How to contrast and maintain information in narrative texts: comparing English and Spanish

The purpose of this paper is to explore the way informants change, contrast or maintain information in English and Spanish when building discourse cohesion in a narrative task. The data have been elicited using the video clip The Finite Story (Dimroth 2006), composed of 31 scenes, which altogether form a story. The protagonists are three men who one night are involved in a fire and who repeat the same actions or do the opposite of another character in different moments of the story. So informants have to exploit different linguistic devices in order to convey contrasts in the entity domain and the time domain or to maintain the predicative information. Dimroth et al. (2010) have analysed The Finite Story narrations of German, Dutch, French and Italian adult native speakers, identifying the type of items signalling which parts of the information are maintained and which parts have been changed or contrasted. The anaphoric linking devices range from additive particles (It. anche, Fr. aussi, Ger. auch etc.) to polarity (Ger. doch, Du. toch, Fr. bien etc.) or temporal contrasting markings (alla fine, finalement etc.) and to prosodic devices (prosodic accent on the finite verb). The results let the authors state that Dutch and German speakers select different pragmatic devices with respect to Italian and French speakers. As a matter of fact, the authors suggest that: - when a polarity contrast is present, Dutch and German speakers mark this polarity contrast much more frequently than Italian and French speakers, which prefer to mark the contrast on the entity or time components; - where no polarity contrast is involved, Dutch and German speakers show a clear preference for the marking of contrast on the Topic Entity with the help of additive particles, while Italian and French speakers can also signal the maintenance of information on the predicate level. With respect to the typological debate just quoted, our purpose is to test Dimroth et al.’s hypothesis on English and Spanish in order to enlarge the debate about the possible ways of building textual cohesion in Romance and Germanic languages. As to our methodology, we proposed to our informants (20 speakers for each language) the same video clip described above (The Finite Story). We will show, in particular, that the typological classification proposed by the authors does not hold and that it needs to be shaded according to the more central or peripheral character of the phenomena observed. As a result of our analysis, we will demonstrate that Spanish is closer to German and Dutch, since its speakers tend to highlight polarity contrasts whenever it is possible; English, in its turn, shares more cohesive phenomena with Italian and French than with the other German languages considered, since the contrasts of time and entity definitively overcome those concerned with polarity. A functional and enunciative explanation of the facts observed will be proposed and integrated with some grammatical explanations, the latter being incapable of justifying our results by themselves. Bibliography Dimroth, Christine, 2006. The Finite Story. Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics, http://corpus1.mpi.nl/ds/imdi_browser?openpath=MPI560350# Dimroth, Christine / Andorno, Cecilia / Benazzo, Sandra / Verhagen, Josie (2010), “Given claims about new topics. The distribution of contrastive and maintained information in Romance and Germanic Languages”, Journal of Pragmatics 42: 3328-3344. Höhle, Tilman, 1992, „Über Verum-fokus im Deutschen“, Linguistische Berichte, Sonderheft 4, Sonderheft 4, 112–141. Klein, Wolfgang, 2008, “The topic situation”. In: Ahrenholz, B. et al. (Eds.), Empirische Forschung und Theoriebildung. Festschrift für Norbert Dittmar zum 65. Geburtstag. Frankfurt a.M., Peter Lang, pp. 287-306.