Information Highlighting in Advanced Learner English: The Syntax–Pragmatics Interface in Second Language Acquisition

319 Pages·2009·2.31 MB·English

by  Marcus Callies

Information Highlighting in Advanced Learner English
Pragmatics & Beyond New Series (P&BNS)
Pragmatics & Beyond New Series is a continuation of Pragmatics & Beyond and
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University of Lüneburg University of Zurich
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University of Southern Belgian National Science Belgian National Science
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Editorial Board
Robyn Carston Sachiko Ide Deborah Schiffrin
University College London Japan Women’s University Georgetown University
Thorstein Fretheim Kuniyoshi Kataoka Paul Osamu Takahara
University of Trondheim Aichi University Kobe City University of
Miriam A. Locher Foreign Studies
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University of Trieste Yunxia Zhu
The University of Queensland
Volume 186
Information Highlighting in Advanced Learner English. The syntax–pragmatics
interface in second language acquisition.
by Marcus Callies
Information Highlighting
in Advanced Learner English
The syntax–pragmatics interface
in second language acquisition
Marcus Callies
University of Freiburg
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Amsterdam / Philadelphia
TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
8
American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of
Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Callies, Marcus.
  Information highlighting in advanced learner English : the syntax-pragmatics interface
in second language acquisition / Marcus Callies.
p. cm. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, issn 0922-842X ; v. 186)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1.  English language--Syntax. 2.  English language--Study and teaching--German
speakers. 3.  German language--Syntax. 4.  English language--Grammar,
Comparative--German. 5.  German language--Grammar, Comparative--English.
6.  Pragmatics. 7.  Second language acquisition.  I. Title.
PE1395.C35 2009
425--dc22 2009007777
isbn 978 90 272 5431 3 (hb; alk. paper)
isbn 978 90 272 8948 3 (eb)
© 2009 – John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any
other means, without written permission from the publisher.
John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands
John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa
Table of contents
Abbreviations ix
List of tables xi
List of figures xv
Preface xvii
chapter 1
Introduction 1
chapter 2
Information highlighting in English 9
2.1 General functional principles of discourse organization 10
2.1.1 Major concepts of information structure 13
2.1.1.1 Sentence position and information status 13
2.1.1.2 Syntactic weight 17
2.1.1.3 Topic and focus 19
2.1.1.4 Cases of emphasis: Intensification and contrast 21
2.2 Means of information highlighting in English 24
2.2.1 Lexico-grammatical means 24
2.2.1.1 Emphatic do 24
2.2.1.2 Focus particles 26
2.2.1.3 Pragmatic markers 29
2.2.2 Focus constructions 31
2.2.2.1 Inversion 32
2.2.2.2 Preposing 36
2.2.2.3 Clefts 40
2.2.2.4 Extraposition 47
2.2.2.5 Frequency and register variation 51
2.2.2.6 The markedness of focus constructions 53
chapter 3
Information structure and information highlighting
in English and German 59
3.1 Basic word order in English and German and its impact
on information structure 59
vi Information Highlighting in Advanced Learner English
3.2 Focusing devices in English and German 66
3.2.1 Topicalization vs. preposing 66
3.2.2 Inversion 68
3.2.3 Clefts 69
3.2.4 Lexico-grammatical means 77
3.2.5 Summary 77
chapter 4
Pragmatics and information highlighting in SLA research 79
4.1 Pragmatics in SLA 79
4.1.1 The syntax-pragmatics interface in language acquisition 85
4.2 Information structure and focusing devices in SLA research 89
4.2.1 Information structure in early and advanced SLA 89
4.2.2 Lexical intensifiers and focus particles 96
4.2.3 Pragmatic markers 99
4.2.4 Focus constructions 100
4.2.5 Summary 104
4.3 Language universals, markedness and crosslinguistic influence in SLA 106
4.3.1 Language universals, language typology and SLA: Universal
Grammar vs. the functional-typological approach 106
4.3.2 Typological markedness and its interplay
with crosslinguistic influence 108
4.4 Research hypotheses 111
chapter 5
Research design 115
5.1 Assessing L2 proficiency: Defining the advanced learner 115
5.2 Research instruments 117
5.2.1 Experimental study 118
5.2.1.1 Production: Discourse completion 120
5.2.1.2 Metapragmatic assessment: Pragmalinguistic judgments 123
5.2.1.3 Introspection: Retrospective interviews 126
5.2.2 Learner-corpus study 127
5.3 Procedures of data analysis 129
5.3.1 Experimental data 129
5.3.2 Corpus data 133
chapter 6
Experimental study 135
6.1 Elicited production 135
6.1.1 Native speakers vs. learners 135
Table of contents vii
6.1.1.1 Syntactic means 141
6.1.1.2 Lexico-grammatical means 145
6.1.2 Learners’ L1 vs. L2 147
6.1.2.1 Syntactic means 151
6.1.2.2 Lexico-grammatical means 156
6.2 Metapragmatic assessment 158
6.3 Introspection 164
6.4 Summary 177
chapter 7
Learner-corpus study 181
7.1 Syntactic means 181
7.1.1 Clefts 181
7.1.2 Preposing 194
7.1.3 Inversion 195
7.1.4 Extraposition 198
7.1.5 There-sentences: Existentials and presentationals 201
7.2 Lexico-grammatical means 202
7.3 Summary 204
chapter 8
Discussion and conclusion 207
8.1 Interpretation of findings 207
8.2 Methodological problems and limitations of the study 213
8.3 Pedagogical implications 215
8.4 Suggestions for further research 219
References 221
Appendices 237
Appendix 1. Story used for the elicitation tasks 237
Appendix 2. Elicitation questionnaire – English version 247
Appendix 3. Elicitation questionnaire – German version 261
Appendix 4. Contingency tables 278
Appendix 5. Individual use of focusing devices by native speakers
and learners (experimental study) 281
Appendix 6. Rankings for individual test items, native speakers vs. learners
(assessment questionnaire, English version) 283
Index 291

Abbreviations
AdjP adjective phrase
ADV adverbial
ALV Advanced Learner Variety
BNC British National Corpus
C/COMPL complement
CA Contrastive Analysis
CD communicative dynamism
DA dative alternation
DCT discourse completion task
DM discourse marker
DO direct object
DWDS Digitales Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache des 20. Jahrhunderts
EFL/ESL English as a Foreign/Second Language
EIC Early Immediate Constituents
FSP Functional Sentence Perspective
GWO Grammatical Word Order
HNPS Heavy-NP-Shift
ICE International Corpus of English
ICLE International Corpus of Learner English
IL interlanguage
ILP Interlanguage Pragmatics
IO indirect object
IS information structure
L1 native language
L2 foreign/second language
LOB Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen Corpus
LOCNESS Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays
MDH Markedness Differential Hypothesis
NNS non-native speaker