How to contrast and maintain information in narrative texts: a comparison between English and Spanish

The purpose of this paper is to explore the way informants change, contrast or maintain information in English and Spanish when building discourse cohesion in a narrative task. The data have been elicited using the video clip The Finite Story (Dimroth 2006), in which three protagonists repeat the same actions or do the opposite of another character in different moments of the story. So informants have to exploit different linguistic devices in order to convey contrasts in the entity domain and the time domain or to maintain the predicative information. Dimroth et al. (2010) and Giuliano (2012) have analysed Finite Story narrations of German, Dutch, French and Italian adult native speakers, identifying the type of items signalling which parts of the information are maintained and which parts have been changed or contrasted. The anaphoric linking devices range from additive particles (It. anche, Fr. aussi, Ger. auch etc.) to polarity (Ger. doch, Du. toch, Fr. bien etc.) or temporal contrasting markings (alla fine, finalement etc.) and to prosodic devices (prosodic accent on the finite verb). The results let the authors state that Dutch and German speakers select different pragmatic devices with respect to Italian and French speakers. As a matter of fact, the authors suggest that: - when a polarity contrast is present, Dutch and German speakers mark this polarity contrast much more frequently than Italian and French speakers, which prefer to mark the contrast on the topic component (entity or time); - where no polarity contrast is involved, Dutch and German speakers show a clear preference for the marking of contrast on the Topic Entity with the help of additive particles, while Italian and French speakers can also signal the maintenance of information on the predicate level. With respect to the typological debate just quoted, our purpose is to test Dimroth et al.’s hypothesis on English and Spanish in order to enlarge the debate about the possible ways of building textual cohesion in Romance and Germanic languages. Bibliography Dimroth, Christine, 2006. The Finite Story. Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics, http://corpus1.mpi.nl/ds/imdi_browser?openpath=MPI560350%23 Dimroth, Christine / Andorno, Cecilia / Benazzo, Sandra / Verhagen, Josie (2010), “Given claims about new topics. The distribution of contrastive and maintained information in Romance and Germanic Languages”, Journal of Pragmatics 42: 3328-3344. Giuliano, P. (2012), “Contrasted and maintained information in a narrative task: analysis of texts in English and Italian as L1s and L2s”, EUROSLA Yearbook 2012, Amsterdam, John Benjamins, vol. 12: 30-62. Höhle, Tilman, 1992, „Über Verum-fokus im Deutschen“, Linguistische Berichte, Sonderheft 4, Sonderheft 4, 112–141. Klein, Wolfgang, 2008, “The topic situation”. In: Ahrenholz, B. et al. (Eds.), Empirische Forschung und Theoriebildung. Festschrift für Norbert Dittmar zum 65. Geburtstag. Frankfurt a.M., Peter Lang, pp. 287-306.