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Détail de la contribution

Auteur: Sandra BENAZZO

Co-Auteur(s): Christine DIMROTH, Universität Osnabrück, Allemagne

Titre:
Additive particles in Romance and Germanic languages: Are they really similar?


Abstract/Résumé: Romance and Germanic languages show great differences in the repertoire of contrastive particles (e.g. German 'doch' and Dutch 'wel' that lack comparable equivalents in Italian and French; cf. Dimroth, Andorno, Benazzo & Verhagen 2010). At first glance, there is no such discrepancy in the domain of additive particles, were the repertoire in both language groups consists of one default particle ('aussi', 'anche', 'auch', 'ook') and a variety of secondary ones whose use is more restricted ('également', 'ebenfalls', etc.). The study of oral production data of native speakers of the above mentioned languages, however, reveals that Romance and Germanic languages systematically differ in the frequency of use of additive particles and also in the way in which these particles interact with the information structure of the underlying utterances. These differences can be linked to more fundamental differences in information organization that also have consequences for first and second language acquisition. We will present findings on the use of additive focus particles in free and elicited production data of native speakers of French and German as well as of first and second language learners of these languages. Results show that additive particles, like contrastive particles and negation, seem to be operating on the “proposition layer” of utterance structure (Dik, 1997) in German, whereas they are integrated on the “predication layer” in the Romance languages. This contribution presents collaborative work issued from the international research project LANGACROSS ('Utterance structure in context: Language and cognition during acquisition in a cross-linguistic perspective') that looks into language specific principles for the expression of additive and contrastive information and at perspective taking in discourse.