Subordination in narratives and macro-structural planning: A comparative point of view

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

“…This contrasts with German (a 'verb-second' [V2 language]) in which the position of the syntactic subject is relatively free. In this case the main protagonist in the narrative is accorded the highest status for mention as subject of a clause (see in detail Carroll et al 2008), and events proceed in time with the protagonist 'in control' so to speak. A similar pattern also applies to the V2-language Dutch (see Flecken 2011).…”

“…Levelt 1989Levelt , 1999, the frame of analysis for the present study is based on findings with regard to the role of core grammatical features such as word order constraints, null-subject, grammaticalized aspect, for information organization for the text as a whole (cf. Carroll and von Stutterheim 2003;von Stutterheim, Carroll and Klein 2003;Carroll et al 2008). 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.…”

Assessing bilingual attainment: macrostructural planning in narratives

“…For example, is the decision to map an agent of an action as subject of a main or subordinate clause made individually at each point in the narrative, or are there planning principles that provide guidelines for the speaker at a macrostructural level, in the sense that they are found to apply on a global basis throughout the text, comparing speakers of English, German, and French (cf. Carroll et al, 2008). The findings show that principles underlying information structure that are grammatically driven hold for the whole text on a default basis.…”

“…Speakers were given the same visual input (a short silent film, for example) and were asked to tell what happened. Research within this framework has shown that the organization and embedding of linguistic form in context is driven grammatically in the domains studied, and poses problems for learners even at very advanced levels of adult second language acquisition (Carroll & Lambert, 2003, 2006Carroll, Murcia Serra, Watorek, & Bendiscioli, 2000;Carroll, Rossdeutscher, Lambert, & von Stutterheim, 2008;Carroll & von Stutterheim, 2003;von Stutterheim & Lambert, 2005).…”

“…The analyses show that focus is placed when deciding what to say on the selection of entities and associated events that reach a point of completion and can thus accommodate the relation of temporal shift ('and then'). This temporal relation is satisfied by events with a right boundary or endpoint and the selection of entities for mention that are involved in events of this kind (see in detail Carroll et al, 2008). In the film used for the cross-linguistic comparison, this leads to a preference to mention events carried out by the animate protagonist, who is responsible for bringing about events that have an endpoint in the stimulus film (see section 3.2), rather than inanimate entities such as environmental forces (gusts of wind knocking things about; pieces of paper flying around; rocks falling; water dripping, and so on).…”