Strategies for linking information by German and Japanese native Speakers and by German learners of Japanese

Abstract

The study examines which strategies native speakers of German, native speakers of Japanese and advanced German learners of Japanese adopt when linking information in narrative texts (film retellings). The main results are as follows: (a) The L1 German speakers organize temporal shift-relations in order to link information, whereas the protagonist in topic function is often maintained across utterances. In contrast, the Japanese speakers prefer to compare series of events involving each of the main characters by organizing a shift in the entity domain. (b) The L2 strategies cannot be explained by a single feature, as various factors are seen to interact in the L2 speakers' decision making. In particular, the organization of information from the domain of time is directly related to the principles in the source language.