative), but each sentence type can show different word orders. Italian is therefore said to have a ‘free’ word order: this does not mean that any word order is allowed in any sentence, but that constraints of different levels work in a nondeterministic way in shaping the possible word orders for each sentence in a specific context. The basic – that is, pragmatically and semantically neutral – word order is generally claimed to apply to the syntactic categories of ‘subject’ and ‘object’, the subject constituent occurring before and the object constituent after the verb. However, the VS structure is also possible, if specific semantic and pragmatic features occur in an utterance; moreover, the acceptability of VS structures varies in accordance with the verb classes: intransitive verbs – or, according to some scholars, unaccusative verbs – are more likely to occur with the VS order than transitive verbs. Word order constraints in Italian, and particularly the constraints for the VS order, have been described in several studies both for Italian L1 and 535

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for Italian L2, but as far as we know no quantitative results based on controlled data are available as of now. The present study is part of a more comprehensive study to be described below that aims at describing the functional value of the VS order and at quantifying the relative weight of a number of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic parameters in the choice of this structure on the basis of a small but controlled corpus of oral narrative data from both native speakers and learners (L1 German, intermediate and advanced levels). The results will show that, although the VS order does not have any anaphoric meaning in itself, it is used in Italian to mark referential movement (Klein & von Stutterheim, 1987), that is to link informative content across sentences, and thus has a cohesive function, both from a local and from a global perspective. Moreover, the results demonstrate that learners acquire these different functions at different stages, as the cohesive function at the global level appears only in advanced learners. The chapter is organized as follows: the section ‘Word Order in Italian: Corpus-Based Studies’ outlines the constraints on VS order in Italian L1 and L2, and offers a survey of previous corpus-based studies. Functional and textual perspectives are favoured in this section, as it is the case in the section ‘The Study’, where the functional theoretical background of the Quaestio model is provided for the interpretation of native speaker and learner discourse phenomena. The section ‘Theoretical Background’ places the study in the context of the overall research design to which it contributes, and provides the methodology for the data collection and coding. The section ‘Aims and Methodology’ presents and discusses the results. The conclusion proposes an interpretation of the results in the light of the Quaestio model and suggests further implications of the overall research.

Word Order in Italian: Corpus-Based Studies Italian L1 Italian word order, and the VS order in particular, has been the object of several studies from different theoretical perspectives. Despite differences in theoretical perspectives, scholars agree on the following fundamental observations: • • •

The basic word order in Italian is grounded in syntactic categories and is SVO. The VS order is a possible alternative to the SV order in a number of contexts. The choice between SV and VS order in these contexts is not linked to syntactic parameters alone but also to the semantic and pragmatic properties of the sentence and its components.

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We will sketch an overall picture of the question by dwelling upon three studies which focus on the weight of semantic and textual-pragmatic constraints: Sornicola (1994), Berretta (1995) and Bonvino (2005). Sornicola (1994) quantifies the distribution of different word orders in a corpus of written and oral data (853 sentences) and values the relative weight of several relevant parameters generally claimed to affect word order. On the whole, the VS order is found in a minority of contexts: SV is therefore confirmed as the basic word order from a corpus-based, quantitative perspective. According to her data, the following parameters proved to play a role: • •

• • • •

The overall order of the sentence constituents: in VS sentences, another constituent (adverbial, PP) is often found in the preverbal position. The syntactic nature of the verb: the VS order is hardly ever found with transitive verbs, while verbs with one argument admit the VS order more frequently; the role of the syntactic category of ‘unaccusative’ in promoting the VS order is not confirmed (both intransitive and unaccusative verbs being equally available for VS structures).1 The semantic nature of the verb: the VS order is more frequent with durative and stative verbs. Subject animacy and agentivity: the VS order is more frequent with inanimate and non-agent subjects than with animate and agent subjects. Topicality and the given/new dimension: the VS order is more frequent with new or non-topical subjects than with given topical subjects. Text type: the VS order is more frequent in oral than in written texts and varies depending on text typologies.

In the end, the study confirms the need for a multidimensional approach to the question, as no single explanatory level can be assumed to be fully satisfying. However, the heterogeneous nature of the data, the number of factors involved, together with the rather small size of the corpus prevent the study from drawing a clear picture of the relative weight of the different constraints. Moreover, as the author herself points out, the variability of the texts does not allow for a clear-cut distinction between topic and non-topic constituents or among given and new information. Berretta (1995) proposes to describe the contextual values of VS utterances in light of the sometimes vague definitions of pragmatic categories generally adopted to describe the function of the VS order – such as ‘focus’, ‘new’ and ‘contrast’. On the basis of a qualitative description of a small set of token examples from oral conversations, she defines subjects in VS structures as ‘remathic’ (= non-topical) subjects. Remathic subjects can be found: •

in sentences describing the occurrence of an event (‘thetic sentences’ according to Sasse, 1987): Ha telefonato la Piera (Piera called);

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in sentences where the referent in subject position is contrasted to an alternative referent (‘identificational sentences’ according to Sasse, 1987): Pago io (It’s me who pays, not you); in sentences where a constituent different from the subject assumes the topic value: Me l’ha detto la mamma (Mum told me that; topic: ‘that’).

This study shows that, in order to have a more precise definition of the pragmatic categories involved in the phenomenon, we need to describe the contexts in which VS structures occur – particularly the information flow of the text. Bonvino (2005; see also Bonvino, 2004) confirms the already-mentioned general findings, also noting that: • •

Pronominal and lexical subjects show a significantly different behaviour: the VS order is attested for 36% of lexical subjects, but for only 10% of pronominal subjects. Subjects and other constituents in Italian tend to be in a complementary distribution in the preverbal position, that is the preverbal position tends to be occupied by only one constituent (the same was observed by other scholars: Benincà, 2001; Bernini, 1995; Sornicola, 1995).

More interestingly, Bonvino claims that, although sometimes confused in the literature, two different syntactic phenomena are in fact to be distinguished under the same label ‘VS structure’, namely postposition and extraposition (right dislocation) of the subject, which display different prosodic and syntactic properties (see Table 27.1). According to Bonvino, in order to explain the semantic and pragmatic functions of subject postposition, it is inadequate to base the analysis solely on the semantic nature of the constituents involved (subject, verb), without considering the semantics of the whole utterance in the text: VS structures share ‘la tendance à écarter toute valeur générique des sujets ou des énoncés et à favoriser leur interpretation événementielle’, that is they underline the single and precise occurrence of the actual situation in which the subject is involved. Apart from the VS order, other features often co-occur to induce an event-based (‘événementiel’) interpretation of the utterance: focus

TABLE 27.1 Subject postposition and subject extraposition (Bonvino, 2009) ‘Sujet attaché’ = sub postposition

‘Sujet non attaché’ = sub extraposition

S within the scope of the negation

S outside the scope of the negation

S near the verb (except parenthetic elements and paradigmatic adverbs)

S distant (argumental constituents between V and S)

No prosodic boundaries between V and S

Prosodic boundary before S

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particles and temporal/spatial adverbs; non-generic subjects; event verbs, punctual verbs and perfective aspect; and discourse information movements going from the general to the singular: restriction, contrast, and so on. Once again, it is claimed that the VS structure can be explained at the text level better than at the sentence level, as it is linked to utterances carrying specific information movements, here collected under the category of ‘event-based’ utterances.

Acquisition of the Word Order in Italian L2: Previous Results As we have seen, Italian does not show a systematic word order reorganization linked to specific syntactic or pragmatic functions such as the restructuring of interrogative or negative sentences. Research on word order in learner varieties has therefore focused on ordering tendencies concerning main constituents in affirmative sentences, in order to look for: • •

the presence of ‘marked’ word order such as VS structures, left and right dislocations, cleft sentences; the principles underlying the selection of ‘marked’ word orders.

We will briefly sketch the main results obtained in a number of studies sharing the theoretical background provided by the ESF project on learner varieties further presented in the section ‘Theoretical Background’. According to Klein and Perdue (1989, 1997), word order in learner varieties can be explained on the basis of a limited set of semantic, syntactic and pragmatic principles. These principles are claimed to hold cross-linguistically, that is they are not linked to a specific grammar system, and can fulfill the vast majority of the communicative needs of the speakers. The learner varieties based on these principles (‘basic’ learner varieties) proved to reach an optimal balance between a minimal expressive effort and a maximal communicative effect; however, basic varieties can ‘collapse’ for both internal and external reasons: on the one hand, the clash of different principles in specific communicative contexts pushes learners to elaborate their language systems in order to solve the conflict, hence to evolve towards more advanced varieties; on the other hand, the target language offers learners models of sentence structures to manage conflicting contexts. In finding their way through the specific target language rules, learners can follow various paths according to their L1; that is, they can be more or less sensitive to different constraints and rely on different structures according to the model provided by their L1. These assumptions have been the object of investigation in a number of studies in the ‘Pavia project’ on learner varieties of Italian, whose results we will sketch in the following paragraphs. Chini (2002a, 2002b) compares sentence structure in the retelling of the movie Modern Times by 18 German speakers (undergraduate students with

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non-initial competence levels) with a control corpus of 18 native speakers. The overall percentage of VS structures among learners is lower than that of the native group, but learners with a lower competence level have higher percentages of VS structures than more advanced learners. This is primarily due to the c’è (‘there is’) constructions, which amount to 70% of VS structures in the learners of lower levels; in the more advanced learners, the overall number of VS structures is spread over many verb types, namely unaccusative and intransitive verbs; the same happens in the native group. As for the function of VS structures, they are mostly presentative, that is they introduce a new referent in the text, which can be further specified with a relative sentence: (1) alla porta c’è un poliziotto [learner corpus] to-the door there-is a policeman ‘A policeman is at the door’ (2) arriva una manifestazione [learner corpus] arrives a procession ‘A procession arrives’ Only in more advanced learners different functions for postverbal subjects can be found, such as the ‘contrast’ with a different subject (‘emphatic subjects’ according to Chini, example (3)) or the mention of a topical subject (‘non-emphatic subjects’, example (4)): (3) dopo un po’ sale anche la ragazza [learner corpus] after a while comes-up also the girl ‘After a while the girl comes up too’ (4)

si siede al tavolo e sembra che sia un po’ preoccupato lui [learner corpus] sits at the table and seems to be a little worried him ‘he sits at the table and seems a little worried’

In a corpus of seven French speakers and a control corpus of seven native speakers with the same task, Turco (2008) describes the structure of sentences with a presentative function (introduction or reintroduction of a referent in the text) and an identificational function (according to Lambrecht, 1996: sentences in which the referent involved in a given event is to be identified). As for the presentative function, VS structures with c’è are as frequent in learners as in native speakers, but learners use far fewer VS structures with predicative verbs than native speakers do. Moreover, the VS order is used by learners only for the first mention of referents, while in native speakers’ data it can also be used to re-introduce referents: (5) poi interviene di nuovo la donna later intervenes again the woman

[native speaker corpus] ‘later the woman intervenes once again’

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VS structures with an identificational function are found both in learners and in native speakers. However, the examples proposed for learners only show sentences with copula (similar to the first part of a cleft construction): (6) dice all’uomo che non è Charlie Chaplin [learner corpus] says to-the man that not is Charlie Chaplin ‘he says to the man that it’s not Charlie Chaplin (who did it)’ while native speakers also show VS identificational sentences with predicative verbs: (7) quindi si fa arrestare lui therefore makes himself captured him

[native speaker corpus] ‘therefore he makes himself captured (instead of the girl)’

Valentini (1992, 2003), in a corpus of diadic conversations between native interviewers and a group of Chinese learners, finds the VS order in beginning learners too. Some non-subject initial topic is found, resulting in a postverbal subject: (8) questi pani è tuti mangia la cani these breads is all eats the dogs

‘this bread, the dog ate it’

Postverbal subjects can also be found with contrastive (example (9)) or remathic (example (10)) value: (9) [IT: sul giornale dice che Deng è morto e Li Peng è ferito] [IT: according to the newspaper, Deng died and Li Peng was wounded] CH: ferito suo vicino wounded his neighbour ‘The wounded (is not Li Peng), it’s a colleague’ (10) [IT: Ci son stati dei morti?] [Were there any deaths?] CH: ha morti tante persone has dead many people

‘Many people died’

Valentini suggests that the L1 plays a major role in highlighting pragmatic factors with respect to both semantic and syntactic factors and thereby in shaping the sentence word order. Even though care is necessary when comparing such heterogeneous data, we can sum up the findings as follows: SV order is found to be the most frequent word order in Italian L2; the VS order appears, in very early varieties

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and in different L1s, with c’è structures and all-new referents, that is with prototypical presentative sentences; however, the encoding of further functions (reintroduction, identificational) with a wider variety of means (predicative verbs) takes longer to acquire. In particular, the clash between the semantic role assigned to a referent by a predicative verb – the agentive role, which calls for a preverbal position – and the pragmatic (focal) status of the referent– which calls for a final position – seems difficult to solve. As Klein and Perdue (1989, 1997) suggest in relation to such cases, the L1 can play a role in the acquisitional path, in that learners whose L1 allows a more pragmatic order (such as Chinese) or presents similar structures (such as French cleft structures with identificational function) are favoured in the use of the correspondent VS order sentences. Much work is still to be done. In particular, it would be important to weigh the role of the different intralinguistic and interlinguistic features mentioned in the section ‘Italian L1’ for the native varieties. As Valentini (2003) points out, the research on word order variation raises some questions because it lacks such a notion as ‘obligatory context’, while in other morphosyntactic domains researchers can take into account the presence or absence of the structures in contexts where they are expected in the target language. This is not the case for non-obligatory structures such as marked word orders. As shown in the work of Chini and Turco, the analysis in these cases can only compare word order preferences in learners with those in native speakers, using comparable texts and homogeneous communicative tasks which encourage the use of different kinds of marked structures. The present study is inspired by these thoughts.

The Study Theoretical Background This study is part of a more comprehensive research project on ‘scope and information structure organization’, which adopts the theoretical framework of the Quaestio model (Klein & von Stutterheim, 1987) and the ESF model on learner varieties (Klein & Perdue, 1989). The Quaestio model offers a comprehensive picture of many different aspects of the information flow in a text. According to the Quaestio model, each text type is characterized by a prototypical question (the quaestio of the text) that governs both its macrostructure and the structure of its sentences. In particular, a narrative text is based on a quaestio concerning the actions performed by the entities or the event in which they are involved in different time spans: ‘what did person P do at time T?’. Therefore, in terms of ‘aboutness’ (Dimroth, 2002), that is of topic-comment organization, agentive persons and time spans are prototypically in a topical position and predicates

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are in a comment position; in terms of ‘contrastiveness’ (Dimroth, 2002), the prototypical information flow of a narrative text involves reference maintenance in the domain of entities, with a shift in the time span and a change in the domain of the predicate. The ESF model on learner varieties is adopted in order to explain how the information flow is expressed by learners. As we have seen, according to Klein and Perdue (1997), a limited set of constraints governs utterance organization in every language. As for word order, the following principles proved to be at work across languages and from the very first stages of learner varieties: • •

The pragmatic principles: ‘topic first’ and ‘focus last’. The semantic principle: ‘controller of the action before the verb’.

While pragmatic and semantic principles are universal, language-specific principles – such as constraints on the position of the subject and on verb classes – are at work at the syntactic level. Second-language learners have a knowledge of universal pragmatic and semantic principles and of the syntactic principles of their mother tongue; but they have to learn the syntactic principles that are specific to the target language and the interactions among different constraints in that language. Moreover, they have to learn to build the cohesion within the text – that is to signal the information flow of the text – taking into account the constraints of the target language. Research within this framework has by now widely investigated specific linguistic means which guarantee text cohesion in narrations. Thus, it has examined the role of referential movement in the use of referring expressions, the role of the topic-comment and given-new oppositions for word order, as well as the foreground–background opposition in the macrostructure of sentences. However, further investigation before we can see a comprehensive picture of the cohesive phenomena, among others, the role of adverbs, of conjunctions and of predicate expressions in text cohesion, has not been systematically examined yet; moreover, we lack adequate corpora in order to investigate the management of non-prototypical information flow. The current research project aims at investigating text cohesion in nonprototypical information flow, in which maintenance can be expressed only in the predicate domain (see Dimroth et al., 2010). It uses a specially designed stimulus (The Finite Story, Dimroth, 2006) involving a plot that includes similar or opposite actions performed by different persons in different time spans (see Table 27.2). In order to link the utterances referring to the situations 0–4, the speaker cannot rely on the means available to mark a referential movement in the entity domain, and particularly not on the referential anaphoric linkage, as the topic entity is continuously changing. However, s/he can signal how information moves in the predicate and/or in the

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TABLE 27.2 The finite story film logic Situation

Information configuration licensed by the situation*

sit. 0

At time t0 M. Blue wakes up

sit. 1

At time t1 M. Green wakes up

sit. 2

At time t2 M. Red doesn’t wake up

– With respect to sit. 0: change of entity + same polarity ‘entity addition’ With respect to sit. 0–1: change of entity + same polarity ‘entity contrast’

sit. 3

At time t3 M. Red doesn’t wake up

sit. 4

At time t4 M. Red wakes up

With respect to sit. 2: maintenance of entity + opposite polarity + time shift ‘time addition’ With respect to sit. 1: change of entity + opposite polarity ‘time addition’ With respect to sit. 3: maintenance of entity + opposite polarity + time shift ‘time contrast’

*We call ‘information configuration’ the result of the comparison among the information units of a situation and those of a previous situation. The predicate is maintained in all the considered information configurations

temporal domain, with several lexical devices such as particles, conjunctions or anaphoric predicates: (11) sit. 0. M. Blue wakes up sit. 1. M. Green wakes up too / M. Green does the same sit. 2. M. Red on the contrary doesn’t wake up sit. 3. M. Red still doesn’t wake up sit. 4. M. Red finally wakes up too The main research project is now collecting a corpus of retellings from native and non-native speakers, in order to answer the following research questions (see Dimroth et al., 2010): • •

How do speakers of different languages mark text cohesion in the different information configurations? How do learners of different L1 and L2 acquire and use the L1- and L2-specific means?

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Aims and Methodology The present study aims at answering a research question arising from the study conducted in Dimroth et al. (2010): at first sight, the VS order in the data of Italian native speakers seems to correlate with specific information configurations; we want to determine whether the correlation is a significant one and whether the VS order fulfils different functions in the texts of native and non-native speakers.2 We will therefore analyse and compare the use of VS structures in a subcorpus of 18 Italian native speakers with that of 14 German advanced and intermediate learners of Italian. The details of the three groups considered are given in Table 27.3. The texts were transcribed and segmented, each segment containing the utterances referring to one situation of the story. The segments were then coded for the potential information configurations licensed by the situation they refer to. For instance, in example (11) the utterances describing situation 2 license the information configuration ‘entity contrast’ (in comparison to situation 0); utterances describing situation 4 license the information configuration ‘entity addition’ (in comparison to situation 1) and the information configuration ‘time contrast’ (in comparison to situation 3). Further segmentation and coding at the clause level included the following parameters: • • •

•

The relative order of the subject and the verb: SV, V, VS.3 The following semantic, syntactic and pragmatic values of S and V. The verb class of V, that is transitive, intransitive with the auxiliary avere, intransitive with the auxiliary essere, pronominal intransitive, passive, copula constructions, presentative constructions (such as esserci S, vedersi S = there is S), perceptive and causative constructions. The semantic content of V,4 that is state (one-state-content predicate: man sleeping, room burning, telephone ringing . . .), event (two-states-content

TABLE 27.3 The three groups considered Group

Number of subjects

Description

Native speakers

18

19–34 years old, undergraduate and graduate students

Intermediate learners

7

19–25 years old, undergraduate students of Italian, studying Italian in Germany

Advanced learners

7

23–59 years old, graduate students and graduated, living in Italy since five years or more

546

•

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predicate + no subject control: man waking up, telephone ceasing to ring, fire . . .), action (two-states-content predicate + subject control: fire brigade coming, men jumping from window . . .), referent introduction with no semantic content (there is X, we can see X). The semantic nature of the entity in S: animate and human entities (the main characters M. Red, Green and Blue; firemen), inanimate entities which are crucial for the story (apartment, fire, telephone) and other mainly ‘environmental’ entities (music, situation . . .). The speaker can also be the subject in sentences giving comments or hypothesis (I think, I can see. . ., I imagine). The referential movement of the entity in subject position (new, changed with respect to a previous utterance, maintained from a previous utterance).

The aim of the study is to determine whether and how word order within the three groups of speakers correlates with the parameters included in the coding. For the subsequent analysis, word order will then be the independent variable and all the other parameters will be the dependent variables.

Results Global distribution of sentences and clause types Since we wanted to analyse the word order as a textual phenomenon, we first compared the texts produced by the three groups of speakers with respect to some parameters concerning the global syntactic organization of the text. The overall number of clauses (Table 27.4) and the distribution across clause-types in each text (Table 27.5) give a first idea of the global syntactic complexity of the texts. From this point of view, native speakers and advanced learners appear to be highly similar, while intermediate learners show a higher number of clauses per text, a higher use of coordinating structures and a lower use of subordinating clauses. In other words, they tend to produce their texts with a strategy of accumulation more than with a selective and hierarchical one. However, the differences are not striking. In order to determine their possible influence on word order distribution, we consider the nature of the entities mentioned in the subject position (Table 27.6) and the syntactic classes of verbs (Table 27.7). All speakers show a clear preference for placing an animated subject, and in particular the main characters of the story (M. Blue, M. Red, M. Green) in TABLE 27.4 Number of clauses per text Ita L1

Ita L2 – adv

Ita L2 – int

1360 clauses for 18 sp. = 75.5

546 clauses for 7 sp. = 78

588 clauses for 7 sp. = 84

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TABLE 27.5 Clause types* Ita L1 (%) Main clause Coordinate Argumental Temporal Causal Final Concessive Consecutive Modal Relative Total

51 26 6 4 3 2 0 0 1 7 100

Ita L2 – adv (%) 54 24 6 4 3 3 1 – – 5 100

Ita L2 – int (%) 46 35 9 1 2 2 – – – 5 100

*‘0%’ indicates a proportion lower than 1%; ‘–’ indicates that the clause type is not attested in the sub-corpus

subject position. Once again, the intermediate learners show a slightly different tendency, in that the subject position is filled with the main character only in 54% of clauses (as compared to 64% in the other two groups), while a higher proportion of empty referents or ‘environmental’ entities (such as music, sounds, lights, ambiance) is found (15% of clauses as compared to 5% in the other two groups). This results in a higher proportion of inanimate subjects. As for the second parameter, verb classes are attested in similar proportions in the three groups. The only clear-cut differences are the higher proportion of pronominal intransitive verbs among native speakers, and the higher proportion of presentative and copula constructions in the intermediate group. This last fact can be connected to the higher proportion of event nouns

TABLE 27.6 Entities in the subject position Ita L1 (%) M. Blue/Red/Green Firemen Apartment Fire Telephone Other 0 (Impersonal) Speaker Total

64 19 2 7 2 1 4 1 100

Ita L2 – adv (%) 64 18 1 8 2 2 3 0 100

Ita L2 – int (%) 54 17 1 8 3 8 7 3 100

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TABLE 27.7 Verb classes

Transitive

Ita L1 (%)

Ita L2 – adv (%)

25

30

Ita L2 – int (%) 28

Intransitive (aux avere)

15

18

11

Intransitive (aux essere)

19

23

22

Pronominal intransitive

25

16

12

Impersonal

2

1

1

Passive

2

1

–

Copula

5

5

9

Presentative constructions (Esserci, vedersi. . .)

5

5

16

Perceptive constructions

0

0

0

Causative constructions Total

1

1

1

100

100

100

( fire and others such as music, situation) as subjects: event nouns, as well as and presentative and copula constructions appear together in descriptive sentences such as there’s a cheerful music, the situation is dramatic.

VS order and semantic/syntactic parameters From a general quantitative perspective, the three groups seem once again in many respects highly comparable in the order they choose for subjects and verbs (Table 27.8). In particular, null subjects are equally frequent within the three groups (about 50%),5 while the VS order reaches nearly 10% of clauses. If we now restrict the analysis to sentences showing a VS order, we still observe some similarities: all groups show a clear preference for the postposition of inanimate subjects (Table 27.9) and of subjects in presentative constructions (Table 27.10: esserci S (there is S); but also for impersonal forms of perception predicates such as vedersi, sentirsi S (one can see, hear S). On the other hand, a detailed comparison of the frequency of VS constructions for TABLE 27.8 Word order Ita L1 (%) SV V VS Total

40 50 10 100

Ita L2 – adv (%) 43 48 9 100

Ita L2 – int (%) 41 47 12 100

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TABLE 27.9 % of VS sentences for different subject referents

M. Blue/Red/Green Firemen Apartment Fire Telephone Other 0 (Impersonal) Average (all subject entities)

Ita L1 (%)

Ita L2 – adv (%)

Ita L2 – int (%)

5 8 31 47 48 58 6 10

3 9 29 45 44 44 0 9

4 10 50 47 18 34 11 12

each verb class among the three groups shows some divergences: for each verb class, the intermediate group shows a lower percentage of VS structures in comparison with the advanced and the native groups; in fact, among intermediate learners the presentative construction is the only case for which the verb class implies a significant use of the VS order (65%), while the percentage is lower than 4% for all other classes; moreover, in this group, even the presentative construction shows lower levels of VS structures as compared to the two other groups (which reach 70% or more). To conclude, the only reason for the VS sentences to be as frequent for all groups is the higher use of presentative constructions in the intermediate group (Table 27.7).6 In fact, following Table 27.11, the large majority (83%) of the VS order in the intermediate learners is due to presentative constructions,

TABLE 27.10 % of VS sentences for different verb classes Ita L1 (%) Transitive Intransitive (aux avere) Intransitive (aux essere) Pronominal intransitive Impersonal Passive Copula Presentative constructions (Esserci, vedersi. . .) Perceptive constructions Causative constructions Average (all verb classes)

3 5 13 7 11 13 4 73 17 0 10

Ita L2 – adv (%) 1 6 13 8 0 0 0 70 – 0 9

Ita L2 – int (%) 1 4 4 2 0 – 0 63 0 0 12

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TABLE 27.11 % of verb classes for the VS structures Ita L1 (%)

Ita L2 – adv (%)

Ita L2 – int (%)

Transitive

6

2

2

Intransitive (aux avere)

8

11

4

Intransitive (aux essere)

23

31

2

Pronominal intransitive

17

13

8

Impersonal

2

–

–

Passive

3

–

–

Copula Presentative constructions (Esserci, vedersi. . .) Perceptive constructions Total

2

–

–

38

42

83

1

–

–

100

100

100

while within the two other groups the intransitive verb classes contribute to the total number of VS structures for roughly half of all VS structures. To sum up, up to this point we can observe that the semantic parameter of animacy plays a crucial role for all groups in disfavouring the VS order. Native speakers and advanced learners are also sensitive to the syntactic criteria of the verb class, in particular because the presentative, intransitive and passive constructions have a higher degree of VS order than transitive and copula constructions, while the intermediate group limits the VS order mainly to presentative constructions.

VS order and textual-functional parameters More subtle divergences between the intermediate group on the one hand and the native and advanced learners on the other hand emerge if textual and functional parameters associated with VS clauses are taken into account. We consider here three factors: predicate semantic types, subject referential movement and information configurations associated with VS order clauses. Table 27.12 shows the distribution on VS clauses among different predicate types. We describe the four categories separately. In the category of ‘referent introductions’ we include all predicates whose function is the mere introduction of a referential entity in discourse. This can be obtained with the already described presentative structures or with passive forms such as essere inquadrato (to be framed): (12) c’è un telefono in primo piano there-is a telephone in the foreground ‘A telephone is in the foreground’

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TABLE 27.12 Predicate types of VS clauses Ita L1 (%)

Ita L2 – adv (%)

Referent INTRODUCTION

20

STATES: one-state-content

20 + 9

32 + 13

EVENTS: two-states-content + non-subject control

31

28

4

ACTIONS: two-states-content + subject control

19

17

9

100

100

100

Total VS clauses

9

Ita L2 – int (%) 34 49 + 4

(13) si sono visti i vigili del fuoco are seen the firemen

‘One sees the firemen’

(14) viene inquadrato il tetto is framed the roof

‘The roof is framed (in the image)’

Among ‘states’ we include all predicates which describe one-state events. We find here some verbs already found in the previous category and associated with event nouns: (15) si sentono dei rumori are heard some noises

‘One hears some noises’

(16) si vede un incendio one sees a fire

‘One sees a fire’

and full lexical verbs involving both animate and inanimate subject referents7: (17) bruciava il tetto was burning the roof

‘The roof was burning’

(18) mentre stava squillando il telefono while was ringing the telephone ‘While the telephone was ringing’ (19) stanno dormendo tutti e tre tranquillamente are sleeping all three quietly ‘The three are sleeping quietly’ (20) sembra spaventato anche il signor rossi seems worried also mister red ‘Mister Red seems worried too’

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Both the ‘event’ and the ‘action’ categories include two-states-content predicates, respectively with a subject that is not the controlling agent: (21) si è spenta la luce went off the light

‘The light went off’

(22) all’improvviso scoppiò un incendio suddenly broke out a fire ‘Suddenly a fire broke out’ (23) ora si è svegliato il signor rossi now woke up mister red

‘Now M. Red woke up’

and with a controller subject: (24) sono arrivati i vigili del fuoco arrived the firemen

‘The firemen arrived’

(25) risponde lo stesso pompiere di prima answers the same fireman as before ‘The same fireman as before answers’ Once again, a clear difference can be observed between the intermediate learners and the native and advanced learners: the native speakers use the VS order with all predicate types, but only advanced learners follow a similar distribution pattern, while the intermediate group limits VS use to ‘referent introductions’ and to ‘states’ predicate types. More interestingly, VS structures describing states are mostly realized, as predicates for ‘referent introductions’, with c’è or impersonal forms of perception verbs (such as example (15) and (16)), thus confirming that the use of the VS order is limited to these verb forms. In Table 27.13, we consider the subject referential movement for VS clauses.8 A difference emerges here between the native group and both of the learners’ groups. Indeed, all groups use the VS order to introduce new referents or to re-introduce old referents that are no longer present in the speaker’s mind (previous mention in different scenes), such as the telephone ringing in the fire brigade building or the coming of the fire brigade at the building in fire: (26) in quel momento squilla il telefono at that time rings the telephone ‘At the same time the telephone starts ringing’ (27) finalmente sopraggiunge il camion dei pompieri finally arrives the fire brigade ‘The fire brigade finally arrives’

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TABLE 27.13 Subject referential movement with VS clauses Ita L1 (%)

Ita L2 – adv (%)

Ita L2 – int (%)

New

39

30

31

Previous mention in different scene, with different syntactic role

43

60

67

Previous mention in different scene, with same syntactic role

2

10

–

Previous mention in current scene, with different syntactic role

7

–

2

Previous mention in current scene, with same syntactic role

9

–

–

100

100

100

Total VS clauses

However, only the native group also uses the VS order for highly salient subjects (mentioned in the same scene, eventually with the same syntactic role). This happens in contexts where a situation that has already occurred (therefore ‘old’) (in the following example to wake up and notice the fire) occurs again in the current time span for a different entity (‘entity addition’): (28) [scene 6: Mr. Blue, Red and Green sleeping] [scene 9: Mr. Blue wakes up and notices the fire] [scene 20] ora si è svegliato il signor Verdi now woke up mister Green ‘Now M. Green wakes up’ Note that the ‘new’ entity for which the ‘old’ situation holds can be, in the local context, re-introduced: (29) [scene 6: Mr. Blue, Red and Green sleeping] [scene 9: Mr. Blue wakes up and notices the fire] [scene 20] ora si è svegliato il signor Verdi now woke up mister Green ‘Now M. Green wakes up’ [scene 21] si è svegliato anche il signor Rossi woke up also mister Red ‘Now M. Red also wakes up’ but it can also be a locally maintained, highly salient entity: (30) [scene 26: M. Blue jumps from the window onto the firemen jumping sheet] [scene 27] il signor Verdi si convince, si butta dalla finestra Mister Green persuades himself, jumps from the window

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cade sul telone dei pompieri e si salva anche lui falls onto the firemen sheet and saves himself also him ‘now M. Green persuades himself, jumps from the window, falls onto the firemen sheet and he is also saved’ That is, in contexts of ‘entity addition’ two different and conflicting informative values are carried by the subject entity. On the one hand, the subject entity is an animated, highly salient entity carrying the role of protagonist in the story retelling and is therefore a highly preferred candidate for the (initial) topic position, especially when it is locally maintained. On the other hand, the identity of the subject entity is the only relevant ‘new’ information for an already given predicate to communicate and should therefore be in the focus (final, postverbal) position. Interestingly enough, VS can occasionally be used by native speakers with other information configurations, such as when a situation that did not occur in a previous time span (to wake up and notice the fire) now holds for a different entity (‘entity contrast’): (31) [scene 7: Mr. Green sleeps; scene 8: Mr. Red sleeps] [scene 9] il primo ad accorgersi dell’incendio è il signor Blu the first to notice the fire is mister Blue ‘M. Blue notices the fire as first’ or when a situation that previously occurred (to answer the telephone) now holds again for the same entity (‘time addition’): (32) [scene 13: Fireman trying answering the phone] [scene 18] risponde lo stesso pompiere di prima answers the same fireman as before ‘The same fireman as before answers’ In these last cases, additional strategies (the cleft construction the first to do X is . . . in example (31); the adjunct the same X as before in example (32)) focus on the identity of the current subject with respect to the one that held in a similar previous occurring situation. This confirms the idea that the VS order function is to focus on the identity of the subject in the current situation, in comparison with a previously occurring situation which is given in the currently presented context. Note that these ‘identificational sentences’ (as used by Lambrecht, 1996) do not carry any ‘contrasting’ value, neither on the pragmatic (illocutive) level – in that they do not deny previous assumptions, as in cases (6), (7) and (9) – nor on the local textual (referential) level. They add new assumptions about different (and only in this sense ‘contrasted’) referents, which

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can be locally given and topical. This kind of communicative value is only occasionally attested in the advanced learner group and not at all in the intermediate group. To sum up this second part of the analysis, we can conclude that both of our learner groups and the native speakers use the VS order to mark the introduction or re-introduction of non-topical, changing referents. This is done with presentative constructions (by all groups) and with other verb classes (by native speakers and advanced learners only), resulting in thetic sentences. Only native speakers – and some advanced learners to a much lesser extent – use the VS order to focus on the subject identity of a given predicate, that is in contexts where the prototypical organization of the information across utterances in narrative texts is reversed.

Conclusions Our study confirmed that the VS order in Italian is bound by multiple constraints and can fulfil a variety of functions, which can be profitably analysed by means of a set of controlled data. As none of the constraints that proved to influence word order forces the choice for the VS order, its use cannot be evaluated in terms of ‘obligatory contexts’, but rather in terms of ‘favourable contexts’. The comparison between highly similar narrative texts was therefore useful to weight the various constraints on preferences for SV or VS order in native and learners data. Moreover, from an acquisitional point of view, the comparison between intermediate and advanced learners allowed us to see that functions and constraints are acquired at different points of the acquisition process. The semantic parameter of animacy proved to be highly significant for both native speakers and learners: all speakers show a clear preference for the VS order with inanimate subjects; no developmental tendencies between the two learners groups can be observed here, thus confirming the early effect of semantic features in determining the linguistic choices in learners’ data. The syntactic parameter of verb class plays a primary role in the preference for different word orders in the group of native speakers: presentative constructions are by far more frequently realized with the VS order; all other verb classes show a low percentage of VS order realization, but this increases with one-argument verbs (intransitive, unaccusative and pronominal verbs). Data from learners show that syntactic parameters need some time to be acquired: indeed, the intermediate learners frequently use the VS order with presentative constructions, but hardly ever with other verb classes; in contrast, the advanced learners distribute the VS order among verb classes that are similar to those used by native speakers.

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Turning to the role of textual parameters, both native speakers and learners use the VS order more frequently when a new referent occurs in subject position, hence when the sentence (re)introduces a referent in the current discourse. This confirms that pragmatic constraints shape the learner varieties from the beginning of the acquisition process onward. Nevertheless, a difference can be found between the two groups of learners, in that only the advanced learners also use the VS order in information configurations where a possibly highly salient subject, even when locally maintained, is compared (‘contrasted’) at a more global level with a different subject occurring in a similar situation (information configuration of ‘addition’). In this case, a conflict between constraints occurs, in that the pragmatic principle ‘topic first’, the semantic principle ‘controller before the verb’ and the syntactic principle ‘subject before the verb’ should all converge towards the SV order, but conflict with a different pragmatic principle, the ‘new information in final position’. Moreover, the evaluation of the subject entity as ‘new’ information and of the predicate as ‘old’ information in these contexts only holds at the global level, since the reverse can be true at the local level and the subject should therefore stay in initial position. Only some advanced learners seem to be – partially – able to manage this conflictual context in the way native speakers do, that is by allowing the VS order. As a whole, the results confirm some tendencies already outlined by previous studies but also provide more in-depth insights into how various constraints at different levels interact in actual contexts, especially in cases where speakers have to manage conflicting constraints at the local and global levels. They also provide more fine-grained insights concerning the relative weight of these constraints in native varieties and in the path followed by learners who must learn to manage them.

Notes (1) Frascarelli (2000) also disconfi rms the unaccusative preference for VS order, a hypothesis which was fi rst carried out in the generativist framework (Burzio, 1986) and taken up afterwards by many scholars. (2) Andorno and Interlandi (2010) investigate the same research question on the prosodic level: they analyse the prosodic features of SV sentences in the same information configurations. (3) We did not consider the left and right extraposition of the subject, where, according to Bonvino (2005), the subject forms an independent tone unit, different form the verbal tone unit. (4) Following the model proposed by Klein (1994), the classification is based upon the presence versus absence of a change of state in the lexical content of the verb-incontext; a further distinction is based on the presence/absence of control on the event. More information is given in the section ‘VS Order and Textual: Functional Parameters’.

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(5) The study conducted by Chini (2002a, 2002b) shows that the null subject is slowly acquired by German learners. (6) This is in line with fi ndings of Chini (2002a, 2002b) and Turco (2008). (7) In Table 27.10, at row ‘states’ we gave separate percentages for the two construction ‘presentative verb + event noun’ and ‘event verb’. (8) We measured the continuity of a referent using these parameters: previous mention in same/different scene; syntactic role of the previous mention. As the storyretelling has to be done scene-by-scene, that is speakers interrupt themselves at each scene, scene boundaries are highly relevant to the text continuity. This can explain the high percentage of the function of ‘reintroduction’ function in our data as compared with data from Chini (2002a, 2002b) and Turco (2008).

References Andorno, C. and Interlandi, G. (2010) Topics? Positional and prosodic features of subjects in additive sentences in Italian L1. In M. Chini (ed.) Topic, Information Structure and Language Acquisition (pp. 73–94). Pavia: Angeli. Benincà, P. (2001) The position of topic and focus in the left periphery. In G. Cinque and G. Salvi (eds) Current Studies in Italian Syntax. Essays Offered to Lorenzo Renzi (pp. 39–64). Amsterdam: North-Holland. Bernini, G. (1995) Verb-subject order in Italian. An investigation of short announcements and telecast news. Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung 48, 44–71. Berretta, M. (1995) Ordini marcati dei costituenti maggiori di frase: una rassegna. Linguistica e Filologia 1, 125–170. Bonvino, E. (2004) Fenomeni sintattici e prosodici relativi alla distinzione fra due tipi di soggetto postverbale. In F. Albano Leoni, F. Cutugno, M. Pettorino and R. Savy (eds) Il Parlato Italiano. Atti del Convegno Nazionale (pp. 1–27). Napoli: D’Auria. Bonvino, E. (2005) Le sujet postverbal. Une étude sur l’italien parlé. Paris: Ophrys. Burzio, L. (1986) Italian Syntax. Dordrecht: Reidel. Chini, M. (2002a) Ordres marqués et perspective du locuteur en italien L2. Revue française de linguistique appliquée VII, 107–127. Chini, M. (2002b) Fra sintassi e pragmatica in italiano L2: gli ordini marcati in testi di apprendenti tedescofoni. In P. Cordin, R. Franceschini and G. Held (eds) Parallela 8. Lingue di confine, confine di fenomeni linguistici/Grenzsprachen. Grenzen von linguistischen Phänomenen (pp. 311–333). Roma: Bulzoni. Dimroth, C. (2002) Topics, assertions and additive words. Linguistics 40, 891–923. Dimroth, C. (2006) The Finite Story. Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics – Online document: http://corpus1.mpi.nl/ds/imdi_browser?openpath=MPI560350%23. Dimroth, C., Andorno, C., Benazzo, S. and Verhagen, J. (2010) Given claims about new topics: Scope particles & perspective taking in Italian, French, German & Dutch. Journal of Pragmatics 42, 3328–3344. Frascarelli, M. (2000) The Syntax-Phonology Interface of Focus and Topic Constructions in Italian. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Klein, W. (1994) Time in Language. London: Routledge. Klein, W. and Perdue, C. (1989) The learner’s problem of arranging words. In B. MacWhinney and E. Bates (eds) The Crosslinguistic Study of Sentence Processing (pp. 292–327). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Klein W. and Perdue, C. (1997) The basic variety (or: couldn’t natural language be much simpler?). Second Language Research 13, 301–347. Klein, W. and von Stutterheim, C. (1987) Quaestio und referentielle Bewegung in Erzählungen. Linguistische Berichte 109, 163–183.

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Lambrecht, K. (1996) Information Structure and Sentence Form: Topic, Focus, and the Mental Representation of Discourse Referents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sasse, H-J. (1987) The thetic/categorical distinction revisited. Linguistics 25, 511–580. Sornicola, R. (1994) On word-order variability: A study from a corpus of Italian. Lingua e Stile XXIX, 25–57. Sornicola, R. (1995) Theticity, VS order and the interplay of syntax, semantics and pragmatics. Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung 48, 72–83. Turco, G. (2008) Introduction et identification d’un référent chez les apprenants francophones de l’italien L2. Acquisition et Interaction en Langue Étrangère 26, 211–238. Valentini, A. (1992) L’italiano dei cinesi. Questioni di sintassi. Milano: Guerini. Valentini, A. (2003) Gli ordini sintattici marcati. In A. Giacalone Ramat (ed.) Verso l’italiano (pp. 208–219). Roma: Carocci.

28 Macrostructural Principles and the Development of Narrative Competence in L1 German: The Role of Grammar (8–14-Year-Olds) Christiane von Stutterheim, Ute Halm and Mary Carroll

Introduction Research on narratives in recent years has largely focused on issues concerning the diversity of functions they fulfil within different contexts of use, and includes a wide range of studies on how they are constructed to meet both social and cultural norms. With regard to the linguistic knowledge involved in carrying out a task of this kind, and the way in which it is acquired, it is frequently assumed that ‘in general, however, by the time children enter school their language use is correct, and their basic sentence types are similar to those of the adults’ (Smith et al., 1998: 306). This implies that what is left in the acquisition of narrative competence will centre on its function as a complex social skill. Claims of this kind illustrate a fundamental deficit in current theories and models of first language acquisition. In this field, the conviction prevails that what has to be explained is the developmental path up to the point at which a child masters the syntax, morphology and phonology of a language, along with its basic lexicon – all of which will generally have taken place by the age of five or six. The few areas that still cause problems at that age will not pose core questions with regard to the acquisition process. This means that the development of linguistic competence in later stages does not attract much attention in first language acquisition research, since the main focus is placed on early phases in which the linguistic system is acquired. In the structuralist tradition, the dichotomy between language and its use in 559

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context has led to a reduction in scope on what is considered the objective of linguistic theory. Although language in use is seen as a research topic in its own right, the linguistic principles that apply at this level are not viewed as forming an essential part of our linguistic knowledge, but are frequently consigned to domains such as rhetoric or style, thereby implying that their application is a matter of skill or taste rather than system-based constraints. Research in adult second language acquisition shows, however, that the picture is more complicated, since there are at least two levels in organising information and selecting forms for expression. One is indeed the level of register or style where second language speakers have problems in selecting forms which are appropriate in conventional as well as structural terms, given a specific context. The other level in information organisation relates to core features of the system that draw on knowledge at the syntactic – semantic interface and its implications for the way information is organised for expression in a given language. We will illustrate what we mean by an example from English and German. Taking a pragmatic category such as ‘shared information’, some of the formal means used to indicate the status of a referent in this respect are definite and indefinite articles. Although English and German are very close with regard to the formal system of determiners, the principles that determine their use differ systematically in syntactic, semantic, as well as pragmatic terms. Referents encoded as subject of a clause that are not familiar to the interlocutor are more frequently mentioned with an indefinite article in English (a figure in black disappeared behind the hedge). In German, by contrast, mention of a referent with this status (indefinite article) rarely occurs in clause-initial position, since word order is relatively free and the subject can be placed in a position following the verb (in dem Moment verschwand eine in schwarz gekleidete Figur (at this moment disappeared a black dressed figure). Based on syntactic constraints, the position preceding the verb has an outstanding function in information structure in German and information that can be mapped into this slot is subject to systematic constraints in informational terms. Similarly, whether a referent can be treated in context as specific or unspecific also differs in these two languages, and its linguistic underpinnings are far from being well understood. The point we should not lose sight of concerns the foundations on which cross-linguistic differences of this kind are based, since they illustrate the type of linguistic knowledge required when organising information for expression: Speakers have to draw on grammatical and semantic knowledge that goes beyond its complex fusion at the syntactic – semantic interface to include relevant factors at the level of pragmatic knowledge. We are dealing here with the way a complex process takes place in language acquisition. As the present study demonstrates, the acquisition process involved when learning one’s first language lasts well into the speaker’s teens and beyond. And although adult L2 speakers may sometimes get close, they do not achieve native-like competence in this regard.

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The present study forms part of an extensive series of cross-linguistic analyses which show how grammatical differences determine basic principles underlying information organisation in text production. As an illustration of what lies ahead on the long road into the system we can now turn our attention to the following examples. The first example is taken from an oral retelling of a silent film, produced by a 10-year-old speaker, while the second is that of an adult speaker retelling the same episode.1 Both speakers were asked to tell what happened in the film they had just seen. (1) (child 10 years) 001 . . .dann landete der lehmmann in so einem papierland then landed the clayman in such a paperland 002 dann hat ihn ein blatt angegriffen then has him a sheet of paper attacked 003 dann ist er weitergegangen then has he walked on 004 und dann war da ein wirbelsturm mit lauter blättern and then was there a whirlwind with several sheets 005 und dann hat er wasser auf dem papier gesehen and then has he water on the paper seen 006 und dann ist er dahin gegangen and then has he there-thither walked 007 und dann hat er versucht die tropfen aufzufangen and then has he tried the drops to catch 008 dann kamen keine. . . then came none (2) (adult) 001 . . .das sandmännchen landet in einem blättermeer the little sandman lands in a sea of sheets 002 lauter umherfliegende große blätter many flying-around large sheets 003 teilweise auch richtige wirbel in part also real whirls 004 es wird von einem großen blatt umgeschmissen it gets by a large sheet thrown over 005 Ø steht wieder auf stands again up 006 Ø entdeckt zufällig eine wasserpfütze discovers by chance a waterpuddle 007 Ø versucht das wasser zu greifen tries the water to grasp 008 und Ø stürzt dabei ab . . . and crashes thereby down

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The text produced by the 10-year-old speaker is typical for this age group. While it does not contain any formal errors in a narrow sense, there are clearly major differences between the two texts. First of all, the child and adult speaker select different referential frames in sequencing the events. The 10-year-old selects the retrospective perspective found in narratives of personal experience, the temporal anchor typically selected by this age group, while adult speakers organise the sequence of events on the basis of a frame of reference that includes the deictic now (cf. Carroll & von Stutterheim, 2003; Carroll et al., 2008). In the child’s text, each event maps into a ‘predefined’ set of intervals, so to speak, which are established, irrespective of the nature of the event, by an explicit marker of temporal shift, the temporal relation expressed by dann (then). A further domain that is critical for information organisation is given with the syntactic subject and its formal and functional properties. In the first example, the candidate for the role of subject is determined by the participant with the highest status on the scale of agentivity (cf. example (1), line 002 and 008). In the adult text, by contrast, the subject role is assigned to the protagonist, the argument with the highest status in ‘topic’ terms, a feature defined in terms of text coherence and informational status (cf. use of the passive in example 2/004). Another evident difference lies in reference management, in this case the formal means used in referring to the entity maintained across adjacent utterances as subject of a main clause. The 10-year-old speaker does not make use of ellipsis, whereas ellipsis is highly frequent in the adult narrative. 2 These initial observations point to a fundamental difference between the two texts which does not lie in mastering the formal system as such – children at this age can produce passive constructions, use subject ellipsis, or express other temporal relations in addition to temporal shift (then). The difference lies in how the information is constructed, linked and referentially anchored for the text as whole, which leads us to the main questions addressed in this chapter. Given the fact that children continue to acquire the necessary knowledge up to the age of 13 and 14, (a) what do they learn between the ages of 8 and 14 and (b) what triggers the course of development? In other words, how do they find their way into the adult system across developmental stages that go beyond the acquisition of form to mastering the language-specific principles that determine how linguistic means are used in context? The point of departure in investigating these questions in the present study lies in the status of grammaticised meanings and their role in determining the decisions speakers make when organising information for expression. We assume that grammatical form is not an autonomous system independent of meaning but is a core factor with respect to the way information is organised for expression. Since meanings that are

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grammaticalised differ across languages, cross-linguistic diversity consists less in what is possible to specify than what is relatively easy or hard to specify (cf. Hockett, 1954; Slobin, 1991, 1996; Talmy, 1987). Meanings that are ‘easier’ to specify are for instance temporal concepts which are grammaticised on the verb (for example, aspectual distinctions representing an event as ‘ongoing’ or ‘completed’, via the imperfective/perfective contrast). Speakers of languages in which temporal concepts of this kind are grammaticised on the verb (e.g. English or Arabic) are more likely to express corresponding aspects of a dynamic situation, when relevant in context, compared to speakers who have to resort to lexical means in order to convey the same kind of information (cf. Carroll & von Stutterheim, 1997, 2003; von Stutterheim & Nüse, 2003). Based on a series of analyses in adult second language acquisition, the present study addresses the role of grammatical form and how word order constraints in German drive the course of development in first language acquisition when organising information for expression in narrative tasks. One of the core grammatical features which is relevant for information structure in German is the ‘verb second’ constraint on word order in main clauses. This constraint entails that the finite verb must form the second main constituent in the clause, leading to the so-called verb second or ‘V2 constraint’ on word order. Significantly for information organisation, this structural constraint creates a ‘slot’ or Vorfeld (pre-field) in main clauses which can accommodate only one constituent. If information encoded in the syntactic subject, for example, cannot be placed in this position, as discussed above, the speaker has to decide on another alternative with a suitable status, since this position in the clause is typically reserved for information which is accessible for the interlocutor (e.g. part of the common ground). This factor is crucial in planning information structure in narratives with regard to the type of information that will be eligible for mention in this slot. The V2 constraint constitutes one of the significant grammatical differences between German, Romance languages and English, for example, in information structure. So how does the first language learner deal with constraints of this kind on their way to narrative competence? The role of the syntactic underpinnings and the idea of syntactic boot strapping into text and discourse competence have been put forward in the literature. However, grammatical categories cannot be reduced to formal categories based simply on distributional criteria but are linked into intersections of semantic and pragmatic distinctions, as encoded via grammatical structure. They concern regularities in the mapping of domains of linguistic form ‘as generalizable over language to isolable domains of characterizable conceptual content’ (cf. Silverstein, 1991). But empirical research addressing the crucial role of grammatical underpinnings in discourse competence on a larger scale is still outstanding.

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The Acquisition of Text Competence Research Background Although there are few studies that have addressed the implications of language-specific grammatical structure for information organisation in depth, there is a large body of research on the development of text competence from different perspectives (cf. overview in Hickmann, 2006). The large-scale crosslinguistic project, directed by R. Berman and D. Slobin (cf. Berman & Slobin, 1994), can be regarded as a milestone in this field and continues to provide a relevant research programme for future work. Based on the analysis of oral narrative texts, the authors focused on three central aspects of text competence: (a) filtering which includes selection of content for verbalisation and perspective taking on the selected content, (b) packaging which refers to structuring information in hierarchical terms, in particular foregrounding–backgrounding and the compression of information and (c) developmental path which addresses the determining factors in the acquisition of discourse competence (linguistic, cognitive and pragmatic). The data cover speakers from three to nine years, and their narratives are compared with adult texts. The results present a clear picture across the different languages studied. Children develop their narrative abilities along all the dimensions mentioned and texts become formally more differentiated and structurally more complex. What is particularly relevant in the present context – the authors stress the extent to which development is based on language-specific principles. ‘We were repeatedly surprised to discover how closely learners stick to the set of distinctions that they have been given by their language’ (Berman & Slobin, 1994: 641). Further studies on L1 acquisition also aim at identifying age-related patterns in the expression of temporal relations, spatial reference, topic selection, grounding and profiling, and provide a wide range of insights into how children solve complex communicative tasks at different ages (cf. e.g. Bamberg, 2007; Behrens, 2009; Berman & Verhoeven, 2002; Bowerman, 2002; Hickmann, 2003; KarmiloffSmith, 1987; Perdue, 2008; Tolchinsky & Rosado, 2005; Watorek, 2004).3 However, most of these studies do not look at stages of development by speakers beyond the age of eight or nine. Berman (2004) presents a very clear account of the framework used in functional L1-acquistion research which distinguishes three phases in language development: • • •

I pre-grammatical: item-based, situation-bound II grammaticised: structure-dependent, rule-bound III conventionalised: context-oriented, discourse-motivated (Berman, 2004: 13)

This model distinguishes between separate phases in the development of narrative competence, a grammar-driven phase and a discourse-driven phase

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in development, without specifying direct links between grammar and discourse, however. Berman elaborates this position in saying that ‘after acquiring rule-based knowledge, there comes a state of proficient integration of this knowledge and use. In mature language usage, abstract rules are constrained by norms of use, rhetorical conventions and discourse appropriateness, yielding variation in style and register in accordance with the particular communicative context’ (Berman, 2004: 14). The two-step model is problematic, given the fact that information organisation at the level of discourse follows language-specific patterns. Research in this domain will need to focus more closely on grammatical knowledge and how it drives the course of development in specific terms in order to build on these studies and gain further insight into the nature of the determining factors. In concluding this brief survey, we would like to stress the focus of the present study: How do children discover the language-specific principles underlying information organisation once they have acquired the formal means of the language, and what factors trigger or impede the process of development for speakers between the ages of 8 and 14. We assume that competence in this regard cannot be adequately described at the level of rhetoric or style since it involves syntactic, semantic and pragmatic knowledge, culminating in a set of language-specific organising principles that operate at a macrostructural level when producing a text.

Macrostructural Organisation of Information Ever since Labov’s seminal work on narrative texts linguists have aimed at identifying and describing the overarching principles on which text structure is based (Labov, 1997; Labov & Waletzky, 1967), leading possibly to the specification of universal principles in text construction. A narrative was defined as a specific way of presenting past events in which the order of the sequence of independent clauses can be viewed as the order in which the events reported took place. The order reflects a before–after relation and forms the skeletal structure of the narrative. Narratives of personal experience typically include an orientation or abstract, with evaluations embedded in the complicating action, followed by a resolution or coda. Further aspects studied concern text structure in general, covering functions such as coherence, grounding and topic management. Differences observed across languages with respect to information organisation were mainly traced to a source that was considered unrelated to language: cultural traditions. In this context, language specificity was assumed relevant at the level of form only. As outlined above, this view is still held by many researchers in the field. Large-scale comparative empirical studies on text structure and the development of text competence, however, revealed that there are systematic differences across languages that are grammatically driven (Carroll et al., 2004, 2008; Watorek, 2004). In what follows we will briefly summarise work

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on macrostructural organisation in narratives along these lines. This will serve as background against which language development will be described and analysed. Taking the underlying structure on which a narrative is based, speakers are asked to provide an answer to the underlying question Quaestio, that is what happened (to x) at tn; what happened (to x) at tn + 1; what happened at tn + 2; etc. (cf. von Stutterheim, 1997; von Stutterheim & Klein, 1989). In the process of planning and producing a narrative text, the speaker has to select information from his or her knowledge base which fits this mould. Processes of this kind in text production are subject to a complex set of organising principles that operate at the level of macroplanning for the task as a whole. Cross-linguistic comparisons show how grammaticalised categories such as tense and aspect, as well as constraints on word order and semantic role assignment, determine the selection of information and the way it is structured in language-specific terms (Carroll & Lambert, 2003; Carroll & von Stutterheim, 2003; von Stutterheim et al., 2003). Starting with the chain of events, the set of abstract temporal relations by which events are linked in sequence are determined by the temporal and aspectual concepts encoded grammatically in the language. As mentioned above, temporal frames of reference form one of the core elements in the set of global organising principles that include not only temporal perspective taking and temporal linkage, but spatial perspective taking, the assignment of informational status to the participants in the events (topic status), as well as further relevant features for information structure such as attitude (on the specific role of this component in Japanese, e.g. cf. Tomita, 2008). Referential frames support the integration of information from different semantic domains in text production in that individual predicate-argument structures can be anchored with respect to time, space and worlds in coherent terms. They provide the criteria which allow the speaker to embed information in hierarchical terms and support the creation of coherence from one utterance to the next. Starting with the role of the temporal frame in information organisation, a narrative is constituted by a sequence of intervals (what happened at t1; at t2, at t3) that have to be identified and linked in sequence. A shift-in-time relation may be established via the temporal properties of the events selected: If an event is presented as bounded or completed (e.g. he dashed for cover behind the hedge) the interval in time in question can be used as a point of reference, via its point of completion, to allow a shift in time to the next one in line. (t3) He dashed over to the other side of the road (after that, at t4) and disappeared behind the hedge. The core relation of temporal shift can be marked explicitly by expressions such as then. Significantly, for the organisation of information, speakers may want to select or construct events with temporal properties that deliver a point of completion and thus provide the basis for temporal shift. The temporal relations thereby established involve the post time of the preceding event, given its point of completion, which functions

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as the temporal point of reference for the subsequent event. As shown in the narrative examples above, adult speakers do proceed in organising information for expression in this way while the younger speakers do not. If the events are presented, for example, as he was dashing down the road, making his way in the shade of the hedge, there is no point of reference that supports a shift in time. Making his way in the shade of the hedge may overlap with dashing down the road, or not. Furthermore, cross-linguistic comparisons show that frames of reference that accommodate event representation of the latter kind are more frequently found in languages that have grammaticised means to express the relevant aspectual distinctions (e.g. English, Arabic), in contrast to German, for example. It is important to note that if speakers decide to mark the sequence by simply predicating each event as located with respect to the after-relation, expressed by a form such as then (and then . . .; and then. . ., as illustrated above in the text of the 10-year-old speaker), this reduces the level of complexity in processes required in information organisation, since speakers do not have to cater for the appropriate inherent properties that will ensure temporal shift on an internal basis in the temporal frame. In addition to temporal relations, the linearisation or sequencing of the situations selected for mention is not only given in temporal terms but is also organised with respect to possible causal relations as well. Causal relations can be described as involving a ‘cause’ and its ‘consequence’ or a ‘goal’ and its ‘precondition’. Relations of this kind constitute one of the core factors in establishing coherence in adult narrative texts. As a further complicating factor in information structure, the cross-linguistic comparisons show that questions of causality can be presented from the viewpoint of the narrator or the protagonists in the story, or both. Preferences in this regard also show language-specific tendencies that can be linked to the temporal frame of reference selected, thus pinpointing another factor that has to be taken into account when acquiring the relevant linguistic knowledge underlying information organisation. In addition to temporal and causal relations, speakers implement means that encode the informational status of the entities and participants mentioned. The syntactic subject, in contrast to other arguments, plays a central role in this context. Eligibility for mention as subject of a main clause (in contrast to a subordinate clause) may be decided on the basis of a semantic criterion such as agentivity, for example (Carroll & Lambert, 2003). Selectional procedures of this kind profile cause–consequence relations as a means of advancing the story line and ensuring coherence. Speakers can also select the pragmatic criterion of ‘topichood’ in assigning entities to subject function. In this case, they typically profile the main character(s) in a narrative as the unmarked candidate. This means, in turn, that information will be organised for expression in a way that allows the creation of coherence defined over the intentions and attitudes of the characters involved.

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Language Specificity in Macrostructural Information Organisation Grammaticised categories impose constraints on information structure in that they provide a scaffold for the selection and structuring of information, thereby leading to language-specific principles of information selection and organisation. As mentioned above, information structure in German is finetuned so as to accommodate the relation temporal shift, and this feature is driven at a grammatical level in the following way: As outlined above, word order constraints in main clauses in German require that the finite verb must constitute the second main constituent in the clause. In a narrative task, the candidates for mention in the Vorfeld, the slot preceding the finite verb, are typically temporal relations which are associated with change in state events and encode temporal shift, thus allowing the speaker to advance the story line. The cross-linguistic comparisons show that information selection and topic assignment is channelled in these terms in German, and with this the decision as to what type of entity can typically be mapped as subject of a main clause. There is a focus on candidates that can deliver on temporal shift – the main character in the story for example, who may be expected to act in bringing about changes in state, that is an event with a point of completion. This constitutes the preferred option in German narratives (as well as in Dutch, the other ‘verb-second’ language in our studies) and determines informational status within a hierarchical structure. Information organisation within this frame is marked by the following factors: the main character, the entity most likely to be involved in change in state events, is accorded a higher status, compared to other agents, in that it is eligible for mention as subject of a main clause. This can be observed when other agents compete with the protagonist for mention in this role. In contexts of this kind, other agents are typically mapped into a passive construction as the logical, and not the syntactic subject, or the information is downgraded in a subordinate clause. This ensures maintenance of the status (‘topic’) of the main character at the level of thematic continuity. It creates the conditions for use of ellipsis in reference maintenance allowing topic continuity to be sustained within the text as a whole. Patterns in text structure thus correlate in this way with typological features of languages used, and are relevant for the way information is structured for the text as a whole – its macrostructure.

Acquisition of Principles of Information Organisation On the basis of our understanding of macrostructure as induced by grammatical features of the respective language, the question of language development appears in a different light. The fact that children continue to develop their language competence on a systematic basis beyond the age of 7 can be

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analysed with respect to the grammatical categories relevant for information organisation. Our hypothesis in this context can be formulated as follows: developmental changes in text competence are driven by core grammatical features and their entailments for information organisation – a process which is modulated and elaborated on with development in the speaker’s range of rhetorical and stylistic variation. In what follows we present an in depth-study of children’s narratives produced by speakers between 7 and 14 years. The focus of analysis is placed on the two critical domains for macrostructural organisation in German texts: temporal reference, linkage and subject selection.

The Empirical Study The database elicited for the developmental study consists of film retellings of a silent film ‘Quest’,4 a stimulus which has been used in a large-scale cross-linguistic study with adult speakers of 13 languages. The film is approximately nine minutes long, and is clearly structured into five episodes. It portrays the adventures of a clay figure, the only animate-like protagonist in the film, who tries to find his way in a hostile world. He encounters natural forces (high winds, flying rocks, huge sheets of paper) which in some way or another get in his way in his quest for salvation. For the analysis of information structure the constellation is straightforward. There is one main character with a well-defined status (animate-like) with respect to the other major players (inanimate), so that mapping patterns in information structure can be compared accordingly. The participants in the study first watched the film as a whole, and then viewed it again episode for episode. After each episode the film was stopped and they were asked to tell what happened in the episode they had just seen. The retelling was thus off-line. For purposes of comparison, the interlocutor showed very little response, leaving the initiative to the speakers. The elicitation questions were formulated in the past tense: what happened. Although the question was formulated in this tense, the present tense was selected spontaneously by all adult speakers. The participant groups range in age as follows: 7/8 years, 9/10 years, 11/12 years and 13/14 years, with 20 subjects in each group (cf. Halm, 2010 for a detailed description of the elicitation procedure). The children attended elementary as well as high school, and were controlled for social and educational background, gender (50% girls, 50% boys) and region (50% from the north of Germany, 50% from the south). The latter variable was important in the present study since the use of tenses, in particular the preterite and the present perfect, differs in southern and northern parts of Germany. 5 We will come back to this factor in the discussion of the empirical results. Adult narratives were used as a point of reference indicating the state in which narrative competence is fully developed. These texts were elicited using the

570

Par t 3: Typological Var iat ion and L anguage Acquisit ion

same procedure and the adult speakers were students at the Universities of Heidelberg and Kiel. All narratives were audio-recorded and transcribed in an orthographical format. The data were segmented into utterance units, where an utterance unit is defined as a minimal predicate-argument structure. The tests were stored in an Excel database, and utterance units were annotated according to predicate type, semantic role, as well as properties such as hypotaxis, use of passives and other functional properties (main structure/side structure6 ). The empirical study is based on the analysis of the entire corpus, but the analysis focuses in parts on one episode (the world of paper).

Empirical Analyses The analysis starts with a number of general properties that can be taken as indicative of the development of text competence: formal aspects (length), functional aspects (grounding) and semantic aspects (situation type). The results confirm those found in other cross-sectional studies on the development of narrative competence (cf. Berman & Slobin, 1994; Hickmann, 2003). The next step in the analysis focuses on temporal organisation as well as subject selection across the four age groups.

General text properties Figure 28.1 shows the development of text length, taking the overall number of utterance units. The picture is not surprising since there is a considerable increase between 7/8 and 9/10, while the amount of information provided by the speakers remains more or less at the same level in the periods that follow. Further elaboration takes place after age 14, as shown in Figure 28.2. This can be attributed to an increase in the descriptive information provided. Work on earlier phases in development has shown that children start by giving short accounts of the events. Inclusion of descriptive information (side 200

172

150 100

108

117

112

11/12yrs

13/14yrs

83

50 0 7/8yrs

9/10yrs

Figure 28.1 Length of texts in number of utterances

Adults

Macrostruc tural Pr inc iples and Nar rat ive Competence

571

100,0% 80,0%

79,1%

68,8%

70,1% 62,2%

60,0%

53,7% 46,3%

40,0% 20,0%

20,9%

31,2%

29,9%

37,8%

0,0% 7/8 yrs

9/10 yrs main structure

11/12 yrs

13/14 yrs

adults

side structure

Figure 28.2 Distribution of information across main structure and side structure

structure information) comes only gradually, and serves to anchor the events or explain mental states, etc. This course of development continues over the age groups. The number of side structures produced by the youngest group amounts to 20%, increasing to 37.8% for the 13/14-year-olds. The following two excerpts illustrate this development in information selection. (3) (7 years)7 01 . . .da ist es (das männchen) auf dies papier raufgefallen there is it on this sheet has on- fallen 002 und dann ist da so ein blatt gekommen and then has there such a sheet come 003 und dann ist es an seinem kopf vorbei gegangen and then has it his head passed by 004 und dann ist da noch ein blatt gekommen and then has there again a sheet come 005 das ist auf den kopf gelegen this has on his head laid 006 und dann hat er so eine pfütze gesehen and then has he such a puddle seen 007 und dann hat er raufgefasst. . . and then has he on- touched (it) (4) (12 years) 001 . . .dann fällt der sandmensch ziemlich weit runter then falls the sandman rather far down 002 der boden ist alles aus papier the ground is totally (made) of paper 003 und da fliegen auch papierfetzen rum and there fly also scraps of paper around

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Par t 3: Typological Var iat ion and L anguage Acquisit ion

004 005 006

und die fliegen ihm entgegen and they fly him towards und er weicht halt aus and he avoids (it) und dann gibt es da noch einen papierwirbel im hintergrund. . . and then is there also a paper whirl in the background

In example (4), the 12-year-old speaker provides information about the situation whereas the younger speaker focuses on the salient actions when selecting information for expression. This difference in constructing the film retelling is reflected in the type of predicates selected, taking the distinction between one-state predicates and two-state predicates.8 The latter category includes predicates that relate to a change in state. This property provides a temporal reference point for a shift in time relation, as mentioned above. Information in the texts, which departs from the referential context of the story, is treated as a separate group (comments by the speakers, for example) (Figure 28.3). Summarising the findings so far, one can say that they show a linear continuation in the course of development in text complexity as described for younger age groups (cf. Berman & Slobin, 1994; Hickmann, 2003). But we see that even at the age of 14 there is still quite a stretch to go yet on the developmental path. All texts are organised on the basis of the event sequence but become more elaborate, differentiated and hierarchically structured as age proceeds. However, what drives the course taken in development, given that the children do not differ in their command of formal aspects of the linguistic system? In order to pinpoint some of the driving forces we will take a detailed look at the two domains that were identified as critical for information organisation in narratives.

100,0% 80,0%

83,9% 86,0% 80,2% 81,3% 75,7%

60,0% 40,0% 17,1% 17,1% 15,3% 11,7%

20,0%

21,7% 2,3% 1,6% 0,8% 2,7% 2,6%

0,0% event predicates 7/8 yrs

Figure 28.3 Predicate types

9/10 yrs

state predicates 11/12 yrs

comments 13/14 yrs

adults

Macrostruc tural Pr inc iples and Nar rat ive Competence

573

Results for the Temporal Domain: Forms and Functions The first striking observation lies in the different use of tense forms. The youngest group in the sample uses past tense forms, with the present perfect as the most frequent form, while at the other end of the continuum we see that adult speakers use the present tense as the matrix tense. So what happens in between? Figures 28.4 and 28.5 give an overview over the tenses found in the texts across age groups, which are split up for main and side structure utterances. What is interesting at this point is the fact that there is no turning point where children move clearly from a perspective characteristic of personal narratives to a perspective that takes what is represented in the 100,0%

97,7%

94,1%

85,6%

80,0%

65,1%

60,0%

47,6%

40,0% 20,0% 0,0%

5,4% 0,5%

42,3%

25,1%

9,7%

8,5%

12,9% 1,5%

7/8 yrs

9/10 yrs

11/12 yrs

13/14 yrs

Perfect

Present

2,3% 0,0%

adults Preterite

Figure 28.4 Developmental patterns: results for the temporal domain in the main structure of the narrative10

95,9%

100,0% 83,8%

80,0% 60,0% 40,0% 20,0%

68,4% 50,0%

48,2%

27,8%

39,5%

21,1%

22,2%

9,4% 11,4%

0,0% 7/8 yrs Present

9/10 yrs

9,5%

11/12 yrs Perfect

6,8%

13/14 yrs

4,1% 0,0%

adults Preterite

Figure 28.5 Developmental patterns: results for the temporal domain in the side structure of the narrative11

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Par t 3: Typological Var iat ion and L anguage Acquisit ion

film as unfolding before the mind’s eye – while speaking – thus giving grounds for the use of the present tense. The pattern of development moves instead through a phase in which tense switch is erratic. Figures 28.4 and 28.5 illustrate the use of tenses across the age groups, differentiated according to functional status.9 Speakers in the youngest age group select the present perfect as the dominant tense with a few switches to the preterite form. The 9/10-year-olds have partly started to select the present tense as an option, which occurs in conjunction with a contrast between the present perfect and the preterite form. This latter opposition remains active with the 11/12-year-old group. Use of the preterite persists up to the age of 13/14 when it then disappears. But there is still a large number of present perfect forms compared to the adult speakers. An analysis of the side structure utterances (background information) presents a different picture. Side structure information is expressed by preterite in half of the cases, and decreases on a continuous developmental path. The present tense takes over, but again, speakers at the age of 13/14 still mark background information by means of a tense contrast more frequently than adults. The interesting question at this point concerns the function of these forms, in particular of tense switch. In the following we will take a closer look at the contexts where tense switch occurs. The youngest group uses the present perfect as the dominant tense, and the contexts in which a tense switch occurs cover three functions.

Present perfect → simple past This switch occurs mainly with the youngest group. Use of the preterite is related to utterances in which the syntactic subject is not the protagonist (function I). The excerpt below illustrates this pattern. We interpret this as evidence of a stage in development in which information begins to be organised on a hierarchical basis. (5) (7 years) 001 . . . und dann ist das gegangen und gegangen and then has it walked and walked 002 dann kam ein papier then came a (sheet of) paper 003 und dann hat es sich erschrocken and then has it got scared 004 und dann hat es nachgedacht and then has it pondered 005 und dann kam ein papier and then came a (sheet of) paper 006 und hat das umgefegt and has it swept over

perfect preterite perfect perfect preterite perfect

Macrostruc tural Pr inc iples and Nar rat ive Competence

007

dann ist das aufgestanden. . . then has it got up

575

perfect

This pattern on tense use is maintained by the second age group. (6) (10 years) 001 . . . und dann kam auf einmal ein blatt and then came all of a sudden a sheet 002 und dann ist er ganz schnell so hochgegangen and then has he very fast gone up 003 und dann/und dann ist er gegangen einen augenblick and then/and then has he gone a moment 004 und dann ist er gegangen and then has he gone 005 und dann kam von vorne wieder ein blatt and then came from infront again a sheet 006 konnte das blatt noch ausweichen could the sheet still avoid 007 dann kamen welche hinterher ein blatt then came some after(it) a sheet 008 da konnte er nicht mehr ausweichen there could he no more escape 009 und dann ist er mit dem blatt hingefallen. . . and then has he with the sheet fallen down

preterite perfect perfect perfect preterite

preterite preterite perfect

There are two other functions that are clearly related to a tense shift since the beginning and closure of episodes are sometimes marked in this way, as described in numerous studies (Berman & Slobin, 1994). The forms which fulfil this function change during the course of development and two stages can be observed in the data (function II): Stage I: simple past (beginning/closure) – present perfect (narrative sequence) Stage II: present perfect (beginning/closure) – present tense (narrative sequence) The other function, the grounding function (function III), which is also expressed by tense shift, has also been described in detail in earlier studies on narratives and the development of narrative competence. This is found in the present data up to the point at which speakers move into the present tense strategy. Again, we can distinguish two stages: Stage I: present perfect (main structure) – simple past (side structure) Stage II: absence of tense switch to indicate grounding functions The two latter functions are only sporadically marked in the texts of the youngest group, but can be identified more frequently in the narratives

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Par t 3: Typological Var iat ion and L anguage Acquisit ion

100,0% 80,0% 63,0%

64,5%

60,0%

52,5% 46,3%

40,0% 20,0% 2,7%

4,4%

4,7%

5,4%

5,5% 4,6%

0,0% 7/8 yrs

9/10 yrs

11/12 yrs

Prefield-dann

13/14yrs

adults

Middlefield-dann

Figure 28.6 dann in main and side structure

produced by the 11/12-year-old group. In terms of text organisation, this points to the absence of macrostructural planning in the younger groups. The story is narrated as a sequence of events which are equal in informational status. This interpretation is further supported by the pattern of use of the adverbial shifter dann (then). Figure 28.6 shows frequencies of occurrence differentiated according to the functional status of the utterance. The two younger groups use the form dann in more then 65% of all utterances both in main and in side structures. The two examples illustrate this pattern: (7) (7 years) 001 . . . und dann ist er aufgestanden and then has he got up 002 ist ein bisschen gelaufen has a little run 003 und dann hat der wind eben die papiere ein bisschen geweht and then has the wind the papers a little blown (around) 004 und dann war das männchen da eben and then was the little man there 005 und dann war der sturm auf einmal so stark and then was the storm all of a sudden so strong 006 dass es mitgeflogen ist that it flew (along) 007 ist dann hingefallen has then fallen down 008 dann ist die zeitung auf das männchen geflogen. . . then has the paper on the little man flown

Macrostruc tural Pr inc iples and Nar rat ive Competence

577

(8) (9 years) 001 . . .dann landete der lehmmann in so ein papierland then landed the clay man on such a paperland 002 dann hat ihn ein blatt angegriffen then has him a sheet attacked 003 dann ist er weitergegangen then has he walked on 004 und dann war da ein wirbelsturm mit lauter blätter and then was there a whirlstorm with many sheets 005 und dann hat er wasser auf dem papier gesehen and then has he water on the paper seen 006 und dann ist er dahin gegangen and then has he there-thither walked 007 und dann hat er versucht die tropfen aufzufangen and then has he tried the drops to catch 008 dann kamen keine. . . then came none 009 dann hat er versucht aufzusaugen then has he tried to absorb 010 und dann war er zu schwer and then was he too heavy 011 und das papier ist gerissen. . . and the paper has torn The structure implemented in the texts involves a strict chronological sequence where the speaker adopts the role of an experiencer who witnessed the events. Texts of this type do not show an overall pattern of hierarchical organisation, but there is evidence of the first steps taken in linking information more closely at a local level (cf. the last two utterances in example (8)). The course of development shown in the domain of temporality up to the age of 13/14 can be described on two levels. At a cognitive level, children shift the perspective taken on the events from experiencer to reporter, a change that triggers the shift from past to present tense. This implies that there is a change in perspective from a narrative of experience to a narrative of reported fictitious events. In linguistic terms, the texts develop from a linear structure of chronologically related, equally weighted events into a hierarchically organised macrostructure which draws on a number of expressive devices in different ways. However, the central question still remains unanswered: what drives development and why do different aspects at the level of macrostructural organisation emerge in the child’s system in a coordinated way? As a key category for macrostructural organisation we can identify the institution of an entity in information structure as ‘topic’ on a global level in the narrative as a central factor in driving development. The following section deals with this step in development across the age groups.

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Par t 3: Typological Var iat ion and L anguage Acquisit ion

Course of Development: Findings for the Subject Domain The examples given above already illustrate differences in the mapping of entities as the grammatical subject. Figure 28.7 shows the distribution of entities encoded as subject for the two types ‘protagonist’ and ‘non-protagonist’ in the main structure utterances. At a first glance, the difference is not striking. However, a closer analysis of the way in which the grammatical subject is expressed and the criteria that lead to the selection of an entity as subject reveals the different principles at work. In the first stage of development the criteria for selecting an entity are semantically determined. Agents are encoded as subject and the protagonist is downgraded and encoded as the object of the clause when he does not function as agent. Within this stage there are two phases which differ with respect to the position of the subject in the sentence. As described above, German has no absolute syntactic constraints on the position of arguments and adjuncts in the clause – taking the relevant constituents in the context in question (temporal adjuncts, arguments). In the texts of the younger speakers, the first position in the clause (Vorfeld) is taken up by the temporal adverbial, which means that all other constituents must follow the finite verb, that is, will be placed in the Mittelfeld. If the entity encoded as subject is one of the external forces acting as agent on the protagonist, then the order in the Mittelfeld is as follows: the protagonist is placed, in the role as object, before the subject. This order reveals that precedence is given to pragmatic over syntactic principles. Entities with topic status (the protagonist) are placed before newly introduced referents12: (9) (seven years) und dann hat ihn ein Papier umgeworfen and then has him a sheet thrown over 100,0% 85,1%

83,8%

86,2%

14,9%

16,2%

13,8%

90,7%

91,2%

9,3%

8,8%

80,0% 60,0% 40,0% 20,0% 0,0% 7/8 yrs

9/10 yrs Protagonist

11/12 yrs

13/14 yrs

adults

Inanimate entity

Figure 28.7 Developmental patterns: Results for the subject domain

Macrostruc tural Pr inc iples and Nar rat ive Competence

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In a next phase of development, the subject is placed following the finite verb in the typical subject position at the beginning of the Mittelfeld, the socalled Wackernagel position. In this stage of development, competition between pragmatic and syntactic principles is won by syntax. The subject of the clause, in this case an inanimate agent, is placed in topic position, thereby in violation of the topic constraint for subjects in that position. (10) (10 years) und dann wirft ein Papier ihn um and then throws a sheet him over This is followed by a third stage in which this conflict is resolved. The protagonist as the entity with topic status is encoded in subject function by means of a passive construction. This is also the structure found in the adult texts. (11) (13 years) er wird von einem Papier umgeworfen he gets by a sheet thrown over Table 28.1 summarises these topological patterns across the age groups, for both domains relevant for macrostructural organisation in German (Vorfeld, Mittelfeld). These findings point to a developmental path in which the speaker is searching for a solution to the conflict between pragmatic and syntactic requirements when moving into a macrostructural pattern in information organisation in which the protagonist is selected as a global topic. This course of development is supported by the following formal changes across the age groups. In the first age groups, there are relatively few cases of ellipsis in reference maintenance to the subject since all components are expressed explicitly. TABLE 28.1 Development of subject role Prefield Vorfeld

Wackernagel position

Middle field Mittelfeld

Pragmatic-local (7–10 years)

Temporal adverbial

Animate

Inanimate

Syntactic (9–12 years)

Temporal adverbial

Pragmatic-global (13/14 years)

Subject/patients

Object/patient

Subject/agent

Inanimate

Animate

Subject/agent

Object/patient

Inanimate Object

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Par t 3: Typological Var iat ion and L anguage Acquisit ion

The examples given above illustrate this tendency: the relation of ‘temporal shift’, as well as the subject, is expressed in every utterance. Subject ellipsis first emerges at a local level, where two events/situations are closely linked in causal terms. The following example illustrates this function: (12) Use of ellipsis und dann kam ein papier and then came a (sheet of) paper und ZERO hat das umgefegt and ZERO has swept it down However, subject ellipsis is not yet licensed at this stage at a global level (Figure 28.8). The findings also show that the pattern found for the 13 and 14-year-olds is still not adult-like, although subject ellipsis is used in linking stretches of information systematically. In this sense, they have developed the required structural basis which allows use of these means. In sum, the study of the semantic, functional and formal features of the syntactic subject shows that between the ages of 7 and 13, children develop substantially with respect to the range of planning procedures required in information organisation. They start with a clear-cut semantic criterion which is rooted in the requirements of a narrative task as giving an account of a sequence of interesting events. The agent who advances the story line is encoded as the subject in explicit terms and placed in a position that accords with its informational status. From there the child moves into a phase in which syntactic constraints predominate if there is a conflict between syntax and pragmatic status. This is finally solved in designating an entity with the status of ‘topic at a global level’. This provides the basis for the use of means which reflect this status – ellipsis and passive constructions. 100,0% 80,0% 60,0% 46,8% 40,0% 20,0%

24,6% 17,6%

20,5%

9/10 yrs

11/12 yrs

11,8%

0,0% 7/8 yrs

Figure 28.8 Ellipsis in main structure utterances

13/14 yrs

adults

Macrostruc tural Pr inc iples and Nar rat ive Competence

581

The Integration of Syntactic, Semantic and Pragmatic Knowledge and the Logic Underlying the Path of Development So far we have traced the developmental stages of narrative competence by looking in detail at the two domains time and subject, the categories which play a central role in macrostructural organisation in German narrative texts. We observed changes in the use and combination of tenses, degrees of explicitness in marking relations in the domain of time, as well as the principles which decide if a referent can be mapped as subject of a clause. Since none of these changes imply the acquisition of new forms, the fundamental forces that drive development in information organisation are not located at this level. As mentioned above, we present the thesis that grammatical constraints determine the course of development, not in the sense of a particular structure, but in their implications for information organisation which requires the integration of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic knowledge, with syntactic constraints as the point of departure. In German, the position preceding the finite verb in a main clause (Vorfeld) can be filled with only one constituent13 and this is decided on the basis of criteria that are central to information organisation (topic/focus). The key to developmental change lies in the status of the first position, as the findings reveal. At the ages between seven and 11 speakers ‘fill’ the first position on the basis of the one-dimensional principle of temporal progression (temporal adverbials) and subjects are selected at a local level as agents of the specific situation. Although the syntactic subject is a typical candidate for mention in the first position in a declarative sentence in German, children start with a principle that relates to the core structure of a narrative – a simple means of encoding succession by means of the form dann (then, etc.). This form is one dimensional in semantic terms since it does not entail any relational implications with respect to properties of the events mentioned. It is simply designated as the information that is eligible for mention in the Vorfeld of the main clauses that make up the narrative. This means that children have to develop criteria that allow a referent mapped as subject of the clause access to this position. Once they begin to slowly abandon the principle ‘time is the only candidate’, narrative organisation then destabilises, as shown in the inconsistent use of tense forms. Stability slowly returns with the instalment of the present tense, and its associated perspective, and the designation of an entity that is eligible for mention in the Vorfeld. This form of profiling a referent can be viewed in pragmatic terms as the assignment of ‘topic’ status. The emergence of global topic elements provides the basis for organisation principles that are hierarchical in that information that does not conform to a given set of criteria will qualify for downgrading. At this point means such ellipsis, passive constructions and subordination come into play.

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The path followed by the German children does not correspond to the course of development observed in other studies (cf. Berman, 2004; Hickmann, 2005). Fundamental steps in information organisation made on this long developmental path cannot be explained by rhetoric or style but are anchored in the grammatical system. Cross-linguistic differences can be attributed to the grammatical categories which provide the grid for languagespecific patterns in information organisation. The grammatical underpinnings and syntactic boot strapping into discourse organisation entail the fusion of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic knowledge in language-specific terms – a system of knowledge which takes years to uncover as well as discover. Grammatical form provides the key for the child in tracking down the knowledge they have to acquire when organising information in text functional terms. No one will deny of course that there are also cognitive prerequisites that have to be met so that the child can begin and continue to acquire more complex systems. But cognitive prerequisites do not reveal how the process takes the course observed. We hope these findings have provided evidence for the driving force which lies in specific properties of the grammar of a language.

Notes (1) The excerpts are taken from the study carried out by Halm (2010) in the context of her PhD thesis. (2) A quantitative analysis of 20 adult fi lm retellings in German showed that 52% of the utterances had zero subjects (von Stutterheim & Carroll, 2005). (3) Research on L1 acquisition beyond the age of nine years relates mainly to acquisition at school level, and investigates written language from a normative and/or communicative perspective (cf. Nippold, 1998). The relevant literature will not be surveyed here since there is no immediate link between education-oriented research, with questions related to teaching practice, and studies aimed at discovering what children spontaneously do and why. Results of research on natural language acquisition might in the end show us that progression defi ned within the school syllabus may run contrary to that found in language development outside the classroom (Halm, 2010). (4) The fi lm is produced by T. Stellmach and T. Montgomery, 1996. (5) Cf. the so-called Präteritumschwund in southern varieties of German (Abraham & Conradie, 2001). (6) This distinction corresponds by and large to the foreground–background distinction. However, it differs in that it is based on constraints defi ned by the text question (von Stutterheim, 1997) and not on formal properties of an utterance as originally defi ned by Hopper (1979). (7) The indented lines mark side structures. (8) cf. Klein (1994) on this classification of aktionsarten. (9) In contrast to observations in other studies, the data do not show any difference with respect to the north/south varieties of German. The use of the present perfect is preferred by all children at certain ages. (10) All numbers in the following charts are taken from one episode (paper world) across age groups. The episode is retold with an average of 15 utterances by the children.

Macrostruc tural Pr inc iples and Nar rat ive Competence

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(11) All numbers in the following charts are taken from one scene (paper scene) across age groups. The scene is retold in 15 utterances on average by the children. (12) The results for the German narratives clearly contradict the generalisation formulated by Khorounjaia and Tolchinsky, who say that the ‘avoidance of lexical arguments’ at ages between 9 and 13 is ‘a discursive universal’ (Khorounjaia & Tolchinsky, 2004: 104). In German, the developmental path goes from explicit to implicit arguments. (13) There are exceptions to this rule, but they are not relevant in the given context; see Dürscheid (1989) on word order in German.

References Abraham, W. and Conradie, C. (2001) Präteritumschwund in gesamteuropäischen Bezügen: areale Ausbreitung, heterogene Entstehung, Parsing sowie diskursgrammatische Grundlagen und Zusammenhänge. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Bamberg, M. (ed.) (2007) Narrative: State of the Art. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Behrens, H. (2009) Usage-based and emergentist approaches to language acquisition. Linguistics 47, 383–411. Berman, R. (ed.) (2004) Language Acquisition across Childhood and Adolescence. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Berman, R. and Slobin, D. (1994) Relating Events in Narrative: A Crosslinguistic Developmental Study. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Berman, R. and Verhoeven, L. (eds) (2002) Cross-linguistic perspectives on the development of text- production abilities in speech and writing. Part 2, Special issue of Written Language & Literacy 5:2. Bowerman, M. (2002) Mapping thematic roles onto syntactic functions: Are children helped by innate linking rules? In From Syntax to Cognition, From Phonology to Text (pp. 495–531). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Carroll, M. and von Stutterheim, Ch. (1997) Relations entre grammaticalisation et conceptualisation et implications sur l’acquisition d’une langue étrangère. Acquisition et Interaction en Langue Etrangère (AILE) 9, 83–115. Carroll, M. and Lambert, M. (2003) Information structure in narratives and the role of grammaticised knowledge: A study of adult French and German learners of English. In Ch. Dimroth and M. Starren (eds) Information Structure and the Dynamics of Language Acquisition (pp. 267–287). Amsterdam: Benjamins. Carroll, M. and von Stutterheim, Ch. (2003) Typology and information organisation: Perspective taking and language-specific effects in the construal of events. In A. Ramat (ed.) Typology and Second Language Acquisition (pp. 365–402). Berlin: de Gruyter. Carroll, M., von Stutterheim, Ch. and Nüse, R. (2004) The language and thought debate: A psycholinguistic approach. In C. Habel and T. Pechmann (eds) Approaches to Language Production (pp. 183–218). Berlin: Mouton. Carroll, M., Rossdeutscher, A., Lambert, M. and von Stutterheim, Ch. (2008) Subordination in narratives and macrostructural planning: A comparative point of view. In C.F. Hansen and W. Ramm (eds) ‘Subordination’ versus ‘Coordination’ in Sentence and Text (pp. 161–184). Amsterdam: Benjamins. Dürscheid, Ch. (1989) Zur Vorfeldbesetzung in deutschen Verbzweitstrukturen. Trier: FOKUS Wissenschaftlicher Verlag. Halm, U. (2010) Die Entwicklung narrativer Kompetenz bei Kindern zwischen 7 und 14 Jahren. Marburg: Tectum. Hickmann, M. (2003) Children’s Discourse: Person, Space and Time across Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Hickmann, M. (2005) To leap or not to leap from language into the mind? Theory & Psychology 15, 131–134. Hickmann, M. (2006) The relativity of motion in first language acquisition. In M. Hickmann and S. Robert (eds) Space in Languages. Linguistic Systems and Cognitive Categories (pp. 281–308). Amsterdam: Benjamins. Hockett, Ch. (1954) Chinese versus English: An exploration of the Whorfian thesis. In H. Hoijer (ed.) Language in Culture (pp. 106–123). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hopper, P.J. (1979) Aspect and foregrounding in discourse. In T. Givóu (ed.) Discourse and Syntax (pp. 213–241). New York: Academic Press. Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1987) Function and process in comparing language and cognition. In M. Hickmann (ed.) Social and Functional Approaches to Language and Thought (pp. 195–202). New York: Academic Press. Khorounjaia, E. and Tolchinsky, L. (2004) Discursive constraints on the lexical realization of arguments in Spanish. In R. Berman (ed.) Language Acquisition across Childhood and Adolescence (pp. 83–110). Amsterdam: Benjamins. Klein, W. (1994) Time in Language. London: Routledge. Labov, W. (1997) Some further steps in narrative analysis. Journal of Narrative and Life History 7, 395–415. Labov, W. and Waletzky, J. (1967) Narrative analysis. In J. Helm (ed.) Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts (pp. 12–44). Seattle: University of Washington Press. Nippold, M.A. (1998) Later Language Development: The School-Age and Adolescent Years (2nd edn). Austin, TX: Pro-Ed. Perdue, C. (2008) L’expression de la finitude chez les apprenants L1 et L2 du néerlandais, du français et de l’allemand. In M. Kail, M. Fayol and M. Hickmann (eds) L’apprentissage des langues. Paris: CNRS Editions. Silverstein, M. (1991) A funny thing happened on the way to the form: A functionalist critique of functionalist developmentalism. First Language 11, 143–179. Slobin, D.I. (1991) Learning to think for speaking: Native language, cognition, and rhetorical style. Pragmatics 1, 7–25. Slobin, D.I. (1996) From ‘thought and language’ to ‘thinking for speaking’. In J.J. Gumperz and S.C. Levinson (eds) Rethinking Linguistic Relativity (pp. 70–96). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, P.K., Cowie, H. and Blades, M. (1998) Understanding Children’s Development. Oxford: Blackwell. Talmy, L. (1987) The relation of grammar to cognition. In B. Rudzka-Ostyn (ed.) Topics in Cognitive Linguistics (pp. 165–205). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Tolchinsky, L. and Rosado, E. (2005) The effect of literacy, text type, and modality on the use of grammatical means for agency alternation in Spanish. Journal of Pragmatics 37, 209–237. Tomita, N. (2008) Der Informationsaufbau in Erzählungen: eine sprachvergleichende Untersuchung des Japanischen, des Deutschen und des Englischen zum Einfluss von einzelsprachlichen Systemeigenschaften auf die makrostrukturelle Planung. München: Iudicium. von Stutterheim, Ch. (1997) Einige Prinzipien des Textaufbaus: Empirische Untersuchungen zur Produktion mündlicher Texte. Tübingen: Niemeyer. (Reihe Germanistische Linguistik 184). von Stutterheim, Ch. and Klein, W. (1989) Referential movement in descriptive and narrative discourse. In R. Dietrich and C. Friedrich Graumann (eds) Language Processing in Social Context (pp. 39–76). Amsterdam: North-Holland.

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von Stutterheim, Ch. and Nüse, R. (2003) Processes of conceptualisation in language production. Linguistics (Special Issue: Perspectives in Language Production). 41, 851–881. von Stutterheim, Ch. and Carroll, M. (2005) Subjektwahl und Topikkontinuität im Deutschen und Englischen. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 139, 7–27. von Stutterheim, Ch., Carroll, M. and Klein, W. (2003) Two ways of construing complex temporal structures. In F. Lenz (ed.) Deictic Conceptualization of Space, Time and Person (pp. 97–133). Berlin: de Gruyter. Watorek, M (ed.) (2004) La construction du discours en français langue cible. Langages 155, 3–13.

29 Online Sentence Processing in Children and Adults: General and Specific Constraints. A Crosslinguistic Study in Four Languages Michèle Kail1

Introduction Crosslinguistic studies of monolinguals have extensively studied the syntactic development of children and adults of different native languages, in order to determine how theoretically relevant linguistic differences affect performance and how regularities are useful in the search for universal mechanisms (Slobin, 1985). Online sentence processing by children is still an emerging field (Kail & Bassano, 2003), despite the fact that Tyler and Marslen-Wilson’s (1981) pioneer experiments on English clearly underlined the theoretical merits of developmental studies. The growing importance of online methods in child language research is well attested in Sekerina et al. (2008), a volume providing overviews on innovative methods ranging from behavioural (word monitoring, probe recognition, realtime grammaticality judgment) to paradigms involving eye tracking (free-viewing and looking while listening) and event-related potentials. These methods can be used with children from about five years of age onwards to study relatively complex syntactic and morphosyntactic phenomena. Our goal in this chapter is to present monolingual developmental data on the online integration of two basic grammatical constraints, word-order configurations and morphological agreements in various languages chosen for their pertinent linguistic contrasts. Two are Germanic languages, Swedish and English, and the other two are Romance languages, French and European Portuguese. The main purpose is to identify what online 586

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processing procedures are affected by the specificities of the language and what procedures seem to be general (universal?). Real-time language processing requires the listener or reader to integrate linguistic cues into the ongoing sentence representation. Language is a complex system that involves different types of information (i.e. phonological, syntactic, semantic, morphosyntactic) that must be retrieved and used to achieve comprehension. Different psycholinguistic theories agree that all these information types must be retrieved and used in normal online comprehension, but there is still some debate about the timing of information use and the nature of the interplay between syntactic and lexical-semantic information. In the serial approach, the strongest claims, such as the garden path theory of Frazier and colleagues (Frazier, 1987), propose that structural syntactic principles – minimal attachment and late closure – are sufficient to explain the initial pass analysis and the local phrase structure building. For example, according to late closure, the parser prefers to attach locally, low in the tree. Information from other components may play a role only after the parser has made an initial attachment. For example, Altmann (1989) provided evidence to suggest that referential information can influence the parser’s decisions and prevent garden path effects. On the whole, as underlined by Mitchell (1994) much of the work on parsing is based on the notion that human parsing involves building something like ‘linguists’ tree diagrams’. The interactive models challenge the idea that syntax occupies a privileged position in the initial parsing of sentences (MacWhinney, 1987; MacWhinney & Bates, 1989; McClelland et al., 1989). According to these models, the parser is immediately able to integrate all available linguistic information. In this single system all cues or constraints guide the construction of a unique representation as a function of their relative weights. Our framework is the Competition Model (CM) (MacWhinney, 1987; MacWhinney & Bates, 1989), an integrative-activation model of language comprehension and language use that emphasizes qualitative and quantitative linguistic variations across languages. In this model, the informational value of linguistic forms in a given language plays a probabilistic role in mapping surface forms to their underlying functions as directly as possible. The CM assumes parallel processing, and the language processor can use compound input cues that work across linguistic boundaries, for example prosody, morphology, lexicon and syntax. In contrast to modular theories in which different pieces of linguistic information are computed sequentially by separate processors, the CM processes information from various sources via a common set of perceptual, representational, and retrieval mechanisms. Different cues cooperate and compete with each other in language comprehension, where coalitions and competitions represent the mediation process between forms and functions. When parallel activation of the formal and

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functional levels leads to competition, the co-evaluation of different linguistic sources becomes necessary and is directly determined by the validity of these cues in the particular language. The major predictive construct of the CM is ‘cue validity’, evaluated as the product of ‘cue availability’ (how often a cue is there when needed) and ‘cue reliability’ (how often an available cue leads to the right interpretation). For example, to assign the agent function, word order has a higher validity value in English than animacy or morphological agreement, while the opposite pattern characterizes Italian and French. Thus, English speakers rely more on word order in sentence comprehension while Italian and French speakers rely more on animacy and morphology. According to the processing hypotheses proposed in this model, ‘cue strength’ in a given language; that is, the probability attributed by the subject to a specific linguistic information in order to assign a specific function, is determined by cue validity. Most CM experiments use a sentence-comprehension task in which native speakers are presented with sequences of words consisting of two nouns and a transitive action verb in one of three possible orders, NNV, NVN, or VNN (e.g. the cat is kissing the duck), and are asked to say which of the two nouns is the performer (agent) of the action described in the sentence. A substantial body of studies (for reviews, see Bates et al., 2001; Kail, 1999; MacWhinney & Bates, 1989) conducted over a wide range of languages revealed a strong correlation between cue validity and cue strength in sentence processing. The results also supported the assumption that children acquire sentence comprehension strategies in a sequence that is predictable from the cue validity of the grammatical devices in the adult language. The second basic notion that Kail (1989) proposed to implement in the CM is ‘cue cost’, which refers to the amount and type of processing required for the activation of a given form when cue validity is held constant. In line with an earlier proposal by Ammon and Slobin (1979), we suggested that cues are distributed along a processing-type continuum that ranges from local (an interpretation can be computed as soon as the cue is encountered) to topological (the interpretation is delayed until all information is stored and compared). In some languages such as French (Kail, 1989), Italian (Devescovi et al., 1999), and German (Lindner, 2003), cue validity and cue cost interact during development. Some predictions based on the idea that children acquire sentenceinterpretation strategies in a certain order can be predicted from cue validity in the adult language and have been updated to take into account the greater short-term memory demands of topological processing. Assuming that cue validity and cue cost interact to determine crosslinguistic variations in the use and development of sentence-interpretation strategies, the investigation of cue cost requires more information about how listeners allocate their attention and make predictions in the course of sentence processing (Devescovi & D’Amico, 2005; Kail, 1999; Kempe & MacWhinney, 1999; Staron et al., 2005).

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Previous experiments (Blackwell et al., 1996) used online grammaticality judgements where participants have to judge the grammaticality or ungrammaticality of sentences as quickly as possible. We proposed a variant of this task, the violation detection paradigm, where children as young as six and adults have to detect a linguistic violation in a sentence as quickly as possible. We previously used this paradigm to study verbal-agreement processing by French adults (Kail & Bassano, 1997; Lambert & Kail, 2001) and to examine the online integration of case cues by Greek children and adults (Kail & Diakogiorgi, 1998). In an online grammaticality judgments in French children (from 6 to 11) and adults, Kail (2004) found that at all ages, morphological agreement violations were more quickly detected than word order ones. This result followed the predictions based on cue validity in French where morphology is the dominant cue for sentence interpretation. Each age group was faster at judging sentences with later occurring violations especially the youngest group. This position effect has been interpreted as an indication that listeners use their grammatical knowledge to build expectations over the course of the sentence. Finally, intraphrasal violations were more rapidly detected than interphrasal ones, this effect being observed only in the oldest groups and in adults. The amount of memory required for online integration is low when attachments between units can be made locally (Frazier, 1987). This previous research on French monolinguals has been extended to other three languages Swedish, English and Portuguese (Kail et al., 2008, 2010, 2011). This chapter is the first synthetic presentation of the main results obtained in children and adults in the four languages under study focusing on general vs. specific properties of online sentence processing.

Some Properties of French, European Portuguese, English and Swedish Word Order French The canonical word order in French is SVO. The first NP in a sentence is most frequently the agent but canonical SVO is also preserved in sentences involving intransitive verbs (e.g. mourir or ‘to die’) or elliptical transitives (e.g. manger, ‘to eat’). Unlike Italian Spanish and Portuguese which are also SVO romance languages, French does not permit subject ellipsis. Despite its prominence, the canonical SVO order occurs along with other orders imposed by syntactic, pragmatic or contextual constraints. A major exception to SVO order is the use of SOV order. SOV order in French is primarily due to the existence of a double series of clitic pronouns: preverbal direct object (le, la, les e.g. Je la vois ‘I her see’ and preverbal indirect object (lui, leur) pronouns.

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VSO order is found in the interrogative form: Prend-il le train ce soir? ‘Is taking he the train this evening?’ Finally, combinations of left and right topicalizations and cliticization are responsible for extending the range of possible orders found in French. Nonetheless, this variability clearly operates within definite limits. French does not allow subject ellipsis, and tends to conserve canonical SVO in many constructions.

Portuguese The canonical order is SVO for simple transitive declarative sentences in Portuguese. However, European Portuguese is a null subject language that permits sentences without a lexicalized subject and declarative sentences with postverbal subjects (1) to (3): (1) O professor escreveu o sumário (SVO) ‘The teacher wrote the summary’ (2) Escreveu o sumário o professor (VOS) ‘Wrote the summary the professor’ (3) Escreveu o professor o sumário (VSO) ‘Wrote the professor the summary’ While definite articles are placed before the noun in French and Portuguese, in Portuguese, possessive pronouns may appear before (frequently) or after (less frequently) the noun, and may be preceded by other modifiers such as articles or demonstratives, which is not at all the case in French: (4) Os meus livros de filologia românica ‘The my books’ (5) Estes meus livros de filologia românica ‘These my books’ Null modifier nouns are possible (6), and so are proper nouns preceded by definite articles (7): (6) Livros de filologia românica, tenho imensos ‘Books on philology Romance, I have many’ (7) A Maria comprou livros de filologia românica ‘The Maria has bought books on philology Romance’ Both French and European Portuguese possess a rich and complex system of inflected clitic pronouns. In European Portuguese, the definite article, clitic demonstrative and accusative personal pronoun have the same phonation (o 3rd /masc/sing; a 3rd /fem/sing; os 3rd/masc/pl; as 3rd/fem/pl) (Mateus et al., 2003). A similar phenomenon concerns the identity of clitic accusative pronouns and articles en French (le (masc/sing); la (fem/sing) and les (pl)). This potential ambiguity between clitics and articles presents problems for left-to-right parsing in French as we have shown for children

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(Charvillat & Kail, 1991; Weissenborn et al., 1990) and aphasics participants (Friederici et al., 1991). It should be noted that, depending on various syntactic contexts, clitics in European Portuguese may be placed before the verb, as in French, or after it.

English English is a rigid SVO language and, in contrast to some languages, word order is not much affected by pragmatic factors. Although some minor variation occurs in colloquial speech (e.g. such as OSV and VSO orders in left and right dislocations), other possible orders (OVS, SOV, VSO) are not acceptable. For example some left-dislocated OSV structures can be found as well as right-dislocated VOS constructions. These rare structures may be the basis for the OSV and VOS strategies reported for English-speaking adults. As pointed out by Bates and MacWhinney (1989), the second noun strategies may also reflect a fragmentary fit to other options in English. For example, imperative constructions such as ‘Hit the ball, John’ could support a VOS interpretation. Relative clause constructions such as ‘The ball John hit went out of the park’ contain an OSV fragment [O[SV]V]. Articles invariably precede the noun and most often other determiners and adjectives are in prenominal position. However, they can be in predicate position with the copula be, for example (The book is red). In negatives, there is some optionality about where in the auxiliary the negative element can go but the placement makes subtle differences in meaning that reflect the different scope of the negative element.

Swedish Swedish has a canonical word order, SVO, for declarative sentences. Like all Germanic languages except English, Swedish is a V2 (verb-second) language. Whenever an adverbial, a subordinate clause or an object is topicalized and occurs in sentence-initial position, subject–verb inversion is obligatory because the second position of the sentence is targeted for the verb as in the following examples: (8) Nu kommer han (XVS) ‘Now comes he’ (9) När jag kom hem, träffade jag Lisa (XVS) ‘When I came home, met I Lisa’ (10) Glass gillar han (OVS) ‘Ice cream likes he’ The VS option is used extensively in Swedish. In a corpus of spoken Swedish (Jörgensen, 1976), a nearly even distribution between the two options was observed: no subject–verb inversion occurred in 60% of all

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declarative clauses, whereas 40% exhibited the XVS pattern, where X could be an object, an adverbial, or a subordinate clause In Swedish, adjectives are placed before the noun, with no exceptions. Thus, postposing the adjective is unambiguously a violation of word order, as in the following sentence from the experiment: (11) *Varje lördag fyller den grannfrun turkiska kylskåpet (Noun + Adjective) ‘Every Saturday, the neighbour Turkish fills the fridge’

Verbal and Nominal Agreement French Verbal agreement in French is determined by the number of the subject and, in some constructions, by its gender. Gender is expressed only in complex verbal forms composed of the auxiliary être (be) and a past participle with a masculine, feminine, and/or plural marking: (12)

Les cerises sont ramassées au printemps ‘The cherries-FEM.PL. be-3rd PL gathered-FEM.PL in springtime’

In the oral code, French has a large degree of ambiguity in its inflectional system, particularly with the verbs of the first conjugation (ending in -er- in the infinitive form, like chanter) which are the most frequent (13a) (13b) (13c) (13d)

je chante [ilʃãt] I sing-1st SG, ‘I sing’ tu chantes [ilʃãt] You sing-2nd SG, ‘You sing’ il chante [ilʃãt] He sing-3rd SG, ‘He sings’ ils chantent [ilʃãt] They sing-3rd PL, ‘They sing’

The various written inflections (s and nt) are inaudible because the pronunciation of all of these items is identical. In the absence of strong information, il chante [ilʃãt] can be confounded with ils chantent [ilʃãt] ((‘he sings’ vs ‘they sing’, respectively). In our experiment, we used second and third conjugations in which the plural inflection is audible (e.g, Il remplit vs ils remplissent, he fill-3rd.SG ‘he fills’ vs they fill-3rd.PL ‘they fill’). As a general rule, nominal agreement concerns gender and number agreement of various units such as articles, adjectives, possessive and demonstrative pronouns. In the French lexicon, 60% of the nouns have exclusive gender, masculine or feminine, for example le garçon the boyMASC ‘the boy’, and la table the table-FEM ‘the table’. The remaining 40% nouns can take both genders, for example le tour (‘the turn’, masc.) and la tour (‘the tower’, fem.)corresponding to different meaning. The masculine is more frequent than the feminine (Tucker et al., 1977), and the phonological information of the last syllable of the noun often has a high predictive value for gender assignment.

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Portuguese Essentially, both French and Portuguese show phenomena of agreement that are very closely related. Kail et al. (2008) describe the main similarities and differences in detail. Suffixes are used to mark grammatical information on number, gender, person and tense. In verbs agreement with the subject of the sentence is expressed by morphemes of person, number, tense and aspect as in the following example: (14a) A aluna falou com o professor. [A aluna ] [+sg, fem] falou [+3a,+sg,;past] com o professor]. ‘The student has talked to the professor’ (14b) As alunas falarão com o professor. [As alunas] [+pl, fem] falarão[+3a,+pl,+future] com o professor. ‘The students will talk to the professor’ As far as experiments are concerned, considerable differences concern the phonetic forms of articles which are not comparable in the two languages: in both Portuguese and French the form of the article is a monosyllable, but in Portuguese these are reduced to a vocalic nucleus (V), whereas in French they comprise both a consonant and a vowel (CV) (15–16): (15) (16)

O livro; os livros Le livre; les livres ‘The book; ‘the books’ A menina; as meninas La fille; les filles ‘The girl; ‘the girls’

This might explain the effects of co-articulation which contribute to a less perceptible auditory marking in Portuguese. Thus, there might be competition in real time processing between the regularity of morphosyntactical marking which confers a high degree of validity on Portuguese nominal morphology and the minimal auditory perceptibility of such cues.

English Compared to other languages, English has a relatively impoverished morphology. Person and number distinctions are rarely marked n verbs. In the present tense, verbs require one inflection, -s, for the third person singular, except for has and does. The present progressive tense is used for ongoing actions and has two markings: -ing on the verb and the auxiliary be before it (she is talking; they are talking). The form of be varies with person, number, and tense but not gender. The plural forms are not distinguished by person. The past tense is a major verb inflection and exceptions are the rule for common verbs in English and must be learned by rote. The regular past tense-ed is phonologically determined by the final consonant of the root with the allomorphs /t/, /d/, but does not vary with number or person (speak-spoke; run-ran, eat-ate, tell-told).

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In English, verbs do not incorporate other constituents such as pronominal objects, indirect objects, direction or location within their boundaries. Finally, verbs can be modified by an extensive modal auxiliary system to indicate possibility/ability /obligation . . . Nouns are inflected for plurality and possession. Articles are usually required before common nouns. They mark the contrast definite/indefinite (the vs a/an) but they do not mark gender or other properties of the object (except the mass/count distinction) (for more details see de Villiers & de Villiers, 1985).

Swedish The paradigm of Swedish verbs is considerably less complex than in other Germanic languages (Teleman et al., 1999). There is no subject–verb agreement. Neither number nor person is marked morphologically. Verbs are only marked for tense. For regular verbs, there are two main groups, the -ar group and the -er groups. The only available choice for creating an audible, clear-cut distinction between correct and incorrect verb forms in our experiments was the contrast between the infinitive and the present form of -er verbs, ringa vs ringer (‘to phone’ vs ‘phone(s)’) Swedish noun morphology is relatively rich and complex. There are two genders: common (also called uter), en, and neuter, ett. The common gender is three times as frequent as others (Allen, 1971) and includes practically all animate nouns. The indefinite article is a preposed free morpheme as in many languages : en kaka (a cake). The definite article is a suffix on the noun for example kakan’ (cake-the) ‘the cake’, gender-sensitive in the singular: kakan ‘the cake’ versus vinet ‘the wine’, but neutralized to the –na morpheme in the plural: kakorna (cakes-the) ‘the cakes’ , vinerna (wines-the) ‘the wines’. Nouns and adjectives are inflected for gender, number and definiteness. Determiners and adjectives agree in gender, number and definiteness with the head noun. Morphological marking for definiteness on both the article and the noun is obligatory in adjectival attributive NPs. This is called double definiteness and is characteristic of Swedish. The postposed definite article is doubled with a free preposed definite article: den/det in the singular and de in the plural. The double definiteness also has consequences for the adjective, which takes on a strong and a weak form.

Main Factors of Online Sentence Processing in Monolinguals As previously mentioned, the notion of cue cost has to be specified in terms of processing constraints. We suggest that three main factors are at work in online sentence processing, the first and the second corresponding to general processing factors while the third one is language-specific: (1) The amount of linguistic information available to the listener at a given moment,

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which contrasts early versus late integration (violation position); (2) The phrase structure building, which contrasts intra- versus interphrasal violations (violation span). (3) The third factor concerns the relationship between morphology and word order in a given language (violation type). Our predictions on the role of these main factors are the following:

Violation Position: Early vs Late Some cross-linguistic research using the error detection paradigm (Kail & Diakogiorgi, 1998; Wulfeck, 1993; Wulfeck et al., 1991 ) has shown that late violations are more rapidly detected than early ones by children, normal adults and aphasics. This set of results suggests that the facilitation effect of late position is highly systematic. This effect has been interpreted as an indication that listeners are using their grammatical knowledge to build up expectations over the course of the sentence (see examples in the appendix).

Violation Span: Intraphrasal vs Interphrasal One assumption of online sentence processing is that the processing system tries to assign cues to meaning as soon as possible, integrating each piece of linguistic information into larger structures compatible with the information obtained up to that point. Consequently, in the four languages, violations of elements belonging to the same constituent (intraphrasal violations) should be detected more rapidly than violations of elements belonging to different main constituents (interphrasal violations) (see examples in the appendix).

Violation Type: Agreement vs Word Order The Competition Model assumes that violations of cues that are the most valid ones in a language should be more rapidly detected than less valid ones. Previous research on languages with rich morphology (Costa, 2005; Kail & Diakogiorgi, 1998; Lambert & Kail, 2001; Wulfeck et al., 1991) have shown that case or morphological agreements are the most valid cues for sentence interpretation. So, for French and European Portuguese, we predicted that violations of the most valid cues – morphological agreements – should be more rapidly detected than word-order violations. On the contrary, according to the high validity of word order in English, we predicted that word-order violations should be more rapidly detected than agreement violations. There are very few experimental studies on sentence comprehension and cue validity in Swedish (Gullberg, 1994). The Swedish specificities do not allow strong predictions concerning a clear contrasting impact of word order as compared to morphology.

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Method Participants In each language, about 60 children were divided into three age groups: 6-to-7-year-olds (mean age 6;8): 8-to-9-year-olds (mean age 8;6): 10-to-11-yearolds (mean age 10;10). In addition, 20 university students were tested as adult controls. All participants were native speakers of French, European Portuguese, English and Swedish, living and attending schools/universities.

Linguistic Material A total of 360 sentences were constructed consisting of 40 grammatical sentences and 320 ungrammatical sentences with the same contents as the grammatical ones. There were five different sentences at each level of a 2 × 2 × 2 design, representing orthogonal combinations of two positions (early vs. late), two structural spans (intraphrasal vs. interphrasal) and two violation types (word order vs. agreement). Eight lists of 40 grammatical and 40 ungrammatical sentences were generated. For a given semantic content, each list contained a different violation and the corresponding grammatical sentence. Each participant was assigned to one list and processed 80 sentences. An example is given in the appendix.

Experimental Apparatus Participants’ grammaticality judgments and detection times were recorded using PsyScope (Cohen et al., 1993). The stimuli were read by a native speaker, tape-recorded, and digitally stored in a microcomputer. The speech signals corresponding to each sentence were equalized for duration using Sound Edit Pro. In the ungrammatical sentences, a timer was started by a pulse on a second channel, placed at the offset of the word that made the sentence ungrammatical. In other words, detection time was recorded starting at the point in the sentence after which no legal completion could render the sentence grammatical, marked with ! as in the following example: ‘Every week, a neighbour fill! the fridge after going shopping at the market.’ Participants were tested individually during a session of approximately 20 minutes. They listened to eight training items, after which the 80 test sentences were presented in a random order at fixed intervals of two seconds. No sentence was followed immediately by its grammatical or ungrammatical counterpart. Participants were asked to decide whether each sentence was grammatical and to indicate their choice via a button box, pressing a red

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button for ungrammatical sentences and a green one for grammatical sentences. Children were instructed to listen carefully because they would hear each sentence only once, and to respond as quickly as possible in particular for ungrammatical sentences as soon as they could detect the violation. By pressing the button, the participant stopped the timer started at the offset of the violation and the time needed to detect the violation was computed.

Results Accuracy brought important information about the increase in sensitivity to grammatical violations during development across languages. Nevertheless, detection times were considered to be more informative in terms of temporal specificities of online sentence processing.

Accuracy In the four languages, children’s and adults’ errors consisted of overaccepting (incorrectly accepting) an ungrammatical sentence. A very small number of errors (about 2%) consisted in rejecting a grammatical sentence. Undetected violations were analysed using an analysis of variance conducted on each language, with the following design: age group (4) x violation position (2) x violation span (2) x violation type (2), with participants as a random variable, age group as a between – participant variable, and violation position, span and type as repeated measures. The main results are the following In the four languages, from 6;8 years on, children were able to detect grammatical violations showing judgments that were above chance. As shown in Table 29.1, French children and adults tended to have higher performances and Swedish children and adults lower ones. These differences resulted from to the impossibility to construct exactly the same violations across the various languages especially in terms of their perceptibility. On the basis of previous studies on case marking – violations in Modern Greek (Kail & Diakogiorgi, 1998), we know that perceptibility of violations can result in more errors and longer detection times within a language. It could be also that TABLE 29.1 Global performance: accuracy (%E) and detection times (MS) French

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the French nominal paradigm is less complex than the Swedish one (double definiteness) in the sense of differences in relative entropy, the informational value of an inflection as a function of the size of the morphological paradigm (Moscoso del Prado Martin et al., 2004). Finally, another possible explanation for the discrepancy is the fact that metalinguistic activities are strongly encouraged in French schools right from the beginning, so children may acquire an early habit of making grammatical judgments of sentences. In each language, the undetected violation rates showed a main significant effect of age: in French, Portuguese and English, the main developmental change occurred between 6;8 years and 8;6 years. In Swedish, it occurred between the oldest children (10;10) and the adults. A qualitative analysis of undetected violations as a function of violation structure [eight structures in French, English and Swedish and six in Portuguese where word order inversion of S–V in V–S is not ungrammatical] corresponding to all combinations of the two violation types (t), the two spans (s) and the two positions (p) indicated a consistent pattern across ages and languages. Some structures elicited a greater number of undetected violations than others: structures containing interphrasal violations (s2) which overload working memory.

Violation position: Early vs. late violation In the four languages, at each age level, violation position did not affect the capacity to detect ungrammatical sentences. Children and adults did not show greater sensitivity to violations occurring late in the sentence. This set of results is in accordance with previous results on English (Wulfeck, 1993) and French (Kail, 2004) showing that previous linguistic context did not facilitate the identification of a violation within the sentence.

Violation span: Intra vs. interphrasal violation An important global effect of violation span in French and Portuguese children showed a greater capacity for detecting intraphrasal violations (involving word order and agreement violations between the article and the noun) than interphrasal ones. There was an interaction between violation span and age in French. Indeed, if children’s detection of intraphrasal violations was better than their detection of interphrasal violations, this discrepancy disappeared by the age of 10;10. In Portuguese, the violation span effect did not interact with age. For English and Swedish participants, violation span did not affect the capacity to detect ungrammatical sentences.

Violation type: Agreement vs. word order violations In three languages, French, Portuguese and Swedish, there was no main effect of violation type: children did not show more undetected violations for

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agreement than for word-order alterations. In French and Portuguese where agreement has a high validity, agreement violations were not better detected than word order violations. On the contrary, English children performed in accordance with previous off-line results obtained in many studies focusing on this language or in cross-linguistic studies (Bates & MacWhinney, 1989). At each age group level, English participants were better at detecting violations produced by altering the order of words within a sentence than at detecting agreement violations. These finding are compatible with the fact that word order has a very high validity in English.

Detection Times Detection times analyses were conducted on the correctly rejected sentences only. Not surprisingly, in all languages, children were slower than adults at detecting grammatical violations. The overall analyses yielded a significant main effect of age on detection times. This age effect was monotonic and was tested for a linear trend across the four age levels in each language. A more qualitative way of looking at variations across languages could take into account the difference in detection times between the youngest group mean and the adult group mean (cf. Table 29.1) within each language. Differences were most important in French and in English (1803 and 1728 ms, respectively) while they were not so important in Swedish and Portuguese (1197 and 1027 ms, respectively).

Violation position: Early vs. late violation As predicted and as can be seen in Figure 29.1, in the four languages, late violations were detected more rapidly than early ones for both word-order and agreement violations at each age level. This effect was especially strong in the youngest groups (6;8 years and 8;6years) and tended to decrease with age (age × position interaction). This set of results suggested that the facilitation effect of late position had a high degree of systematicity. From six years on, children in all languages were able to exploit the build-up of linguistic information across a sentence.

Violation span: Intra vs. interphrasal violation As predicted, in each language except Portuguese, violations within the same constituent were more rapidly detected than violations across different constituents (Figure 29.2). In French, this effect became significant at 10;10 years while no interaction with age was found either in English nor in Swedish. In French and English, an interaction between violation span and violation type was observed: for intraphrasal violations, no difference between

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Figure 29.1 Detection times (ms) as a function of violation position and age

detection times for word-order violations and for agreement was found; for interphrasal violations, word-order violations took more time to be detected than agreement ones. In Portuguese, at all ages with the exception of adults, intraphrasal violations were less quickly detected than interphrasal violations. This result contradicted hypotheses formulated for Portuguese on the basis of off-line data (Costa, 2005), as well as data obtained from the other three languages. In order to understand this unexpected result, the acoustic phonetic properties of the structure of the violation must be examined: a vizinha [ɐvi’ziŋɐ] was changed into vizinha a [vi’ziŋɐɐ]. Despite checks being carried out when recording the sentences, this inversion may be interpreted as an ungrammaticality, or as a filled pause, thus slowing down the identification of a

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Figure 29.2 Detection times (ms) as a function of violation span and age

word-order violation. This problem did not occur in French where the article is expressed as a consonantal group: la voisine vs. voisine la. On the other hand, even when the Article-Noun order was respected but morphological violation of gender occurred (o[masc] vizinha[fém] instead of a[fém] vizinha[fém]), the weak phonetic weight of the article, which was reduced to a vocalic nucleus, might prevent the perception of ungrammaticality. The significant interaction between violation span (intra vs. interphrasal) and violation position (early vs. late) revealed that only early violations were concerned and that detection times were shorter for interphrasal violations at all ages. These Portuguese results indicate that, within this violation paradigm, it is important to consider the relative weight of grammatical constraints linked to properties of word-order and agreement cues within the language on the one hand, and constraints linked to the perceptibility of the violations on the other.

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Violation type: Agreement vs. word order violations Briefly summarized, the following results were obtained, showing more language variability than within the two previous factors. As can be seen in Figure 29.3, for Swedish children at each age level and adults, agreement violations were not more rapidly detected than word order violations. Furthermore, the results indicated no interaction between violation type and violation span or violation position. As predicted for French, agreement violations were more rapidly detected than word order violations at each age level and this effect was more important in the oldest groups (10;10 years and adults). In Portuguese, the same pattern was observed but the differences tended to disappear in the oldest groups. The interaction between violation type and violation position which was significant for the French

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oldest subjects (10;10 years and adults) showed that morphological violations rather than word-order ones benefited from their late position. This result seemed to indicate that the more reliable the cue, the more efficient the sentential context. Unexpected results came from English detection times. We previously reported that, at each age level, English subjects were better at detecting wordorder violations within a sentence than agreement violations. Detection times exhibited the reverse pattern. At each age level, agreement violations were significantly more rapidly detected than word-order ones and this effect was more important in the youngest groups (6;8 years and 8;6 years) than in the oldest ones (10;10 years and adults). Contrary to expectations based on cue validity in English, these results seemed to indicate that local violations (morphology) were more rapidly processed than topological violations which were more costly to process. Cue cost could be more decisive for online sentence processing than cue validity in a language such as English which favours word order to interpret a sentence in conditions that impose few processing constraints. At a global level, a comparative analysis of the eight structures involving violations indicated very robust results: except Portuguese, for the three other languages, an intraphrasal agreement violation coming late in the sentence was the most rapidly detected (French: 968 ms; English: 1344 ms; Swedish: 1352 ms) while an interphrasal word order violation coming early in the sentence was took the most time to be detected (French: 2306 ms; English: 2374 ms; Swedish: 3016 ms).

Hierarchy of Factors as a Function of Age and Languages The development of the hierarchy among the three factors was captured in a separate ANOVA. For each age group in each language, we have estimated percentages of variance as measured by Sseffect/Sstotal, the latter including all interactions (Figure 29.4). In French, the analysis of the relative weight of factors revealed significant changes as a function of age. At 6;8 and 8;6 the most crucial factor was violation position. At the age of 10;10 and in adults, the hierarchy of factors changed. Violation type became the dominant factor: violations of agreement were more quickly detected than word-order violations. In Portuguese, the hierarchy of factors seemed to be established from six years on to aduldthood: only violation position was the crucial factor (explaining 90% of variance). In English, from six years on to 10.10 years the main crucial factor was violation position (which explained between 70% and 88% of variance).

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Among the adults, the hierarchy changed and the main factor became violation span explaining 72% of variance. this radical shift seemed to indicate that in English online sentence processing in adults was governed by the structural constraints of the sentences, especially those that required listeners to maintain agreement or word-order cues in working memory. In Swedish there was a clear developmental change between age 10–11 and adulthood: in children, the most important factor was the position of the violation in the sentence, while in adults, violation span became by far the most important factor (explaining 80% of variance).

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Discussion The purpose of this crosslinguistic study conducted in four languages and focusing on online sentence processing in children and adults, was to obtain new data on temporal constraints and on the development of children’ capacities to integrate these constraints during processing. To access the online processing of sentences, we used grammaticality judgments in real time.

Grammatical Sensitivity and Processing School-age children showed very high sensitivity to grammatical violations even when pressured to respond quickly. The first finding was the strong effect of sentential contextual information in the cue integration process. In the four languages, violations occurring late in the sentence were consistently detected more quickly than earlier violations for both word order and agreement violations at each age level even though this effect decreased especially in the adults. From six years on to adulthood this effect was interpreted as an indication that listeners were using their grammatical knowledge to build expectations over the course of the sentence. The resemblance of the position effect across languages, and its systematic decrease with age, argued in favour of considering contextual information as a general online processing factor, no matter what language was under study. The developmental dynamics indicated that from six years on to eight to nine years in the four languages, online sentence processing was governed by its dependence on sentence context. The prevalence of this factor was attested by its capacity to explain more than 80% of variance during this developmental stage. In the various languages we have studied, intraphrasal violations were detected significantly more rapidly than interphrasal violations. Such a result underlined the fact that online processing was dependent on the structural constraints of sentences which required working memory capacities mainly in the detection of violations that crossed the constituent boundary. The overall influence of sentence structure was modulated by the linguistic properties of each language and by its interaction with other constraints. Swedish and English showed very similar pattern: a significant effect at each age level and the gap between intra- and interphrasal detection times increased with age. For both languages, this structural factor became the dominant one in adults explaining 78% of variance in Swedish and 71% in English. It must be noted that this dominance in adults resulted in a continuous increase during development in Swedish, while a shift in was observed in English adults. The unexpected result in Portuguese, where interphrasal violations were more rapidly detected than intraphrasal ones, seemed to be linked to difficulties in auditory perception caused by phonetic properties in the oral modality.

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On the whole, we have clearly shown on one hand that contextual and structural information are main components of online sentence processing and on the other hand that their relative contribution was specific to languages and developmental capacities.

The Impact of Languages In our previous cross-linguistic studies using comparisons within Romance languages (French, Spanish and Portuguese), we showed that typological proximity was not always predictive of all processing specificities, whether in offline paradigms (Kail, 1989) or in online ones (Kail et al., 2008). Nevertheless, the typological proximity of the two romance languages and the confirmed weight of morphology in their off-line processing should have allowed for a greater similarity in online processing. The validity of morphological cues was a good predictor for real time processing in French, but it was not the case in Portuguese. The results indicated the relative precedence of morphology at all ages, although this effect did not reach a significant threshold. As previously shown for Greek (Kail & Diakogiorgi, 1998), the validity of cues may enter into competition with their perceptibility during real time processing. In Portuguese some results need to be confirmed by specific research on the perceptibility of morphosyntactic violations. Kempe and MacWhinney (1999) have convincingly demonstrated that languages such as German and Russian, which present a rich morphological system, trigger different online sentence strategies. Conversely, we have shown that languages which greatly contrast (such as English and French) may require similar online sentence strategies. All these results seem to indicate that cue validity (mainly efficient in off-line processing) and cue cost (mainly involved in online processing) could converge in some languages especially languages with rich morphology and could diverge in languages with strict word order such as English. In this later case, online sentence processing would be governed by cue cost and not by cue validity.

Developmental Issues In the four languages, children from six years old showed very high sensitivity to grammatical violations even when pressured to respond quickly. Age effects were noted in all age groups indicating that grammatical sensitivity continued to develop through adolescence. All groups across age were able to exploit the build-up of linguistic information across a sentence as indicated by their faster detection times for violations that occurred late in the sentence. First, we have shown that age effects decreased when linguistic information increased towards the ends of sentences. Second, this dependency on contextual information specific of young children was replaced by processing strategies trusting on other dimensions as a function of languages.

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This developmental shift occurred around nine years when children began to use the same kind of information as adults did in a given language. This period has been identified as a crucial one in other online studies. According to Trueswell (2008) successful parsing revisions took place at this age. He argued that increased revision ability was attributable to the development of cognitive control and executive function. Other studies have underlined the impact of memory spans. Fabrizio et al. (2006) found that children with higher memory spans were more likely than children with shorter memory spans to use agreement information to revise initial structural hypotheses.

Implication for the Competition Model Many aspects of the Competition Model have been worked out in detail as underlined in two recent reviews: MacWhinney (2005) proposes new directions in the Competition Model focusing on second language acquisition and Devescovi and d’Amico (2005) examine the value of the Model for crosslinguistic studies of online processing. In the last article, the authors mentioned that ‘only few online studies with children were conducted’. We think that the notion of cue cost has been often used without a sufficient analysis of its components. In previous studies (Kail, 1989; Kail & Charvillat, 1988) we referred to cue cost as the amount and type of processing required for the activation of a given linguistic form when cue validity is held constant and we proposed to contrast local and topological processing. The crosslinguistic comparison between French and Spanish developmental data confirmed the hypothesis that topological cues make greater demands on short-term memory and require additional mental operations to compare and cross-reference the elements held in short-term memory. In Italian and Serbo-Croatian, Devescovi et al. (1999) found similar results showing that local cues can be interpreted as soon as they are encountered while distributed cues are harder to process. To summarize the present results, cue validity is highly constrained by cue cost and the relationship between cue validity and cue cost could be more complex than previously stated.

Note (1) The research was supported in part by the CNRS and a grant of the ANR (French NSF). The main participants to this crosslinguistic program are Professors I. Hub Faria and A. Costa for Portuguese, M. Kihlsdet for Swedish, A. Emler for English and P. Bonnet for data analyses.

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Kail, M., Costa, A. and Hub Faria, I. (2008) Jugements de grammaticalité en temps réel: étude comparative du français et du portugais. In M. Kail, M. Fayol and M. Hickmann (eds) L’apprentissage des langues (pp. 199–222). Paris: CNRS Editions. Kail, M., Costa, A. and Hub Faria, I. (2010) On-line grammaticality judgments: A comparative study of French and Portuguese. In M. Kail and M. Hickmann (eds) Language Acquisition Across Linguistic and Cognitive Systems (pp. 179–205). Amsterdam: Benjamins. Kail, M., Kihlstedt, M. and Bonnet, P. (2011) Online sentence processing in Swedish: Cross-linguistic comparisons with French. Journal of Child Language 38, 1–33. Kempe, V. and MacWhinney, B. (1999) Processing of morphological and semantic cues in Russian and German. Language and Cognitive Processes 14, 129–171. Lambert, L. and Kail, M. (2001) Le traitement en temps réel des marques morphologiques d’accord dans les phrases en français. L’Année Psychologique 101, 561–592. Lindner, K. (2003) The development of sentence interpretation strategies in monolingual German learning children with and without specific language impairment. Linguistics 41, 213–254. MacWhinney, B. (1987) The competition model. In B. MacWhinney (ed.) Mechanisms of Language Acquisition (pp. 73–136). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. MacWhinney, B. and Bates, E. (eds) (1989) The Crosslinguistic Study of Sentence Processing. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press. Mateus, M.H., Brito, A.M., Duarte, I., Faria, I.H., Frota, S., Matos, G., Olivera, F., Vigario, M.E. and Villalva, A. (2003)Gramatica da lingua portuguesa (5 aediçao, revista e aumentada). Lisboa: Caminho. McClelland, J.L., St John, M. and Taraban, R. (1989) Sentence comprehension: A parallel distributed processing approach. Language and Cognitive Processes 4, 287–335. Mitchell, D.C. (1994) Sentence parsing. In M.L. Gernsbacher (ed.) Handbook of Psycholinguistics (pp. 375–409). New York, NY: Academic Press. Moscoso del Prado Martin, F., Kostic, A. and Baayen, R.H. (2004) Putting the bits together: An information theoretical perspective on morphological processing. Cognition 94, 1–18. Sekerina, I.A., Fernandez, E.M. and Clahsen, H. (eds) (2008) Developmental Psycholinguistics. On-line methods in Children’s Language Processing. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Slobin, D.I. (ed.) (1985) The Cross Linguistic Study of Language Acquisition. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Staron, M., Bokus, B. and Kail, M. (2005) On-line sentence processing in Polish children and adults. In B. Bokus (ed.) Studies in the Psychology of Language (pp. 227–245). Warsaw: Matrix. Teleman, U., Hellberg, S. and Andersson, E. (1999) Svenska Akademins Grammatik. Lund: Norstedts förlag. Trueswell, J.C. (2008) Using eye movements as a developmental measure within psycholinguistics. In I.A. Sekerina, E.M. Fernandez and H. Clahsen (eds) Developmental Psycholinguistics. On-line Methods in Children’s Language Processing (pp. 73–96). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Tucker, G.R., Lambert, W.E. and Rigault, A.A. (1977) The French Speaker’s Skill with Grammatical Gender. La Hague: Mouton. Tyler, L.K. and Marslen-Wilson, W.D. (1981) Children’s processing of spoken language. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 20, 400–416. Weissenborn, J., Kail, M. and Friederici, A. (1990) Language particular or language independent factors in acquisition. First Language 10, 141–166. Wulfeck, B. (1993) A reaction time study of grammaticality judgments in children. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 36, 1208–1215. Wulfeck, B., Bates, E. and Capasso, R. (1991) A crosslinguistic study of grammaticality judgments in Broca’s aphasia. Brain & Language 41, 311–336.

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Appendix Example of a grammatical sentence and the corresponding ungrammatical sentences in the four languages

Early violation p1 Late violation p2

Agreement violation t1

Word order violation t2

Intraphrasal violation s1 1 2

Intraphrasal violation s1 5 6

Interphrasal violation s2 3 4

Interphrasal violation s2 7 8

1, 2, 3, 4 - Agreement violation (t1) 1 and 2 - gender agreement 3 and 4 - verb agreement 5, 6, 7, 8 - Word-order violation (t2) 5 and 6 - N + adj 7 and 8 - S–V 1, 3, 5, 7 - Early violation (p1) 2, 4, 6, 8 - Late violation (p2) 1, 2, 5, 6 - Intraphrasal violation (s1) 1 and 2 - agreement 5 and 6 - word order 3, 4, 7, 8 - Interphrasal violation (s2) 3 and 4 - agreement 7 and 8 - word order

French Grammatical sentence Chaque semaine, la voisine remplit le frigo après avoir fait les courses au marché. Every week, the neighbour fills the fridge after going shopping at the market

The eight corresponding ungrammatical sentences (1) t1s1p1 Chaque semaine, le voisine remplit le frigo après avoir fait les courses au marché. (2) t1s1p2 Chaque semaine, après avoir fait les courses au marché le voisine remplit le frigo (3) t1s2p1 Chaque semaine, la voisine remplissent le frigo après avoir fait les courses au marché. (4) t1s2p2 Chaque semaine, après avoir fait les courses au marché, la voisine remplissent le frigo.

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(5) t2s1p1 Chaque semaine, voisine la remplit le frigo après avoir fait les courses au marché. (6) t2s1p2 Chaque semaine, après avoir fait les courses au marché voisine la remplit le frigo. (7) t2s2p1 Chaque semaine, remplit la voisine le frigo après avoir fait les courses au marché. (8) t2s2p2 Chaque semaine, après avoir fait les courses au marché remplit la voisine le frigo.

Portuguese Aos sábados, a vizinha enche a despensa depois de ir ao mercado On Saturdays, a neighbour fills the fridge after going shopping at the market’ (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)

t1s1p1 Aos sábados, o vizinha enche a despensa depois de ir ao mercado t1s1p2 Aos sábados, depois de ir ao mercado, o vizinha enche a despensa t1s2p1 Aos sábados, a vizinha enchem a despensa depois de ir ao mercado t1s2p2 Aos sábados, depois de ir ao mercado, a vizinha enchem a despensa t2s1p1 Aos sábados, vizinha a enche a despensa depois de ir ao mercado t2s1p2 Aos sábados, depois de ir ao mercado, vizinha a enche a despensa 7 & 8 are grammatical (7) t2s2p1 Aos sábados, enche a vizinha a despensa depois de ir ao mercado (8) t2s2p2 Ao ssábados, depois de ir ao mercado, enche a vizinha a despensa

English Every week, a neighbour fills the fridge after going shopping at the market (1) t1s1p1 market (2) t1s2p2 fridge. (3) t1s1p1 market. (4) t1s2p2 fridge. (5) t2s1p1 market. (6) t1s2p2 fridge. (7) t2s1p1 market.

Every week, a neighbours fills the fridge after going shopping at the Every week, after going shopping at the market a neighbours fills the Every week, a neighbour fill the fridge after going shopping at the Every week, after going shopping at the market a neighbours fill the Every week, neighbour a fills the fridge after going shopping at the Every week, after going shopping at the market neighbour a fill the Every week, fills a neighbour the fridge after going shopping at the

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(8) t2s2p2 Every week, after going shopping at the market fills a neighbour the fridge.

Swedish På lördagar fyller den turkiska grannfrun kylskåpet efter att ha handlat på marknaden On Saturdays, the (Turkish) neighbour fills the fridge after going shopping at the market (1) t1s1p1 På lördagar fyller det turkiska grannfrun kylskåpet efter att ha handlat på marknaden (2) t1s1p2 På lördagar efter att ha handlat på marknaden fyller det turkiska grannfrun kylskåpet (3) t1s2p1 På lördagar fylla den turkiska grannfrun kylskåpet efter att ha handlat på marknaden (4) t1s2p2 På lördagar efter att ha handlat på marknaden fylla den turkiska grannfrun kylskåpet (5) t2s1p1 På lördagar fyller den grannfrun turkiska kylskåpet efter att ha handlat påmarknaden (6) t2s1p2 På lördagar efter att ha handlat på marknaden fyller den grannfrun turkiska kylskåpet (7) t2s2p1 På lördagar den turkiska grannfrun fyller kylskåpet efter att ha handlat på marknaden (8) t2s2p2 På lördagar efter att ha handlat på marknaden den turkiska grannfrun fyller kylskåpet

30 A Personal Tribute Sir John Lyons

For reasons that I will in due course explain, my tribute will be very personal, but not, I trust, embarassingly so. It will reflect the closeness and in certain respects the uniqueness of my own relationship with Clive. Many of you knew him for longer than I did, and some of you continuously on a daily basis. I first met Clive in 1971/1972, when I was lecturing on linguistics as a Visiting Professor at Paris VIII (based at that time at Vincennes) and he attended my lectures. But I did not really get to know him that year. I met him again in 1977/1978, when I was a Visiting Professor at Paris III, and this time Clive was one of the members of my ‘team’ of ‘assistants’, some of whom were already or later became personal friends of mine. It was during the period 1981–1985, however, when I was Chairman of the Steering Committee of the ESF (ALA) Project, that I met Clive frequently, at meetings of the Committee or of one of the Research Teams. Several of the members of the Steering Committee and of the Research Groups have contributed to this volume and have mentioned Clive’s role as the Project’s Scientific Co-ordinator (based at the Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik in Nijmegen) and as Editor of the two-volume Report (Perdue, 1993). In 1985 I had had to resign at short notice from my Chairmanship of the ESF Project and was no longer in regular contact with Clive. But over the next 10 years or so we were still in touch, and I met him once or twice in England. In December 2007, just before Christmas, I (and a small number of anglophone friends) received a copy of what Clive called a ‘round robin’ (a circular letter written in English). The early paragraphs gave news, professional and domestic, and brought recipients up to date on developments up to midOctober. (There is no need for me to comment on this part of the letter.) In the final two paragraphs, he mentioned his cancer of the colon (of which until then I was ignorant) diagnosed in late October and he referred to my own long experience of chemotherapy, surgery and radiotherapy (going back to 1985). This created a special bond between us. As he put it, ‘[John Lyons is someone] who knows about these things’. For this reason I could empathise with him as far as the experience and effects of chemotherapy were concerned. As he said in his ‘round robin’ (in a characteristically humorous understatement): ‘Chemotherapy is not nice’. 613

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No less important, however, was the fact that over 25 years after my cancer had been diagnosed (despite additional serious health problems) I was still alive and, although I had had to withdraw from many of my administrative and academic responsibilities (including my Chairmanship of the Steering Committee of the ESF ALA Project) I was still reasonably active. Clive did not make this point explicit, but I am sure that he had it in mind when he wrote his round robin. It is one of the principal reasons why my relationship with him was especially close and perhaps unique. For the next three months we were regularly in contact (by telephone). In the earlier part of this period I had made a point of talking to him about linguistics and other shared interests and about his plans for the future. The ‘one firm New Year’s resolution’ that he and his wife Evelyne had made was (I am quoting from the ‘round robin’) to ‘use the convalescence period to travel and catch up with old friends’. After that, ‘in the autumn’, he hoped and intended to ‘be back at the helm’. He had continued working, in hospital, and had kept in touch with other colleagues and close friends, with visits and by telephone until this was no longer possible. After two periods of intensive treatment and surgery, which he bore with great fortitude, Clive died on 15 March 2008. As it happens, this was almost exactly 20 years since James (Peter) Thorne, a close friend both of Clive and myself, had also died with cancer of the colon (on 13 March 1998). This brings me to the second reason why I was especially moved by the ‘round robin’: Clive and ‘Jimmy’ (as we all called him) had known one another since 1976, when Jimmy had ‘replaced’ me as a Visiting Professor for a year at Paris III. Jimmy had been a colleague of mine at Edinburgh since 1964 and a very special family friend of ours (of my wife Danielle and me and our two daughters) since we had met him in America in 1961. In the period between 1976 and 1988 he would talk to us frequently about Clive. They saw one another on several occasions (in Paris or elsewhere) and were in regular contact. In the final three months during which Clive was having treatment I deliberately did not mention Jimmy. But, like me, he could not but have been thinking back to the time, 20 years earlier, when he himself had been giving support and reassurance to Jimmy in comparable circumstances. Jimmy and Clive had much in common. They had both been undergraduates at Oxford (though not of course as contemporaries). Jimmy had read English and Clive Modern Languages (Lyons, 2009). (Neither of them had specialised in linguistics as distinct from philology: this was not possible in those days at Oxford.) They were both great conversationalists and raconteurs, and had a lively sense of humour. Apart from their overlapping academic interests, they also shared several recreational interests, including theatre and sport (especially rugby). In my tribute to Jimmy (Lyons, 1990) I included an English version of an epigram by the Greek poet Callimachus (c. 305–c. 240 BC) in memory of his

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friend Heraclitus. The English-language version by William Cory was published in 1856 and is (or was) very well known. It has been re-published in several anthologies of English poetry, including one which I and probably Jimmy Thorne (and perhaps Clive) used at school. This poem, which I will now present and then briefly explicate, will serve as the centrepiece of the final part of my Closing Address). They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead, They brought me bitter news to hear, and bitter tears to shed. I wept, as I remembered, how often you and I had tired the sun with talking And sent him down the sky. And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest A handful of grey ashes, long long ago at rest, Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake, For Death he taketh all away, but them he cannot take. Cory’s version is more of a paraphrase than a translation. But it does preserve (and express rather beautifully) the two contrasting emotions which I will now make explicit and exploit): (1) grief at the loss of a dear friend; and (2) the consoling and reassuring certainty of the continued vitality (if not immortality) of his ‘nightingales’. As to our shared grief, there is nothing more to be said. As to the ‘nightingales’, in Clive’s case, these are primarily his publications and for those whom he knew personally, including his colleagues and the students he taught, their individual memories of him. The continued vitality of these ‘nightingales’ – their influence direct and indirect – is evident throughout the present volume. One thing has especially impressed me in this connection: the fact that there are so many young scholars present in this volume contributing papers, I am tempted to call them his ‘fledgling nightingales’. Their presence and their performance would have given Clive great satisfaction, committed as he was to teaching and research and to the transmission to future generations of the academic ideals which were the mainspring of his own work. Clive’s nightingales live on and are still singing to us.

References Lyons, J. (1990) In memoriam James Peter Thorne, 1933–1938. In Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science. Series IV, Vol. 65. [Papers from the 5th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics. Cambridge, 6–9 April, 1987. Lyons, J. (2009) ‘Clive (Albert) Perdue’. Obituary. Lincoln College Record 2008–09 (pp. 38–39). Lincoln College, Oxford. Perdue, C. (1993) Adult Language Acquisition: Cross-Linguistic Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.