Additive and restrictive Particles in children and adults Italian L1 data and comparative perspectives

The role of additive and restrictive means in textual cohesion has attired the attention of several scientists in the last 20 years, but essentially with respect to adults native speakers or adult learners of some Romance and Germanic languages (cf., for example, Andorno 2005; Benazzo 2005; Dimroth 2002; Watorek / Dimroth 2005). The role of these same items in the acquisition of a L1 by children is less studied (cf., nevertheless, Benazzo et al. 2004; Dimroth 2009), especially for Italian (cf. Giuliano 2012a/b) and English (no work with respect to the ages that I will consider), namely the two languages on which I will focus in the present work. I will discuss the acquisition of additive and restrictive means in general, including crucially particles, together with the child’s progressing ability of building textual cohesion in a narrative text. The type of texts analysed are narrations collected by two different stimuli: The Finite Story video clip by Dimroth (2006) and a collection of thirty pictures forming altogether a story (still by Dimroth). The informants are Italian and English native children of 4, 7 and 10 years and their narrations will be compared to those of two adult (Italian and English native) reference groups. For Italian children, I have data for both stimuli; for English speaking children just the Finite Story narrations could be collected. As far as the available studies make it possible, I will compare my results to those concerning the acquisition of the means in question German, French and Polish children of the same age. As for research hypotheses, I will try to answer the following questions with respect to my children’s L1 data: (a) at which age do additive and restrictive means appear? (b) which functions do additive and restrictive quantification strategies carry out in discourse organization of very young subjects? (c) What do the acquisitional paths of these forms in children tell us about the cognitive operations by children of the same age learning different languages? (d) which strategies, among these cognitive operations, are language-specific? References Andorno, Cecilia (2005), “Additive and restrictive particles in Italian as a second language. Embedding in the verbal utterance structure”. In Hendriks, Henriette (ed.), The Structure of Learner Variety, Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 405-444. Benazzo, Sandra (2003), “The interaction between the development of verb morphology and the acquisition of temporal adverbs of contrast: a longitudinal study in French, English and German L2”. In Dimroth, Christine / Starren, Marianne (eds.), Information Structure and the Dynamics of Language Acquisition, Amsterdam, John Benjamins. Benazzo, Sandra / Dimroth, Christine / Perdue, Clive / Watorek, Marzena, (2004), “Le rôle des particules additives dans la construction de la cohésion discursive en langue maternelle et en langue étrangère”, Langages 155: 76-104. Dimroth, Christine, 2006, The Finite Story, Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics, http://corpus1.mpi.nl/ds/imdi_browser?openpath=MPI560350%23. Dimroth, Christine (2009). Stepping stones and stumbling blocks. Why negation accelerates and additive particles delay the acquisition of finiteness in German. In Christine Dimroth & Peter Jordens (Hg.), functional Categories in Learner Language. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter, 137-170. Dimroth, Christine (2002), “Topics, assertions, and additive words: how L2 learners get from information structure to target-language syntax”, Linguistics 40(4): 891–923. Giuliano, Patrizia (2012a), “Discourse Cohesion in Narrative Texts: The Role of Additive Means in Italian L1 and L2”. In Marzena Watorek, Sandra Benazzo & Maya Hickmann (eds.), Comparative Perspectives to Language Acquisition: A tribute to Clive Perdue, Bristol (UK), Multilingual Matters, pp. 375-400. Giuliano, Patrizia (2012b), “The construction of textual cohesion in narrative texts: evidence from different tasks by Italian children from 4 to 10 years old”, Linguistica e Filologia 32: 7-49. Watorek, Marzena / Dimroth, Christine (2005), “Additive scope particles in advanced learner and native speaker discourse”. In Hendriks, Henriette (ed.), The Structure of Learner Variety, Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 445-488.