Cecilia Andorno (Università di Torino)

Discourse particles development in initial L2 varieties: the role of target language speech

It is well known that L2 varieties pose specific problems for linguistic description. Although target language speech, as an input source, plays a crucial role in informing L2 varieties, rules of L2 varieties cannot be simply deduced from the target language system (comparative fallacy, Bley-Vroman 1983), but need to be induced from regularities observed within the learners production; for this reason, the identification of linguistic categories in initial L2 varieties can be problematic.

Starting from the perspective of the linguistic development of lexical categories in untutored L2 acquisition (Bernini 2005, Valentini 2008), the status of discourse particles as a separate category and their development in initial L2 varieties will be discussed. Data from different languages suggest that discourse particles arise in initial varieties as syntactically unspecified function words and develop according to the distributional properties exhibited in constructions frequently occurring in the target language input. Instead of the target language system, a perspective centered on target language utterances in speech allows for an explanation of apparently spurious phenomena: the convergent development of non-target uses of various linguistic elements as similar discourse particles (ENG copula is or ITA complementizer che as focus particles; Huebner 1983, Bernini 1995); the divergent development of cross-linguistic pairs of semantically equivalent particles (e.g. GER ja – ITA sì; GER auch – ITA anche; Andorno 2005, Benazzo & Dimroth 2015).

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Biodata

Cecilia Andorno is associate professor in Linguistics at the University of Turin. Her research interests include information structure, discourse particles, (second) language acquisition and language education in multilingual contexts. She is currently involved in “Con parole mie”, a research project concerning the development of formal varieties of Italian as a first / second language in primary schools.