Department of French & Italian Student-Faculty Forum Series presents
Near-Native Discourse Competence: Evidence from French Left-Dislocations
by
Bryan Donaldson
Friday, September
28, 2007
2;30-3:30pm
Ballantine Hall 144
Recent research in second language acquisition (e.g., Fruit, 2006; Hertel, 2003; Hopp, 2004, 2006; Sorace, 2006; Sorace & Filiaci, 2006) has focused on learner performance at the interface of syntactic and pragmatic knowledge. Researchers are beginning to suspect that this aspect of language use is acquired only at very high levels of L2 acquisition. In line with this supposition, this study examines the upper limits of L2 discourse competence and performance by using conversational data from near-native speakers of French. I specifically examine the near-natives’ use of a common Spoken French syntactic construction, clitic left-dislocation (LD), and how these structures are deployed to structure discourse.
The data come from an 8.5 hour corpus composed of 10 dyadic native speaker/near-native speaker spontaneous informal conversations collected in France. The near-native speakers had at least 3 continuous years of residency in France and had learned French primarily after age 13. Their performance on a replication of Birdsong’s (1992) grammaticality judgment task showed their grammatical competence to be equivalent or superior to the near-natives reported in Birdsong’s study.
The corpus contains a total of 883 LDs; 410 were produced by the near-natives, 473 by the natives. The near-natives’ use of LDs is nativelike and conforms to observations by Barnes (1985), Lambrecht (1981, 1987, 1994, 2001), and others regarding the discourse functions (e.g., topicalization) of LDs. On the basis of actual conversation data, the findings of this study suggest that some aspects of discourse competence, a domain at the syntax-pragmatics interface, may be acquirable to nativelike levels. This corroborates Hopp’s (2004) claim that L2 grammars may be “fundamentally identical with native grammars, both in syntax and the mapping of Information Structure and Semantics onto syntax” (p. 88).
Bryan Donaldson is an ABD student in French linguistics who is currently serving as Visiting Lecturer in French in the Department of French & Italian. He received his MA degree from IU in 2004 and has worked as Assistant to the Editor of the journal Second Language Acquisition and as a lecteur at the Université de Pau (France).
The presentation will be followed by discussion and refreshments.
If you have a disability and need assistance, accommodations can be made to address most needs. Please call 855-5458.
