Cross-linguistic analysis of temporal perspectives in text production

Linkage in narratives: A comparison between monolingual speakers of French and Italian, and early and late French-Italian bilinguals

“…The relevance for textual planning, as well as acquisition, is that decisions are not solved for each utterance in turn, but also rely on planning principles that hold on a default basis in language production for a given text type. In this framework, attention has been addressed both to late as well as early bilinguals (L2 English-German; L2 German-English; L2 French-English) and their difficulties in acquiring the linguistic knowledge that determines the interplay between grammaticalized concepts and information organization at the level of the syntactic, semantic, pragmatic interface (late bilinguals, Lambert 2003, 2006;von Stutterheim and Lambert 2005; early Dutch-German bilinguals, Flecken 2011).…”

Chapter 11. What comes second

“…As English is strictly SVO, the first position is preferably filled by the (in)animate grammatical subject whereas in German the V2 word order constraint sets the first position "free" as long as the main verb is in second position in every main clause sequencing (van Kemenade & Westergaard 2012). Therefore, the first position (Vorfeld, see also Los & Starren 2012;von Stutterheim & Lambert 2005) in storytelling is preferably filled by a temporal adverbial or the (animate) protagonist that shift on the temporal story line from "bounded" event to "bounded" event. As Dutch has the same V2 word order constraint as German, the same temporal from bounded to bounded event reference in combination with an active animate protagonist as the syntactic subject is expected (van Bergen, Stoop, Vogels & de Hoop 2011).…”

“…For (1), temporal linking, the initial counts of (a) the occurrences of the progressive in the English retellings show that in the "Quest narratives" (Stutterheim & Lambert 2005) in 21% of all the utterances a progressive form was used (German 0%). Carroll and Lambert (2005: 279), reporting on the same Quest retellings, give the following (b) frequencies of temporal linkers: for English (23.4%) and German (49.4%) For (c) the frequencies of the endpoints in English vs German: these were mentioned in 27.4% of utterances for English against 51.4% for German (Stutterheim & Lambert 2005).…”

Prosodic and lexical marking of contrast in L2 Italian

“…For the sake of clarity, contexts containing a switch on the polarity will be referred to as "polarity-switch contexts", whereas linguistic expressions that highlight a contrast on the polarity component as "polarity contrast markers". Effects of typological differences on the L2-encoding of information structure in high-proficient non-native speakers have already been investigated in a number of linguistic domains, such as temporality, space and referential movement (e.g., Carroll & Lambert, 2006;Carroll, Murcia-Serra, Watorek, & Bendiscioli, 2000;Hendricks & Hickmann, 2011;von Stutterheim & Lambert, 2005) including the pragmatic category of polarity contrast (Benazzo, Andorno, Interlandi, & Patin, 2012). In particular, by using the film-retelling elicitation procedure as in Dimroth et al (2010), Benazzo et al (2012) found that German non-native speakers of Italian or French tend to recruit lexicogrammatical marking that highlight the polarity component, which is more in line with their L1 perspective.…”