Abstract
The starting point of this paper is the observation of an unequal frequency of the additive particle auch in German as compared to the paucity of its French counterpart aussi, in L1 and L2 developmental data as well as in adult native speakers' production, which leads to an investigation of the reasons for the observed difference in language use. The paper brings together findings on the structure and discourse integration of utterances containing additive particles (translation equivalents of also) in written sources from French and German and in oral production data from speakers of French and Italian, German and Dutch. Next to data from native speakers, developmental data from learners of French and German (as L1 and L2) are shown to be relevant sources of information about the integration of the optional particles into utterances and at the discourse level. The developmental data reveal a difference between Romance and Germanic languages, concerning not only the frequency of additive particles, but also their interaction with early markers of assertion: auch/ook function as precursors of the assertive value, in competition with the expression of assertion through finiteness, whereas no such interaction is attested for aussi/anche. A comparison of native speakers' preferential choices concerning the information unit highlighted to enhance discourse cohesion confirms the differences between the two language families: speakers of Germanic languages preferentially use particles and Verum Focus, i. e. anaphoric links operating on the assertion value of the relevant utterances, whereas speakers of Romance languages choose anaphoric links operating on the utterance's descriptive content (entities and predicate). Although additive particles across languages share a similar basic meaning, only the Germanic ones are integrated in a system of assertion-related items that push their speakers to apply a discourse perspective oriented towards a comparison of assertions.
Highlights
The basic additive particles of French, Italian, Dutch, and German are optional elements that can occupy different positions in a sentence
We will first look at the function of additive particles in elementary learner languages in order to see if there are differences in the acquisition of Germanic vs. Romance languages that could be telling for the functioning of the particles in the fully-fledged native variants of these languages
The starting point of this paper was the statement of an unequal frequency of the additive particle auch in German as compared to the paucity of its French counterpart aussi, in developmental data (L1 and L2 learners) as well as in adult native speakers' production, which led to an investigation of the reasons for the observed difference in language use: in particular, we aimed to find out (i) whether the phenomenon represents an isolated and idiosyncratic difference between French and German or rather goes hand in hand with other properties of the languages under study, and (ii) if this has consequences for discourse organization that might be described in terms of 'Thinking for Speaking'
Summary
The basic additive particles of French (aussi), Italian (anche), Dutch (ook), and German (auch) are optional elements that can occupy different positions in a sentence. Even though modal particles are not included, the frequency differences between aussi and auch seem to be even more dramatic in spoken language than in the written language corpora investigated by Blumenthal. Speakers of Italian use the additive particle anche as sparsely as speakers of French use aussi, whereas speakers of Dutch use ook as abundantly as speakers of German use auch. From there we will turn to the study of native speaker data (elicited narrations) from the relevant languages (Section 4) and finish with some conclusions and tentative answers to our research questions (Section 5)
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