Discourse cohesion in narrative texts: the role of additive means in Italian L1 and L2

The purpose of this study is to investigate the type and function of additive means, especially of additive particles, in Italian as a first and second language. As a first step, I will analyse narrative texts produced by Italian native children (with ages of 4, 7 and 10 years) and Italian adults and adult English speaking learners of Italian; as a second step, I will compare learners' narrations to those of adult native Italians as well as to those of Italian children, in order to identify common or divergent tendencies in the use of cohesive additive means; the comparison between L2 learners' and children's data, in particular, will let me identify and compare the types of learning strategies the two groups exploit. I will also consider narrative texts produced by English native speakers with respect to which I will evaluate the transfer from L1 into their Italian narrations. As a last step, I will propose a crosslinguistic comparison between our results and Benazzo et al. (2004)'s ones, which are concerned with French, German and Polish. Benazzo, S., Dimroth, C., Perdue, C. and Watorek, M. (2004), "Le rôle des particules additives dans la construction de la cohésion discursive en langue maternelle et en langue étrangère", Langages 155: 76-104.