Attrition and (incomplete) acquisition of Italian answering strategies / Irene Caloi

Attrition and (incomplete) acquisition of Italian answering strategies / Irene Caloi, in colloque "Bilingualism vs. monolingualism: a new perspective on limitations to L2 acquisition" organisé par lelaboratoire Octogone-Lordat (Université Toulouse 2) sous la responsabilité de Barbara Köpke (UT2J), Holger Hopp (Technische Universität Braunschweig), Tanja Kupisch (Universität Konstanz), Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès, 19-20 juin 2017.

We comparespeaker undergoing L1 attrition (AT; L1: Italian;L2: German) and heritagespeakers (HE; heritage language: Italian; majority language: German) in orderto analyse how different forms of multilingual knowledge shape syntacticphenomena that are the reflex of discourse related conditions, at thesyntax-discourse interface. One such reflex is the word order necessary toexpress a given discourse content, such as New Information Subjects (NIS) in answers to questions thatprompt the identification of the clause subject. Belletti (2007)showed that Italiananswers to these questions displaythe word order VS,thereby realizing the NIS in the immediatevP periphery (1); in contrast, German keeps the SVorder and focalizes the NIS prosodically (2):

(1)  Chi è arrivato? / È arrivato Gianni     Who is arrived / is arrived Gianni

(2)  Wer ist angekommen? / Ján ist angekommen      who is arrived / Jan is arrived

Thestructure is investigated in Italian through a production task consisting of 22videos which trigger NISs answers through 40 questions (20 transitives, 10unergatives, 4 unaccusatives, 6 existential structures).Datareveal that multilingual proficiency determines an increased variety of adoptedanswering strategies. AT and HE perform alike but crucially differently fromItalian native speakers (MonoL1); they match the performance of MonoL1 speakersonly on existential structures, for which both Italian and German display VSstructures. AT speakers show attrition in the form of a less consistent useof VS structures with respect to MonoL1.AT speakers produce alternative strategies: German-like SV structures with transitives (31.1%), unergatives(25.9%), and unaccusatives (31.4%); copular (be) structures with transitives (4.2%) and unergatives (6.9%); andpassives with transitive verbs (17.7%).HEspeakers produce the native-like VS structure more successfully withunergatives (53.9%) and unaccusatives (62.0%) than with transitives (40.2%).Transfer of SV structures from German is preferred in transitive structures(52.6%), in combination with post-verbal lexical objects, otherwise realizedas clitics in VS structures. This suggests that the presenceof the lexical object plays a crucialrole.

Results reveal that NISs undergoattrition (in AT) or incomplete acquisition (in HE), thus identifying a new domainin which phenomena at the syntax-discourse interface are shapedby multilingual proficiency, similarlyto what has been discussedby Sorace (2004)and by Belletti, Bennati & Sorace (2007) in the study of differentmultilingual populations of L2 near-native speakers of Italian.