Abstract
This dissertation investigated the expression of affirmative polarity contrast (e.g.,
speaker B: In my picture the child is eating the candies following after In my picture
the child is not eating the candies uttered by speaker A) from a typological and an
acquisitional perspective, framed in the finiteness-assertion hypothesis proposed by
Klein (1998, 2006). As recently suggested, polarity contrast plays a crucial role for
common ground management in German and Dutch but not in the Romance
languages Italian and French (Dimroth, Andorno, Benazzo, & Verhagen, 2010). It is
not by accident that the grammar of Germanic languages is equipped with a rich set of
linguistic means, namely Verum focus - an accent on the finite verb (e.g., Höhle,
1992) - and affirmative particles (e.g., the Dutch particle wel) for the expression of
polarity contrast. A further research question links such typological differences to
learnability problems in second language acquisition (L2). As shown in previous
studies, even at higher levels of proficiency, learners are not able to encode
information structure in a target-like way (von Stutterheim, 2003).
In this dissertation we provided experimental evidence of polarity contrast, by
adopting the same task procedure in German, Dutch, French and Italian and in L2
learners. Results showed that for German and Dutch speakers marking polarity
contrast is crucial for common ground management. By contrast, even though French
and Italian are equipped with assertion/polarity markings (e.g. Verum focus is
produced occasionally), speakers do not choose these options in the contexts tested
here; conceivably, Romance speakers feel that highlighting the contrast on the
relevant operators might result in a “too assertive” pragmatic effect. The analysis on
the L2 acquisition data supports these cross-linguistic differences. Results showed
that learners tend to look for means in their L2 which allow them to build up L1-like
discourse information organisation, and thus demonstrated a “discourse accent” (cf.
von Stutterheim, 2003)
