Syntactic diversity and functional adequacy in L2 German writing : a multi-dimensional investigation of L2 learners’ syntactic behavior at the interface with discourse organization
(2021)
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- Even when they demonstrate a perfect command of the sentence formation rules of the target language, second language (L2) learners’ written productions are often perceived as distinct from native texts. A major feature frequently put forth to explain this divergent character of non-native writing is a lack of syntactic diversity undermining the cohesion and communicative dynamism of learners’ discourse. In German, varying one's syntactic repertoire implies in particular the ability to topicalize object complements, i.e. to introduce them in sentence-initial position in order to signal their role as thematic anchors for the information units to come. Focusing on the written production of L2 German learners representative of different proficiency levels, the present work has set itself two objectives: (i) to quantify the use of object-subject structures in non-native texts and to determine the extent to which the quality of discourse organization is dependent on the frequency of occurrence of these non-canonical structures; (ii) to identify the grammatical properties of the target language and the cognitive barriers that hinder the process of syntactic diversification at the interface with discourse organization. In view of these two lines of research, this work demonstrated that the use of non-canonical structures at a level comparable to natives is attainable in L2 German, and that this syntactic behavior can be favored by a better performance in other segments of the target language, starting with case morphology.
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Lecouvet, M. (2021). Syntactic diversity and functional adequacy in L2 German writing : a multi-dimensional investigation of L2 learners’ syntactic behavior at the interface with discourse organization. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/104976