Chapter 11. What comes second

Abstract

On the basis of previous cross-linguistic analyses of (re)narrations of the same animation film in German and English, the present study shows how these (re)narrations in Dutch as another Germanic language seem to side more with German than with English in the temporal management of the story-line. Dutch speakers -just as German speakers -structure their story in sequential, bounded events, typically introduced by en dan 'and then' and pushed forward by an animate protagonist. English speakers use a large number of progressive forms, presenting an overlapping series of unbounded situations. In the management of reference to entities however, Dutch differs in a very subtle way from German in subordinate utterances where Dutch speakers use more inanimate entities as a syntactic subject than German speakers.

Language-specific principles of discourse conceptualization in L2 English

“…Due to their different word orders, the utterance-initial constituent in Dutch and English carries different functions for the structuring of information within discourse. As shown in previous studies (Carroll & Lambert, 2003;Los, 2009;Starren, 2017) on native speakers of English and German (a V2-language like Dutch), the speakers of the two languages employ entirely different cognitive strategies to structure narrative and picture descriptions. While English speakers seem to use what they see as a structuring principle (facilitated by clause-initial subjects and existential expressions), German speakers seem to emphasize where they see these things (facilitated by pre-verbal locative adverbials).…”

“…the Vorfeld (Bohnacker & Rosén, 2007a, b, 2008Carroll et al, 2000;Los & he is walking through this plane and the sand is caving in under him because he's looking for water he is digging for the water paper is blowing into his face Dreschler, 2012). This preverbal position in V2 languages potentially fulfills the pragmatic function of a 'local anchor' , as is shown by the temporal adverbial en dan 'and then' in Bülow-Möller (1996), Carroll & von Stutterheim (1993), Carroll et al (2000), Los & Dreschler (2012), and Starren (2017) on information structure in English and German, a V2 language comparable to Dutch in terms of syntax and information structure, have shown how V2 languages allow for the use of utterance-initial adverbials to link back to previous discourse. This means that the subject of a sentence in these languages does not have to serve a successive discourse-linking function as it does in English.…”

“…In retelling a set of events or describing a picture, language users have to select information from a given knowledge base and decide how to sequence the various elements, what to say first, what next and so on, in the processes of selection, segmentation, and linearization of information (Carroll & von Stutterheim, 1993;Slobin, 1996). This information must also be consistently anchored in space and time, and the selected components have to be structured descriptions (Carroll, 2000;Carroll & Lambert, 2003;Lambert et al, 2003;Starren, 2017). These later studies have shown how a set of discourse principles underpinned by a conceptual framework may be influenced by language-specific means in language use in a speaker's L1.…”