How to contrast and maintain information in Spanish and Italian, as L1s and L2s

The purpose of the paper is to analyse the way informants change or contrast information in the Topic Entity and Topic Time domains (Klein 2008) in Italian and Spanish, as L1s and L2s. In the narrative task proposed, informants also have to maintain predicative information, since a process claimed to hold for some Topic Entities and Topic Times is actually ma intained from previous discourse. The data have been elicited using the video clip The Finite Story (Dimroth 2006) and are divided in four groups: Spanish L1, Italian L1, Spanish L2 of Italian learners, Italian L2 of Spanish learners. Dimroth et al. (2010) 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 to polarity or temporal contrasting markings and to prosodic devices. The same authors suggest that: when a polarity contrast is present, Dutch and German mark this polarity contrast much more frequently than Romance languages, which prefer to mark the contrast on the topic component (entity or time). Benazzo & Andorno (2010) extended the debate to Italian and French as L2s. Giuliano (2012) tested Dimroth et al.’s hypothesis on English, both as L1 and L2 (all the author used The Finite Story task), suggesting that English native speakers select cohesive means much closer to those preferred by Romance than Germanic speakers. All the authors explored crosslinguistic interferences. Now, our purpose in the present paper is to furtherly extend the debate to Spanish, as L1 and L2, and to Spanish of Italian learners. We shall demonstrate that Spanish is in many ways closer to Germanic than to Romance languages since its native speakers tend to often highlight the polarity contrast, despite the absence in their L1 of specifically grammaticised means for this purpose; they also tend to transfer this type of contrast in Italian L2, whereas the polarity contrast is absent in the Spanish L2 of Italian speakers. Bibliography Benazzo, S. & Andorno, C. 2010. Discourse cohesion and topic discontinuity in native and learner production: changing topic entities on maintained predicates. In L. Roberts, M. Howard, M. O'Laoire & D. Singleton (éds.) Eurosla Yearbook 10 (92-118). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 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. 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.