How to contrast and maintain information in Spanish and Italian, as mother tongues and as foreign languages

This paper proposes an analysis of 80 narrative texts concerned with Italian and Spanish as L1s and L2s. We shall compare the way both native speakers and learners build textual cohesion when faced with a narrative task involving several referential restrictions: contrasts of entity and polarity, maintenance of the same predication, temporal shifts etc. The stimulus used to collect the data is The Finite Story by Dimroth 2006. By our results we will add to the debate about the learners’ tendency to establish anaphoric linkage according to the specific grammaticized or lexicalized (readily encodable) concepts of their mother tongue even when their competence in L2 is advanced and their L1 is typologically and genetically very close to the L2. Nevertheless we shall demonstrate, by our native and acquisitional data, that grammatical and lexical facts cannot exhaustively explain the speakers’ choices with respect to textual cohesion and the construction of perspective in a given language; an integrative explanation is therefore necessary. We propose to combine the Quaestio model with an enunciative framework. As a final objective, we aim at offering some interesting reflections about the functioning of languages in general, which will add to both the general linguistic theory and the acquisition of second languages domain.