Abilità descrittiva e coesione testuale in L1 e L2: lingue romanze e lingue germaniche a confronto

Abstract

The paper deals with discourse cohesion in descriptive texts focusing both on Germanic and Romance languages. Each language is investigated as L1 as well as L2 with respect to Italian on the basis of a large data base. The informants described a picture to a listener who couldn’t see it. Our cross-linguistic comparison demonstrates, in agreement with Carroll et al. (2000), that the options found in the expression of reference maintenance in a static spatial task reflect distinct principles of typological nature, which are associated with different patterns of grammaticalisation: a. Germanic languages share some adverbial means of discourse cohesion (Engl. here/ there..; Ger. hier/da/dort/daneben..; Swed. da/dar/har/har/bredvid..) that are not exploited by Romance languages native speakers, although they too have some equivalent means at their disposal in the lexical repertoire of their L1s (It. qui/qua/li/la/li vicino..; Fr. ici/la/la dessous.. ; Sp. aqui/aca/ahi/alli/alla/aqui cerca..); b. structures in language which reflect core principles in information organisation are difficult to acquire since learners have to recognize clusters of form-function relations which range over different domains; c. learners tend to employ L1 cohesive means, which proves the enormous difficulty they have in reviewing their L1 “perspective”. L1 data show that Germanic languages focus – even though in different ways – on the concept of “space” via the selection of the means quoted above, in contrast with the Romance speakers, who seem to pay attention to “objects” in a stricter way, by marking the reference maintenance by full prepositional phrases or their equivalents. As to L2 data, they show that learners shape the selection of information and cohesive linguistic means by the “space oriented” or “object oriented” perspective imposed by their L1.