How to contrast and maintain information in English, as L1 and L2

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the way informants change or contrast information in the Topic Entity and Topic Time domains (Klein 2008) in Italian and English, 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 maintained from previous discourse. The data have been elicited using the video clip The Finite Story (Dimroth 2006) and are divided in three groups: English L1, English L2 of Italian advanced learners, Italian L2 of English advanced 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); - where no polarity contrast is involved, Germanic languages show a clear preference for the marking of contrast on the Topic Entity with the help of additive particles, while Romance languages can also signal the maintenance of information on the predicate level. My purpose is to test Dimroth et al.’s hypothesis on English, both as L1 and L2, in order to enlarge the debate about the possible ways of building textual cohesion in Romance and Germanic languages, extending it to the L2 perspective as well. 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