Matching syntax and pragmatics: a typology of topic and topic-related constructions in spoken French

Cadiot, Pierre

doi:10.1515/ling.1992.30.1.57

Cited by 34 publications

(16 citation statements)

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“…Whereas LD signals changes of topic, promotes a non-topical referent to topichood, or marks contrastive topic, RD indicates continuity with a current or immediately previous topic (Lambrecht, 1981(Lambrecht, , 2001Ashby, 1988;de Fornel, 1988;Ziv, 1994). Speakers also use RD to return to a previous topic (Cadiot, 1992;Ziv, 1994) and to encode situationally evoked referents (Ashby, 1988;Ziv, 1994). Lambrecht (1981), Calvé (1983), and Cadiot (1992) all concur that referents in RD demonstrate a higher degree of recoverability than those in LD.…”

Section: Right-dislocation In Frenchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Nativelike right-dislocation in near-native French

Donaldson

2011

Second Language Research

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Recent research on advanced and near-native second-language (L2) speakers has focused on the acquisition of interface phenomena, for example at the syntax-pragmatics interface. Proponents of the Interface Hypothesis (e.g. Sorace, 2005;Sorace and Filiaci, 2006;Tsimpli and Sorace, 2006;Sorace and Serratrice, 2009) argue that (external) interfaces present difficulties for L2 grammars, resulting in permanent deficits even in near-native grammars. Other research, however, has argued that interfaces are acquirable, albeit with delays (Ivanov, 2009;Rothman, 2009). This study examines right-dislocation (RD) in experimental and production data from near-native French. Right-dislocation marks topic in discourse and thus requires the integration of syntactic and discourse-pragmatic knowledge. Participants were 10 near-native speakers of French who learned French after age 10 and whose grammatical competence was comparable to the nearnative speakers of French in Birdsong (1992), and 10 French native speakers. The data come from two experimental tasks and an 8.5-hour corpus of spontaneous informal dyadic conversations. The near-natives demonstrated nativelike judgments, preferences, and use of RD in authentic discourse. Only one near-native displayed evidence of first-language (L1) transfer, which resulted in non-nativelike use of RD. On the whole, the results suggest nativelike acquisition of this area of the syntax-pragmatics interface and fail to provide support for the Interface Hypothesis.

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Section: Right-dislocation In Frenchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Nativelike right-dislocation in near-native French

Donaldson

2011

Second Language Research

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“…In the face of a wide variety of terms used in reference to constructions such as (1)-(3), the term left dislocation is adopted here for reasons of terminological simplicity and not as an endorsement of a particular syntactic theory. For extensive inventories of this and related constructions in spoken French, see Cadiot ( 1992 ) and Fradin ( 1990 ).…”

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confidence: 99%

Left Dislocation in Near-Native French

Donaldson

2011

Stud Second Lang Acquis

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The present study is concerned with the upper limits of SLA—specifically, mastery of the syntax-discourse interface in successful endstate learners of second-language (L2) French (near-native speakers). Left dislocation (LD) is a syntactic means of structuring spoken French discourse by marking topic. Its use requires speakers to coordinate syntactic and pragmatic or discursive knowledge, an interface at which L2 learners have been shown to encounter difficulties (e.g., Sorace, 1993; Sorace & Filiaci, 2006). The data come from (a) an 8.5-hr corpus that consists of recordings of 10 dyadic conversations between near-native and native speakers of French and (b) two contextualized paper and audio tasks that tested intuitions and preferences regarding LD. Analyses of the near-native speakers’ production of LDs, the syntactic properties of their LDs, and their use of LDs to promote different types of discourse referents to topic status suggest that their mastery of this aspect of discourse organization converges on that of native speakers.

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“…(53) French (Cadiot 1992 The morphosyntactic form of topic expression is determined by its role in the proposition, and the structuring of information is achieved by fronting, which can be accompanied by a break in intonation contour and/or a pause; in some languages, fronting of the topic expression requires cross-referencing of the topic within the comment (cf. the locative clitic in (52)).…”

Section: Spatial Framesmentioning

confidence: 99%