Nativelike right-dislocation in near-native French

Abstract

Recent research on advanced and near-native second-language (L2) speakers has focused on the acquisition of interface phenomena, for example at the syntax—pragmatics interface. Proponents of the Interface Hypothesis (e.g. Sorace, 2005; Sorace and Filiaci, 2006; Tsimpli and Sorace, 2006; Sorace and Serratrice, 2009) argue that (external) interfaces present difficulties for L2 grammars, resulting in permanent deficits even in near-native grammars. Other research, however, has argued that interfaces are acquirable, albeit with delays (Ivanov, 2009; Rothman, 2009). This study examines right-dislocation (RD) in experimental and production data from near-native French. Right-dislocation marks topic in discourse and thus requires the integration of syntactic and discourse—pragmatic knowledge. Participants were 10 near-native speakers of French who learned French after age 10 and whose grammatical competence was comparable to the near-native speakers of French in Birdsong (1992), and 10 French native speakers. The data come from two experimental tasks and an 8.5-hour corpus of spontaneous informal dyadic conversations. The near-natives demonstrated nativelike judgments, preferences, and use of RD in authentic discourse. Only one near-native displayed evidence of first-language (L1) transfer, which resulted in non-nativelike use of RD. On the whole, the results suggest nativelike acquisition of this area of the syntax—pragmatics interface and fail to provide support for the Interface Hypothesis.