Prosodic and lexical marking of contrast in L2 Italian

Abstract

We investigated the second language (L2) acquisition of pragmatic categories that are not as consistently and frequently encoded in the L2 than in the first language (L1).Experiment 1 showed that Italian speakers linguistically highlighted affirmative polarity contrast (e.g., The child ate the candies following after The child did not eat the candies) in 34.3% of the cases, by producing a nuclear pitch accent on the finite verb (i.e. verum focus accent). Experiment 2 revealed that high-proficient German and Dutch non-native speakers of Italian linguistically encoded polarity contrast more frequently, either using a verum focus accent (German) or lexical markers (Dutch). This corresponds closely to the patterns preferred in their native languages. Our results show L1 transfer on three levels: a) the relevance of the pragmatic category (i.e. marking polarity contrast on the assertion component), b) the linguistic markers to encode polarity contrast and c) the phonetic implementation of the intonational marking. These three levels of transfer have ! ! 2 implications for how non-native speakers acquire the L2 discourse organisational principles and the linguistic markers to encode them.

Proficiency Reporting Practices in Research on Second Language Acquisition: Have We Made any Progress?

“…88An anonymous reviewer asked whether there is evidence that similar measures (e.g., to Tremblay's cloze test) exist, even if they are unused, for Italian. The one study in our corpus that employed an independent test of L2 Italian proficiency (Turco, Dimroth, & Braun, 2015) reported using the Oxford Italian placement test, a 52‐item cloze test. The authors provide a link to the test in a footnote of their published article, suggesting that it may (at least at one time) have been available online; at the time of writing of the present article, however, the link appeared to be no longer viable, again illustrating the importance of holding materials on a sustainable open repository.…”

Embedding additive particles in the sentence information structure: How L2 learners find their way through positional and prosodic patterns

“…The most typical case of this property is represented by verum focus, in which the finite verb is expected to receive a focal accent. In the Italian sentence structure, on the other hand, the finite verb is immediately followed by the non-finite verb, and only a few adverbs can be placed in-between; moreover, the most frequent verb modifier, the negation, always preceding the whole verb complex, is itself a clitic and cannot be independently highlighted 9 ; even in cases of a Verum Focus interpretation, in the majority of the cases the focus accent is not located on the finite verb, but on the last constituent of the complex verb (Turco et al, 2013(Turco et al, , 2015. To sum up, functional words in the VP can be both positionally and prosodically highlighted as an independent element in German but not in Italian: this difference reflects the existence of language-specific ways in constructing the information structure of the sentence (cf.…”

Non-Native Differences in Prosodic-Construction Use

“…The classic example is Gumperz's discussion of cafeteria servers who offered side dishes using a falling accent, a function which English native speakers perform with a rising accent (Gumperz, 1982). Other work in this vein has examined English question, focus and list-final intonation (Ramirez Verdugo, 2003;Swerts and Zerbian, 2010;Kainada and Lengeris, 2015), Italian contrast (Turco et al, 2015), Spanish turn keeping and information seeking (Aronsson and Fant, 2014), and backchanneling in German and Vietnamese (Ha et al, 2016). Such analyses rely on the existence of a clear intended function, and thus they cannot give us the whole story.…”