The paper investigates the way bilingual (Italian / French) teenagers manage complex syntactic and textual phenomena when producing an oral narrative task. Our informants’ bilingualism is precocious since their second language, namely French, intervened at the age of about three. We studied three groups of subjects: a group of ten bilingual subjects, interviewed at the French School in Naples (Italy), and two reference groups of monolingual adolescents, necessary for the evaluation of the bilinguals narrations, one formed by ten French speakers, the other one by ten Italian speakers, interviewed in France (Avignon) and Italy (Naples), respectively. The narrative task proposed is a short film from the film Modern Times by Charlie Chaplin, that all our subject individually told to a listener who did not know it. Our analysis aims at clearing up the manner by which our three groups of subjects manage: (a) the syntactic complexity, as the expression of the way of organizing the contents of a narration and to establish a hierarchy between them; (b) the causal, final and chronological relationships between the events, namely the factors which build the semantic and textual complexity of a narrative text; (c) the reference to animate and inanimate entities, without which a narration cannot even exist. The theoretical questions that we raise are the following: (a) do our bilingual subjects exploit, in one language as well as in the other one, the same complex phenomena that the monolingual subjects of the two languages in question do? (b) Is the presence of possible difficulties or simplifications due to the complex phenomena of language or to other factors (cognition, interaction…)? The narrations in Italian and French by our bilingual subjects were necessary to establish their distance or closeness to the narrations by the native speakers of the two languages in question. The narrations of our bilingual adolescents show some simplification phenomena but no grave failure in any of the languages that they daily use. Furthermore, the differences that we identified with respect to monolinguals are certainly to be placed on the level of language and not on that of cognition or interaction.

Comparaison de phénomènes complexes en italien et en français chez des adolescents bilingues et monolingues: focus sur le texte narratif / Giuliano, Patrizia. - In: TRAVAUX DE LINGUISTIQUE. - ISSN 0082-6049. - 66:(2013), pp. 73-96.

Comparaison de phénomènes complexes en italien et en français chez des adolescents bilingues et monolingues: focus sur le texte narratif

GIULIANO, PATRIZIA
2013

Abstract

The paper investigates the way bilingual (Italian / French) teenagers manage complex syntactic and textual phenomena when producing an oral narrative task. Our informants’ bilingualism is precocious since their second language, namely French, intervened at the age of about three. We studied three groups of subjects: a group of ten bilingual subjects, interviewed at the French School in Naples (Italy), and two reference groups of monolingual adolescents, necessary for the evaluation of the bilinguals narrations, one formed by ten French speakers, the other one by ten Italian speakers, interviewed in France (Avignon) and Italy (Naples), respectively. The narrative task proposed is a short film from the film Modern Times by Charlie Chaplin, that all our subject individually told to a listener who did not know it. Our analysis aims at clearing up the manner by which our three groups of subjects manage: (a) the syntactic complexity, as the expression of the way of organizing the contents of a narration and to establish a hierarchy between them; (b) the causal, final and chronological relationships between the events, namely the factors which build the semantic and textual complexity of a narrative text; (c) the reference to animate and inanimate entities, without which a narration cannot even exist. The theoretical questions that we raise are the following: (a) do our bilingual subjects exploit, in one language as well as in the other one, the same complex phenomena that the monolingual subjects of the two languages in question do? (b) Is the presence of possible difficulties or simplifications due to the complex phenomena of language or to other factors (cognition, interaction…)? The narrations in Italian and French by our bilingual subjects were necessary to establish their distance or closeness to the narrations by the native speakers of the two languages in question. The narrations of our bilingual adolescents show some simplification phenomena but no grave failure in any of the languages that they daily use. Furthermore, the differences that we identified with respect to monolinguals are certainly to be placed on the level of language and not on that of cognition or interaction.
2013
Comparaison de phénomènes complexes en italien et en français chez des adolescents bilingues et monolingues: focus sur le texte narratif / Giuliano, Patrizia. - In: TRAVAUX DE LINGUISTIQUE. - ISSN 0082-6049. - 66:(2013), pp. 73-96.
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11588/569054
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