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Discourse and pragmatics

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 Chapter 28. Discourse and pragmatics1

Roumyana Slabakova, U Iowa

Index Items: linguistic competence, pragmatic competence, speech acts, conversational

implicature, scalar implicature, reference (see anaphora resolution), and vice versa,
anaphora resolution, (see reference), deixis, definiteness, indefiniteness, specificity,
temporality, Information Structure (see the syntax-discourse interface), Topic, Focus, (for
both see Information Structure), presupposition

1. Introduction

Recent research in second language acquisition acknowledges the prime importance of pragmatic

and discourse knowledge for using a second language effectively. When Hymes (1966) argued

against the perceived inadequacy of the terms “linguistic competence” and “performance”

(Chomsky 1965) and introduced the term “communicative competence,” he was implying that

the latter is a superior modelling of language knowledge and use. In the second language

acquisition literature and in the foreign language teaching literature, linguistic competence has

often been interpreted very narrowly as little more than knowledge and use of morpho-syntax.

However, there is a large part of linguistic competence outside of morpho-syntax that regulates

comprehension and production of situationally and contextually appropriate sentences and

discourse. Thus “linguistic competence” and “communicative competence” should not be in

opposition, since effective communication cannot happen without the underlying linguistic-

pragmatic competence. The existing research on interlanguage pragmatics to date has focused

inordinately more on some aspects of pragmatic competence in preference to others. This chapter

1
I am grateful to the editors for inviting me to contribute a chapter on a topic out of my comfort zone. It has been a
very rewarding experience. I am also grateful to the students who participated actively in the “Linguistic Pragmatics
and its L2 Acquisition” seminar at the University of Iowa in the Spring of 2008. Three anonymous reviewers helped
me to improve the clarity of the presentation and the accuracy of some claims, thank you. All remaining errors are
mine.

1
will survey the literature on interlanguage discourse (sensitivity to linguistic context) and

pragmatics (knowledge of the world, Gricean maxims of co-operation and other universal

pragmatic principles)2 with a view of highlighting important new developments in the

underresearched areas and focusing on pragmatics as linguistic knowledge acquisition.

The Handbook of Pragmatics edited by Laurence Horn and Gregory Ward (2004) lists

implicature, presupposition, reference, deixis, definiteness, and speech acts as the domain of

pragmatics. These largely overlap with what Levinson (1983) identifies as the five main areas of

pragmatics: conversational implicature, presupposition, deixis, conversational structure, and

speech acts. L2 pragmatics, however, has traditionally investigated areas considered to be in the

purview of sociolinguistics, such as institutional talk in and outside of classrooms (Bardovi-

Harlig and Hartford 2005). Indeed, Rose and Kasper (2001) characterize pragmatics “as

interpersonal rhetoric— the way speakers and writers accomplish goals as social actors who do

not just need to get things done but must attend to their interpersonal relationships with other

participants at the same time” (Rose and Kasper 2001: 2).

Thus the three areas that have largely been studied in L2 pragmatics are speech acts,

conversational management and conversational implicature. Theoretical perspectives from which

these topics are studied include conversation analysis and classroom discourse analysis,

sociocultural theory as well as cognitive approaches to SLA (Kasper 2009). As will be shown in

this chapter, speech acts have garnered the lion’s share of attention within these approaches, with

the latter two topics lagging far behind in research interest. While nominal reference and

(in)definiteness have been extensively investigated within generative as well as non-generative

L2 acquisition research, it is safe to say that deixis marking and presuppositions are severely

2
One can argue that discourse and pragmatics are in a set-superset logical relationship. Sensitivity to linguistic
discourse context is only part of pragmatic knowledge of the world and universal pragmatic principles as used to
decode and encode linguistic messages.

2
understudied (Bardovi-Harlig 2011). On the other hand, topic and focus marking at the

discourse-syntax interface is enjoying a positive surge in generative second language studies,

with Sorace’s Interface Hypothesis (Sorace 2003, 2011, Sorace and Serratrice 2009) proving to

be an influential proposal spurring research endeavours in the first decade of the twenty-first

century.

In this review, pragmatics will be approached from a linguistic competence perspective. I

use the term “linguistic competence” more broadly than is presently accepted in the applied

linguistic literature (e.g., Bachman’s 1990 organizational competence, which is opposed to

pragmatic competence). The pragmatic component of linguistic competence regulates the

production and comprehension of, for example, deictic expressions, implicatures and pronouns,

among many other linguistic structures. Pragmatic competence involving socio-discursive

actions aimed at human communication will not be the focus of this chapter. Rather than repeat

the already available excellent recent reviews (Bardovi-Harling 2011, Kasper 2009), which

survey the prevalent research perspective on pragmatics as language-mediated social action, I

propose to complement those reviews by focusing on developmental L2 research of discourse

and pragmatic constraints on the grammar. The critical look taken into each area of pragmatics

will be based on describing language universals as well as L1-L23 meaning mismatches within

that area. I will echo and extend Bardovi-Harlig’s (2005) call to re-contextualize L2 pragmatics

using a wider definition of communicative competence, which includes knowledge of pragmatic

universals and overcoming pragmatic transfer. My perspective in this chapter is strictly in

complementation of, and not in opposition of, the perspective of interaction and socio-discursive

3
In using the label L2 acquisition, I refer to the acquisition not only of a second, but also of a third and fourth
language, etc., that is, all non-native acquisition.

3
dimensions of pragmatics. Finally, I will identify the areas of further research interest likely to

increase our knowledge of interlanguage pragmatic development.

2. Speech acts

The L2A research in this area is mainly based on speech act theory (Austin 1962, Searle 1969).

According to these authors, a human utterance as part of communication represents the

simultaneous performance of multiple acts: a locutionary act (i.e., propositional meaning of the

sentence), an illocutionary act (i.e., the force associated with the use of the utterance in a specific

context), and a perlocutionary act (i.e., the effects on the recipient of the performed speech act).

The illocutionary act is at the heart of L2 pragmatics research because it captures the essence of

the speaker’s intention or goal in producing a particular conversational turn.

As mentioned above, definitions of L2 pragmatics clearly reflect the dominance of

speech acts as a primary area of inquiry. For example, Blum-Kulka (1982) makes a distinction

between social, linguistic and pragmatic acceptability but identifies wrong illocutionary force as

the most salient characteristic of nonnative speech act realization. Thomas (1983) introduces the

division between sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic competence. In Kasper’s (2001)

definitions:

Pragmalinguistic knowledge requires mappings of form, meaning, force, and context....

Sociopragmatics refers to the link between action-relevant context factors and

communicative action (e.g., deciding whether to request an extension, complain about the

neighbor’s barking dog) and does not necessarily require any links to specific forms at all

(Kasper 2001, 51).

4
 While both types of knowledge have been studied extensively (see Kasper and Rose

2002, Kasper 2009, Bardovi-Harlig, 2005, 2011 for reviews), it is the latter that has been better

operationalized in the literature and has received more attention in general. The development of

pragmalinguistic knowledge, the conditions, environments, and the types of instruction that

influence it profitably are still in need of more research attention (Kasper, 2001). It is also

interesting to observe that the L2A literature on speech act development is much richer than the

L1A literature on the same topic. Therefore, it has become standard for researchers in the field to

describe (but not always to test) how native and nonnative speakers perform a specific speech act

and to compare the two (e.g., Hassall 2006, Barron 2006, among many others). Although there is

a clear understanding in the literature (von Stutterheim and Klein 1987, Kasper, 2009; Bardovi-

Harlig, 2011) that learners can and do access universal pragmatic resources such as the notions

of politeness, cooperation, turn taking in conversation, etc., positive pragmatic transfer in the

conditions of L1-L2 similarity has been understudied. Perhaps understandably, researchers tend

to focus on linguistic situations where speech acts in the L1 and L2 mismatch. There is

significant evidence, surveyed in Kasper (2009) that forming new pragmatic knowledge presents

considerable challenges to learners. However, L1-L2 similar speech acts, conversational routines

and conventional expressions can give us a very interesting insight into the other side of the

issue: if learners can transfer the sociopragmatic knowledge form their native culture, how do

they use their pragmalinguistic resources to apply the transferred competence?

Research into interlanguage pragmatics also includes an examination of the role of

classroom instruction. The rationale for examining effects of instruction is based on Schmidt’s

Noticing Hypothesis (Schmidt 1983, 1993) observation that mere exposure to the target language

is not sufficient for pragmatic competence to be picked up effortlessly, even after prolonged

5
exposure. Furthermore, Bardovi-Harlig (1999) argues forcefully for the teaching of pragmatic

skills because uninstructed learners differ from native speakers not only in production but also in

perception of pragmatic norms. An implicit assumption of authors who urge the teaching of

speech acts is that grammatical competence and pragmatic competence (in the sense of

knowledge of politeness) do not go hand-in-hand in most learners’ linguistic development.

To take an example from a recent study, Koike and Pearson (2005) attempts to tease apart

the effects of explicit and implicit instruction on the complex speech act of giving suggestions.

Anglophone learners of Spanish at roughly intermediate proficiency were divided into five

groups: those that received explicit versus implicit pre-instruction crossed with those that

received explicit versus implicit feedback plus a control group that received no instruction on

this speech act. Results of a post-treatment test and a delayed post-test indicate that learners can

indeed learn and maintain pragmatically appropriate behavior when they are given instruction on

the speech act and responses before further practicing with exercises.  The researchers also note

that explicit instruction seems to help learners understand the speech act while implicit

instruction helps them to produce more appropriately (Koike and Pearson 2005: 495).

Furthermore, Jeon and Kaya (2006), a recent meta-analysis based on 13 quantitative studies

suggests that explicit instruction is generally superior to implicit instruction, in the realm of

speech acts,

Since polite behavior is to some extent a matter of personal choice and upbringing, not

only of linguistic knowledge, studies comparing college-age L2 learners (which are the majority

of studies) would benefit from demonstrating that the same polite behavior is indeed the norm

for these individual learners in their native language. Furthermore, it should be a priori

established whether or not the native language and the target language differ measurably in the

6
respective speech act so that learners have something pragmatic to learn over and beyond the set

linguistic expressions of the speech act under investigation. For example, Holtgraves (2007)

performs a very interesting experiment to ascertain that speakers of a language activate a specific

speech act construct in their mental grammar upon understanding that one has been performed in

the current communication. However, the nonnative speakers in his experiment come from a

large variety of native languages so it is not clear which of them had to learn a new speech act

and which had to map the L2 speech act onto their native one.

More generally speaking, the L2 speech act acquisition research is working towards a

detailed and better-operationalized comparison of speech acts across languages of the world. To

this end, if no independent language comparisons exist in the pragmatics literature, L2

experimental studies should include at least two native control groups (L1 and L2) as well as

learner groups. Furthermore, it should be ascertained that learners notice, recognize and

comprehend speech acts in listening, so that they can then appropriate them in their individual

grammars (Bardovi-Harlig 2009).

3. Conversational Implicature

Conversational implicature is a linguistic phenomenon related to speech acts in the sense that

both capture the ability of the hearer to recognize the additional meaning and intention encoded

in a speaker’s utterance. While speech acts are more often culturally acceptable conventions and

rules of speaking, conversational implicature refers to the universal ability to recognize the

speaker’s underlying intention over and above the compositional semantic meaning of the

utterance. For many L2 researchers, comprehension of implied meaning is a speech act among

many others. However, literal and intended meaning interpretation is a linguistic computation

7
much wider in application: it is part of almost any communication. Consider the following

example of a well-known pragmatic inference:

(1) Some professors are smart.

Most people would agree that, in hearing the utterance in (1), they understand that he speaker has

conveyed the assumption in (2).

(2) Not all professors are smart.

Notice that (2) is not encoded by the speaker’s utterance, nor is it part of what the speaker has

said. Rather, (2) is an assumption inferentially derived by the hearer on the basis of what the

speaker has said. Logically speaking, some means some and possibly all. But if the speaker of (2)

had meant all professors are smart, she would have uttered (3) or (4), being maximally

informative and not (1). Since she didn’t, then we can safely assume she means (2).

(3) Professors are smart.

(4) All professors are smart.

The first systematic attempt to explain how the inference in (1) is derived is due to the

philosopher of language Paul Grice. In a series of lectures presented at Harvard in 1967,

published later as Grice (1989), he offered a comprehensive framework of the mechanisms of

inferential communication. More specifically, he suggested that communication is essentially

governed by certain rational expectations about how a conversational exchange should be

conducted, which he called “maxims”. According to Grice’s five maxims, interlocutors are

normally expected to offer contributions that are truthful, informative, relevant to the goals of the

conversation and appropriately phrased. These expectations about rational conversational

conduct constrain the range of interpretations hearers are entitled to entertain in interpreting

utterances. Furthermore, these expectations can be violated (or exploited) to create a variety of

8
effects. According to Grice’s maxims, in producing (1) and meaning (2), the speaker has used

part of the following maxim:

(5) “Quantity Maxim

i. make your contribution as informative as is required,

ii. do not make your contribution more informative than is required.” (Grice 1989:26)

The speaker has chosen a relatively weak term among a range of words ordered in terms of

informational strength: some … most … all. Assuming that the speaker is trying to be cooperative

and will say as much as she truthfully can, the fact that she chose the weaker term (some) gives

the listener reason to think that she is not prepared to make the stronger statements in (3) and (4).

This leads to the inference that the stronger statement does not hold, that is, to (2). The

assumption in (2) is called a conversational implicature, and more specifically, a scalar

implicature, since the propositions which some … most … all give rise to are ordered on a scale

(Horn, 1972, Gazdar, 1979). Implicatures are studied from the perspective of Relevance Theory

(Sperber and Wilson 1986) and from a neo-Gricean perspective (e.g., Levinson, 2000).

Note that conversational implicature is universal, it is purportedly part of human

language and all languages should exhibit a similar process of implied meaning inferencing.

Therefore, the issue of transfer from the native language plays out in an interesting way in this

area of linguistic pragmatics. The mechanisms of scalar implicature computation, whatever they

are, can readily be transfered from the native language of the learner. On the other hand,

implicature in certain situations certainly depends on the lexical knowledge of set expressions, or

chunks.

A pioneering series of studies on knowledge of conventional implicature was Bouton

(1988, 1994). Initially based on a cross-sectional picture, Bouton followed the development of

9
several types of conversational implicature such as relevance and implied criticism. He tested

two groups of students after 17 months and after 54 months in the US. The general conclusion

from his findings was that the learners were capable of computing implicature after a period of

study in the US. The only area of uncertainty and difficulty remained “specific points of

American culture and not the type of implicature involved” (Bouton 1994: 163). Bouton’s

findings confirmed that implicature is a cognitive process distinct from cultural knowledge and

that its acquisition does benefit from instruction and longer exposure to the target language.

The effect of the learning environment, in the target language country or in the native

language country, was taken up by Röver (2005). The study tested ESL and EFL learners and

tested, among other conditions, comprehension of two types of implicatures: formulaic

implicatures, e.g., indicating agreement that should have been patently obvious to the

interlocutor by saying “Is the Pope Catholic?” and conversational implicatures that had to be

computed online without the benefit of conventional expressions (Q: Are you coming to the

party? A: I have to work, where the answer means No). Results revealed no effect of L2

exposure on learners’ comprehension of implicatures but a significant proficiency effect.

Recently, Taguchi (2008) examined the comprehension speed and accuracy of Japanese ESL and

EFL learners. She employed a pragmatic listening task with indirect refusals and indirect

opinions and she administered it twice: before and after a 5 to 7 week period of instruction.

Results indicate that both learning groups improved in speed and accuracy, suggesting that the

learning environment does not have a decisive effect on interlanguage pragmatics. In other

words, even a foreign language classroom affords sufficient input for the learners to make

decisive gains in pragmalinguistic competence. In this respect, these two studies contradicted

earlier findings suggesting that instruction in a study-abroad situation was beneficial for

10
pragmatic development (Bardovi-Harlig and Dörnyei 1998).

There is an extensive literature on scalar implicature computation demonstrating that

children can answer experimental questions in a pragmatic way, but not until the ages of 5 to 7

(Guasti et al, 2005; Papafragou and Musolino, 2003). A central question of the child acquisition

literature is whether scalar implicature computation development depends on the maturation of

some cognitive capacity, or of processing abilities? If scalar implicature calculation depends on

the maturation of some cognitive capacity in children, we expect adult learners to be much better

at it than children learning their mother tongue. Not only are they cognitively mature individuals

but their native language is in a position to assist them in inference calculation. If, on the other

hand, scalar implicature computation depends on processing capacity because it involves choice

of an optimal competitor within a narrowly constructed set of options (a sentence with some

versus a sentence with not all), we could expect adult learners to have more difficulty than adult

and young native speakers.

These predictions were tested in Slabakova (2010) and Lieberman (2009). Slabakova

investigated the L2 acquisition of scalar implicatures by Korean-native learners of English. In

one experiment the participants had to judge the felicity of underinformative sentences without

context as in (6) and had to say whether they agree with the statement.

(6) Some elephants have trunks.

A positive answer represents the logical option since some and indeed all elephants have

trunks. However, the sentence is pragmatically infelicitous in that it is not maximally

informative; the negative is the pragmatic answer. The test sentences were translated in Korean

and administered to Korean native speakers, as well as to English natives in English. Slabakova

found differences in the Korean speakers’ performance in their native and in their second

11
language. They gave around 40% pragmatic answers in their native language (not significantly

different from the English native group) and about 60% pragmatic answers in their second

language. The results suggest that L2 learners have no problem computing scalar implicatures;

indeed they do so more often than native speakers. In the second experiment with added context,

the learners gave pragmatic answers over 90% of the time. Slabakova (2010) argues that the

difference between native and second language speakers is due to processing resources. Since the

logical responses are arguably due to conjuring up alternative contexts in order to agree with the

logical use of some (only some elephants have trunks because some others may have been

injured, or born without trunks, Guasti et al 2005), speakers have a harder time coming up with

these alternative contexts in their second language.

Lieberman (2009) continues the investigation of scalar implicature computation, focusing

on the issue of processing resources. He tested the acceptance of computationally demanding

implicatures as in (7) and compared them to less demanding sentences as in (8).

(7) Max didn’t read all of the books.

(8) Max read some of the books.

A sentence such as (7) involves an indirect implicature because of a scale reversal and is harder

to process than the direct implicature in (8), even for native speakers (Gillingham, 2007).

Lieberman tested Japanese-native learners of English on the scales <sometimes, always>,

<partly, completely>, as well as every in the scope of negation. Participants had to evaluate the

felicity of sentences in short contexts. When forced to judge the acceptability of single test

sentences, native speakers as well as learners had difficulty computing the indirect implicatures

compared to the direct one. The nonnative speakers were even less accurate than the natives,

suggesting that in these cases there is indeed a processing problem and the native nonnative

12
differences are a matter of degree. When the processing load was reduced by presenting the

participants with two alternatives, one felicitous and one infelicitous, the nonnative speakers had

no trouble with the task and performed similarly to the native speakers. It is interesting to note

that neither in Slabakova (2010) nor in Lieberman (2009) was proficiency a factor in the

learners’ performance.

A very interesting dimension of child-adult comparisons and processing resources is

highlighted by studying bilingual children. There is a well-established effect of bilingualism on

executive functioning (involving attention, inhibition and focusing) in children and adults.

Bialystok (2001), Bialystok and Senman (2004), Bialystok and Martin (2004) and others have

shown that bilinguals often exhibit significantly superior executive functioning and attentional

abilities that are associated with better responses on metacognitive and metalinguistic tasks. Thus

it is possible that the bilingual advantage is a factor in pragmatic development.

This research question is examined by Siegal, Iozzi and Surian (2009), which compares

pragmatic competence in bilingual and monolingual children. Children participating in this study

were bilingual in Italian and Slovenian, or monolingual in either language. The researchers tested

3–6-year-old children on a conversational violations test to find out whether they would obey

Gricean maxims. Results of two experiments in Siegal et al. (2009) show that there is a definite

advantage of the bilingual children over the monolingual ones on four Gricean maxims: Quantity

II, Quality, Relation and Politeness. Bilingual children were more accurate in choosing non-

redundant answers, true answers over false ones, answers that were relevant to the questions, and

polite answers over rude ones. The only maxim on which all the children performed equally well

and hovered at around 60% pragmatic responses was the Maxim of Quantity I. Here is a test

item:

13
(9) Question: “What did you get for your birthday?”

Logical but underinformative answer: “A present.”

Pragmatically appropriate answer: “A bicycle.” (Siegal et al., 2009:116)

Results of 60% pragmatic answers for children before the age of six are largely in line with other

studies in the literature on scalar implicature computation in children. More importantly,

however, Siegal et al. (2009) do not establish an advantage for bilingual children comprehending

underinformative sentences. Thus it is possible that comprehending underinformative sentences

involves different semantic-pragmatic calculations than detecting relevance and rudeness.

In this section, studies were summarized comparing conversational implicature

knowledge with scalar implicature knowledge in L2 speakers. Findings suggest that when

universal computation mechanisms are at play, learners have no trouble comprehending them;

when culturally specific knowledge or formulaic expressions are involved, learners are less

accurate. In addition, the bilingual advantage may only be afforded with respect to the latter but

not the former.

4. Reference (anaphora resolution)

While reference in linguistic pragmatic theory is concerned with the aboutness of the utterance

very broadly construed, research in acquisition of reference focuses on a variety of contextual

factors that lead to the introduction of a new referent in a discourse, the linguistic form that the

speaker chooses on its first mention, the linguistic forms employed for repeated reference to the

same entity and the interaction between linguistic (encoded) and contextual (inferred) cues that

determine the hearer’s identification of the intended referent. Two influential theoretical

proposals on reference resolution within generative linguistics are Chomsky’s (1981) binding

14
Theory and Reinhart and Reuland’s (1993) Reflexivity Theory. While the former uses

predominantly syntactic concepts to formulate its constraints, the latter uses semantic and

argument-structure constructs in addition to syntactic ones.

A number of studies on interpretation of anaphora (Zribi-Hertz, 1989; Reinhart &

Reuland, 1991; Pollard & Sag, 1992; Pollard & Xue, 2001) have pointed out serious problems

for any purely syntactic account and proposed that interpretation of anaphora is determined not

only by syntactic constraints, but also by pragmatic constraints. The discourse principles have

been claimed to involve such notions as logophoricity, contrastiveness, and discourse

prominence.4 Furthermore, Huang (1994, 2000) proposes a Neo-Gricean pragmatic theory of

anaphora in which determining referents of anaphora is pragmatically constrained. He argues

that in several languages, such as Chinese and Korean, pragmatics play a central role and thus,

binding of reflexives may be primarily subject to principles of language use, while in English,

syntactic constraints, such as c-command and locality, are fundamental factors in reflexive

binding. The interpretation of a reflexive is subject to the I-principle, a principle of ‘inference to

the best interpretation’ (Atlas & Levinson, 1981): implicature may cancel some possible

interpretations until it finds an antecedent for the reflexive that gives the most informative,

stereotypical interpretation consistent with our knowledge of the world. To illustrate, note

example (10).

(10) Yang Daniani danxin nüerj bu ken cihou zijii/j.

Yang grandma worry daughter not willing look after self

‘Grandma Yangi is worried that her daughterj is not willing to look after heri/

4
“Logophoricity refers to the phenomenon in which the perspective of an internal protagonist of a sentence or
discourse, as opposed to that of the current, external speaker, is being reported by some morphological and/or
syntactic means. (Huang 2005: 310)” Contrastiveness refers to the usage of emphatic pronouns which highlight a
contrast to current expectations or involving a “he and not anyone else” type of interpretation. Discourse prominence
captures the fact that some discourse referents are more prominent than others in a given discourse situation.

15
 herselfj.’

In English, herself and Grandma cannot corefer on syntactic grounds. In Chinese, the

reflexive can be referentially dependent on the local subject and on the long-distance subject.

However, the local subject interpretation can be rejected when it is inconsistent with our

knowledge of the world. The anaphor ziji in (10) is preferably interpreted as referentially

dependent on the embedded subject, in this case nüer ‘daughter’. But this is not the best

interpretation since it contradicts our knowledge of the world: stereotypical expectations are that

younger people look after older people. The main verb danxin ‘worry’ suggests that the person

who the daughter is not willing to look after is not the daughter herself, but the grandma.

Therefore, the interpretation is cancelled, and the I-principle promotes an interpretation that ziji

is referentially dependent on the matrix subject, Yang Danian ‘grandma’.

Only a few studies have addressed the role of pragmatic factors in the acquisition of L2

reflexives thus this is a significantly underresearched area. Thomas (1989a) examined the

interpretation of English reflexives by native speakers of 20 different languages including two

large subgroups, Chinese and Spanish. Although Thomas focused on the issue of the resetting of

parameters and of L1 transfer within the generative framework, she also looked at the pragmatic

influences on the interpretation of reflexives. She concluded that unlike native speakers, L2

learners frequently permit non-local binding in bi-clausal sentences, whether or not the NP is

pragmatically favored. Therefore, according to Thomas, pragmatic bias failed to

induce L2 learners to allow long-distance binding, suggesting no important role of pragmatics in

L2 learners’ interpretation of reflexive.

Demirci (2000, 2001), on the other hand, argues that pragmatic knowledge plays an

important role in the L2 learners’ interpretation of reflexives, and interferes with the learners’

16
acquisition of locality conditions in English reflexive binding. Demirci studied the acquisition of

English reflexive by Turkish learners of English at five proficiency levels. Unlike English

reflexives, which only allow an antecedent in the same clause, Turkish reflexives allow both

local and non-local binding. Furthermore, unlike other LD reflexives, such as Chinese reflexive

ziji, Turkish reflexives can be bound by both subject and non-subject antecedents. Therefore,

Turkish native speakers need to rely on inference, context, and knowledge about the world in

order to choose between several possible antecedents. Demirci (2000) contrasted pragmatically

neutral and biased (in favor of a local NP and of a non-local NP) finite and non-finite biclausal

sentences by world knowledge. She concluded that the L2 learners transferred pragmatic

principles from L1 to L2; however, they were not able to overcome the transfer and to acquire

fully the purely syntactic rules of English reflexive binding.

Lee (2008) also used pragmatically biased and neutral test items to check the reflexive

interpretation choices of English and Korean native speakers as well as Korean-native ESL

learners. The surprising finding was that less than 40% of the English control group chose a local

antecedent in biclausal sentences (the expected English choice) when the contexts of the

sentence favored a non-local antecedent. Learners were also swayed by the context to choose a

long-distance antecedent. This suggests that a pragmatic factor, that is, a given context in the

task, induced the native speakers as well as the L2 learners to choose a grammatically

illegitimate, but contextually favored antecedent.

The study of pragmatic factors influencing anaphora resolution in second language

acquisition deserves a lot more attention than it has received in the literature so far. The research

findings to date suggest that even native speakers of languages that have syntactically-

17
constrained binding are influenced by context in interpreting anaphora. A linguistic theory

unifying syntactic and pragmatic binding constraints should spur acquisition studies that take

both factors into account. We will come back to the interpretation of pronouns in the section on

the syntax-discourse interface.

5. Definiteness/indefiniteness and specificity

Like anaphora resolution, L2 acquisition of definite descriptions and specificity marking has

largely been treated from a semantic point of view. However, the calculation of definiteness and

specificity happens in real discourse situations, so it is vitally dependent on how the speaker and

hearer encode and decode contextual cues.

Research on article acquisition (Huebner 1983, Thomas 1989b, among many others) has

established that L2-English learners, particularly those speaking a native language without

articles, have persistent difficulties with articles. They often overuse the with indefinites and/or

overuse a with definites. A number of proposals have been made to account for these patterns of

article misuse, including purely syntactic accounts (The Representational Deficit Hypothesis

(Tsimpli and Roussou 1991) and the Prosodic Transfer Hypothesis (Goad and White 2004). In

this section, we will focus on explanations involving the role of speaker vs. hearer discourse-

dependent knowledge.

Within Bickerton’s (1981) Language Bioprogram Hypothesis5, article misuse could be

explained by the choice of L2-English learners to associate the definite article the with the

features [specific referent] or [hearer knowledge]. The success of this explanation has been

criticized on the grounds of insufficient empirical coverage (Thomas 1989) and on imprecise

5
The Language Bioprogram Hypothesis (Bickerton 1981) proposes that the similarity of creoles is due to their
being formed from a prior pidgin by children who all share a universal human innate grammar capacity.

18
semantic definitions of the features (Ionin 2003). Starting from Ionin (2003), a fruitful line of

studies of definiteness has developed that assume a discourse-related definition of this property.

An informal definition of definiteness based on presupposition of uniqueness (Heim 1991) has it

that if a nominal phrase is definite, then the speaker and hearer presuppose the existence of a

unique individual in the set denoted by the NP. Ionin’s definition of specificity encompasses

grammatical and pragmatic specificity and is based on Fodor and Sag’s (1982) definition of

‘speaker intent to refer’. A specific reading of an indefinite NP is characterized by the certainty

of the speaker about the identity of the referent, the speaker having the referent in mind, the

speaker being able to identify the referent, etc. A crucial difference between the two features is

that definiteness encodes a shared state of knowledge between speaker and hearer while

specificity is knowledge held only by the speaker (see examples in 11 below).

Based on these definitions, Ionin (2003) and Ionin, Ko and Wexler (2004) proposed the

Article Choice Parameter with two settings in languages that have two articles. In one type of

language, articles are distinguished on the basis of specificity; in the other type articles are

distinguished on the basis of definiteness. This linguistic situation presents specific difficulties

for learners whose native language does not mark these features morphologically. Since the

Article Choice Parameter is a semantic universal, L2 learners fluctuate between the two settings

of the Article Choice Parameter until the input leads them to set this parameter to the appropriate

value. This is known as the Fluctuation Hypothesis and it makes very concrete predictions for the

pattern of errors in L2 acquisition: learners are supposed to make errors overgeneralizing the in

indefinite specific situations and a in definite non-specific situations.

  We illustrate how crucial pragmatic knowledge is for supplying and interpreting articles

with examples from Ionin et al (2004: 22-3). The target sentences are in italics and the expected

19
article is in bold.

(11) [−definite, +specific]: target a, predicted learner pattern: overuse of the

Meeting on a street

Roberta: Hi, William! It’s nice to see you again. I didn’t know that you were in Boston.

William: I am here for a week. I am visiting (a, the, ----) friend from college—his name is

Sam Brown, and he lives in Cambridge now.

(12) [+definite, −specific]: target the, predicted learner pattern: overuse of a

Bill: I’m looking for Erik. Is he home?

Rick: Yes, but he’s on the phone. It’s an important business matter. He is talking to (a,

the, ----) owner of his company! I don’t know who that person is—but I know that this

conversation is important to Erik.

Ionin et al (2004) tested beginning, intermediate, and advanced learners of English with

Russian or Korean as their native languages. Both Russian and Korean lack articles. The

researchers employed a forced-choice elicitation task and a production task as in examples (11)

and (12), as well as in [+definite,  +specific]  and  [−definite,  −specific]  situations. Group results

from the Russian learners largely support the Fluctuation Hypothesis in the sense that learners

overused article in precisely the predicted learning conditions. However, the individual results

presented a more complex picture where a number of individual subjects did not exhibit the

expected pattern. In addition, their production results revealed that learners overused the with

specific indefinites, but did not overuse a with non-specific definites.

The series of studies by Ionin and colleagues has proved highly influential and has

inspired a number of following studies. For example, Zdorenko and Paradis (2008) finds that in

the case of child L2 learners of English, all informants fluctuate between definiteness and

20
specificity, no matter what their L1 is (only children from article-less L1s exhibited article

omission). Garcia-Mayo (2009) uses the same English forced-choice elicitation task used by

Ionin et al. (2004) with two groups of native speakers of Spanish, one of low-intermediate

proficiency in English and the other of advanced proficiency. Results show no evidence for

fluctuation even at the low-intermediate proficiency level. However, Spanish and English articles

share the encoding of definiteness, although Spanish articles additionally encode gender. Ionin,

Zubizarreta and Bautista-Maldonado (2008) replicated Garcia Mayo’s findings and found that L1

transfer took precedence over fluctuation in the case of Spanish learners of English. Snape

(2009) confirmed the fluctuation findings with Chinese learners of English while only half of

Tryzna’s (2009) Polish native speakers learning English showed the expected pattern. Finally,

overuse of a with definites was practically non-existent in the performance of Zdorenko and

Paradis’s children.

Ionin, Zubizarreta and Philippov (2009) modified the original Fluctuation Hypothesis

proposed in Ionin et al (2004). New linguistic research (Fuli 2007, Tryzna 2009) has showed that

instead of distinguishing between articles based on specificity and not definiteness, Samoan

distinguishes specificity, but within indefinites only. Since the universal specificity distinction is

only demonstrated within a part of the article space, children and adult L2 learners are expected

to be overusing the with specific indefinites, but not overuse a with non-specific definites. Ionin

et al. (2009) argue that only specificity-related errors with indefinites, not specificity-related

errors with definites, reflect L2-learners’ access to the semantic universal of specificity. Their

revised proposal was anticipated in some of the results from Ionin et al (2004) and receives

support from further findings with L1-Russian children acquiring English.

21
 Trenkic (2008) takes issue with Ionin et al.’s operationalization of specificity as in items

designed as [+specific] in their experiment such as those in (11) above, where there is an explicit

statement of the speaker’s familiarity with the referent. Trenkic argues that the semantic

universal of specificity is not really at play in the learners’ grammars, what they are sensitive to

is “explicitly stated knowledge”. Based on her critique of Ionin’s test items, Trenkic provides an

alternative explanation: L2-English learners are mis-analyzing the and a as adjectives, and

assigning the meanings of “identifiable” and “unidentifiable” to them. Ionin et al (2009) argue

against Trenkic’s explanation of article mis-analysis and provide their own explanation in terms

of adult learners’ explicit strategies.

In this section, we reviewed L2 learner’s choice of definite and indefinite articles based

on the discourse information provided by the utterance context. The current findings suggest that

some adult learners fluctuate between marking definiteness and specificity, other groups of

learners at similar proficiency levels do not fluctuate much, and child learners only overuse the

with specific indefinites but not a with non-specific definites. We also reviewed two versions of

the Fluctuation Hypothesis, an influential current explanation for the error patterns. There is still

more to explain in the findings to date. The burden of proof is on the researchers providing

theoretical explanations to support them with replicable empirical data.

6. Deixis

A search of the terms “deixis” and “second language acquisition” in the LLBA database yields a

miserly number of published articles, 5 or 6 altogether. At the same time, deixis underlies all

pragmatics and is such a fundamental property of human language that without it no human

communication would exist. Thus this section will list linguistic properties that are still awaiting

22
its second language acquisition researchers and whose acquisition patterns will give us important

insights into the language acquisition capacity.

Deixis refers to the phenomenon wherein understanding the meaning of certain words

and phrases in an utterance requires contextual information. Words that have a fixed semantic

meaning but have a denotational meaning that constantly changes depending on time and/or

place, are deictic. Classical examples involve the meaning of personal pronouns and adverbs

such as tomorrow and here. Deixis is a pervasive and complex linguistic phenomenon that

covers diverse aspects related to time, space and social aspects of the communicative context.

Levinson (2004: 103) cogently points out that there is a dynamic coexistence between the

indexical sign and its object of reference. The deictic linguistic expressions are not sufficient to

achieve reference without contextual support, but that support is provided “by the mutual

attention of the interlocutors and their ability to reconstruct the speaker’s referential intentions

given clues in the environment.” A programmatic chapter in Klein (1986) is chapter 7 entitled

“The embedding problem.” “Any utterance, whether belonging to a learner variety or to the

target language, is embedded in the speaker’s and hearer’s informational set-up, composed of

current perception, recollection of preceding events and utterances, and knowledge of the world

(Klein 1986: 112).” Klein discusses the necessity to always assess second language knowledge

and performance embedded in context. He gives the example of the utterance in (13) produced

by a migrant worker in a bakery, which can be considered ungrammatical if its context is not

taken into consideration.

(13) Me bread.

23
 While the indexical properties of the utterance are impeccable, considering that it is

produced in a place that sells bread, the sentence may not even be ungrammatical if uttered after

the shop assistant says:

(14) Here’s your apple pie, Madam. Now, what would you like, Sir?

In order to understand an utterance, a learner must possess shared knowledge of the origo

of the speaker, the lexical meaning of the deictic word, and where to draw the line about the

origo (now may mean ‘today’ or ‘this year’ or ‘in recent years’ depending on the situation). The

origo is the “ground zero” around which the deictic field is organized (Bühler 1935): it consists

of information about the speaker, the time and place of speaking. In order to produce an

appropriate utterance, the learner must take into account the origo as well as the contextual

knowledge of the hearer. While certain aspects of Klein’s embedding problem have found its

researchers, many other aspects of the problem remain severely underresearched.

Among the different types of deixis, one that has attracted traditional attention is person

deixis, having to do with the personal pronouns I, we, etc. Note that when Sally produces we in

(15) and in (16), the denotation of we is different and it depends on an active listener to

understand.

(15) We went to the cinema last night.

(16) We live longer than men.

Another type is space deixis, where demonstratives and adverbs like here and there are

discussed. Unless otherwise specified, place deictic terms are generally understood to be relative

to the location of the speaker, as in (17), where the speaker and the shop are positioned on

opposite sides of the street.

(17) The shop is across the street.

24
 Languages usually show at least a two-way referential distinction in their deictic system:

proximal, i.e. near or closer to the speaker, and distal, i.e. far from the speaker and/or closer to

the addressee. English exemplifies this with such pairs as this and that, here and there, etc. In

other languages, the distinction is three-way: proximal, i.e. near the speaker, medial, i.e. near the

addressee, and distal, i.e. far from both. The three German demonstrative pronouns, hier, da,

dort, corresponding to here, here/there, there, may be analyzed that way. Some systems combine

both speaker- and addressee-anchored systems, as in the Yélî Dnye demonstrative determiners

(Levinson 2000).

Niimura and Hayashi (1995) and Gajdos (2011) are among the very few studies that have

examined the L2 acquisition of a deictic mismatch. Niimura and Hayashi compare English this

and that with Japanese demonstratives ko, so and a. They argue that the choice is highly

subjective and psychological, rather than physical, proximity is a determining factor in both

language systems. However, in English, focus, or the degree of attention on the referent, is the

critical determinant whereas in Japanese the overriding factor is whether or not the referent is in

the domain of the speaker's direct experience. Niimura and Hayashi (1995) studied natives’ and

learners’ choices of demonstratives in cartoon strips in Japanese as well as in English. In the

person focus system (English), there was more variety in demonstrative choice than in the

situation focus system (Japanese). Therefore, learners of Japanese had answers more widely

distant from native answers compared to learners of English, but on the whole even advanced

learners diverged a lot from the native performance. The findings of Gajdos (2011), which

studied L2 acquisition of German hier, dort and da by native speakers of English, point to the

same conclusion. On a picture and text acceptability judgment task, all of Gaijdos’s participants

demonstrated native-like knowledge of hier and dort, which are equivalent to English here and

25
there. Even near-native speakers did not accept the spatial adverb da, which has no equivalent in

English, as often as the natives did. However, the large variability in the judgments of the native

speakers (48-95% on various test items) underscores the difficulty of the learning task.

Temporal deixis ensures that time is marked in an utterance or a sequence of utterances in

relation to the speaker’s deictic origo, the hearer’s knowledge and the situational context. From

this marking, the hearer should be able to infer the time of the event and its position on the time

line. Klein (1986: 125) describes four kinds of factors involved in time marking: a common time

conception shared by speaker and hearer; a common point of reference such as the deictic origo

(e.g. the moment of speech); means for marking temporal spans or relations such as adverbials

and verb tenses; certain discourse rules based on common knowledge, for example the Principle

of Natural Order (unless marked otherwise, the sequence of events mentioned in an utterance

corresponds to their sequence in real life).

The marking of temporal deixis has been studied in the so-called “Basic Variety,” the

speech of naturalistic (uninstructed) learners in the European Science Foundation (ESF) corpus.

The corpus incorporates longitudinal data from adult migrant workers in five European countries

with target languages English, French, Dutch, German, and Swedish (Dietrich, Klein and Noyau,

1995; Klein and Perdue 1997; Perdue and Klein 1992, Meisel 1987, see also a review of these

studies in Bardovi-Harling 2000, ch. 2). The main finding is that the untutored learners “are

perfectly able to express temporal reference and relations despite the complete absence of verbal

morphology and even verbs in a large proportion of their utterances. (Dietrich et al 1995: 6)” An

example of an utterance conforming to deictic temporality marking is given below:

(18) Türkei Urlaub zurückkomm, meine Mann krank.

Turkey vacation come back, my husband ill

26
 “After he came back from vacation in Turkey, my husband was ill.”

The competent pragmatic marking of temporality in untutored learners is confirmed by

non-European studies as well. For example, Sato (1990) examined the development of L2 past

tense inflection (among other properties) in two Vietnamese-speaking bothers aged 10 and 12

adopted in a US family. During the ten-month period of observation, the brothers did not mark

temporality with morphological means and relied on other means, such as adverbials and the

interlocutor’s marking of past tense. Findings of this type highlight the fact that deictic

(pragmatic) marking of temporality is indeed universal and is the foundation for the development

of morphological marking. It is also clear from this literature that the development of aspectual

and tense morphology beyond the Basic Variety happens over a long period of time and emerges

with a lot of errors and omissions.

The marking of temporality in instructed learners proceeds very differently from that of

uninstructed learners. There is a vast literature on this topic, surveyed in Bardovi-Harlig (2000),

among many others. Bardovi-Harlig (2000, ch. 2) shows that learners develop functional, and

often rich, means of temporal expression before the acquisition of verbal morphology, and the

use of lexical adverbials to mark temporality continues long after the acquisition of tense

morphology. While the marking of temporality through morphological means is beyond the

purview of this chapter, it is important to note that the study of deictic temporal marking should

be expanded beyond the morphological means to include the pragmatic means of that marking.

For example, this deictic marking of the time line and temporal relations becomes crucially

important when a learner whose native language marks temporality morphologically (say

English) approaches a language that does not (say Mandarin Chinese). It is expected that such

27
learners will have access to the universal temporal deictic schema, but this access is not

empirically supported as yet.

Finally, social deixis marks the social role or status of the participants in the speech

event. Special expressions exist in many languages, including the honorifics of Southeast Asian

languages (Thai, Japanese, Javanese, Korean) and the so-called T/V distinction in Slavic

languages, Spanish, German and French. The latter label is based on the Latin pronouns tu ‘you-

sg’ and vos ‘you-pl’ (Brown and Gilman, 1960): when used to a single interlocutor, tu and its

equivalents are informal while vos and its equivalents are a formal means of address implying

social distance. While the linguistic structures involved are simple, the cultural context in which

they are deployed is complex and involves an understanding of how interpersonal relationships

are constructed and communicated in the languages which distinguish T/V pronouns. These

distinctions are widely studied in the L2 pragmatics literature on conventional expressions (e.g.,

Dijkstra, 2006; Liddicoat 2006; Dewaele, 2004 among others). Findings suggest that while

perception of the pragmatic distinction is not a problem (Dijkstra 2006), the target-like

production of these lags behind perception for a long time (Lyster, 2004).

In summary, the universal concept of deixis describes the embedding of every human

utterance in the surrounding context and is a much more pervasive feature of language than

normally recognized. While some aspects of deictic marking have been studied widely, e.g.,

social deixis, others have not enjoyed much attention, e.g., person and space deixis. After 25

years, the bottom-line message of Klein’s (1986) chapter 7 still rings true: there is a lot of work

that still remains to be done on context embedding in learner varieties. The most important

distinction to be made is between universal deictic properties versus language-specific ones.

28
7. Information structure (the syntax-discourse interface)

The marking and comprehension of information structure, or topic and focus, has enjoyed prime

attention in the generative L2 literature in the last decade. A lot of attention has been paid to

explaining L2 behavioural patterns through principled solutions based on independently

motivated distinctions. Generative linguists assume a language architecture that is modular: the

linguistic system consists of language modules (e.g. phonetics/phonology, syntax, semantics)

within which specialized internal linguistic processes go on, for example feature checking and

displacement of constituents within the syntax module. Between each two modules, however,

another type of linguistic process occurs, the so-called interface processes. The latter take units

of one module and map it to units in another module (Jackendoff 2002, Chomsky 1995). Thus

interface processes are by definition more complex and involve keeping more information in

short-term memory compared to intra-modular processes.

The syntax-discourse interface has a privileged position in this language architecture. For

some scholars (e.g., Jackendoff 2002, topic-focus calculation is part of the conceptual (largely

semantic) module. For others (e.g., Reinhart 2006), it is outside of the semantic module and is an

interface between language and extra-linguistic reality. Whether one or the other approach is

correct is actually an empirical question. However, under both approaches the syntax-discourse

interface is the meeting place between language and other cognitive systems.

Looking into the endstate competence of near-native learners, the Interface Hypothesis

(Sorace 2003, Sorace and Filiaci 2006) proposed that if these learners’s grammars diverge from

native speakers’, the divergence is more likely to be within the syntax-discourse interface than at

other interfaces. A more recent version of the hypothesis (Sorace and Serratrice 2009, Sorace

2011) argues that linguistic structures at this interface are prone to lasting optionality of

29
judgement (in the sense that learners treat the acceptable and the unacceptable versions of the

construction equally) and hence even near-native learners exhibit non-native grammatical

competence. For an excellent review of recent research at the linguistic interfaces and the

Interface Hypothesis, see White (2011). In agreement with White (2011), in this section I will

review some seminal research findings and suggest that the sweeping proposal that all properties

at the syntax-discourse interface are problematic is perhaps too strong.

The interrelated notions of topic (or theme, what a given sentence is about, thus

discourse-old information) and focus (or rheme, what is predicated of this topic, hence

discourse-new information) have been studied ever since the Prague School of linguistics in the

30ies. In second language acquisition, researchers have been preoccupied with whether learners

encode and comprehend these notions through the use of null and overt subjects (in languages

that allow null subjects in the first place), word order (post-verbal versus preverbal subjects) and

clitic-doubling of displaced topics. Research findings have been decidedly mixed. First of all, at

lower proficiency levels, learners do not demonstrate sensitivity to discourse new and old

information (Lozano 2006, Hertel 2003, Ivanov 2009, Rothman 2009). At near-native levels,

some studies find complete convergence while others find subtle but persistent divergence. We

will look at some concrete studies below.

Findings in Belletti, Bennati and Sorace (2007) present a prime example of difficulties

and optionality at near-native levels. The study investigated knowledge of null subject grammars

by near-native learners of Italian whose native language was English. One of the tasks of the

study was a picture verification task where participants were given a test sentence and 3 pictures

identifying the pronoun antecedent as either the matrix subject, the matrix complement, or an

external referent. The null subject is appropriate when the subject of the embedded clause is the

30
same as the matrix subject (the old lady) as in (19) below. However, if the speaker wants to shift

the topic from the matrix subject to the matrix object (the girl), she will use an overt pronoun to

mark topic shift as in (20). Thus the non-optional appearance of overt or null embedded subject

pronoun signals topic shift or topic maintenance.

(19) La vecchiettai saluta la ragazzaj quando proi/?j attraversa la strada.

the old lady greets the girl when crosses the street

(20) La vecchiettai saluta la ragazzaj quando lei*i/j attraversa la strada.

the old lady greets the girl when she crosses the street

“The old lady greets the girl when ∅/she crosses the street.”

In processing sentences such as (20), Italian near-native speakers were found to interpret

the overt pronominal subject of the embedded clause as coreferential with the lexical subject of

the main clause 30% of the time, while the natives only interpreted it in this way 5% of the time,

a significant difference. At the same time, 65% of near-native answers and 85% of native

answers converged on the correct interpretation (embedded subject refers to matrix complement).

Thus the Italian near-natives in this study were less sensitive than the native speakers to topic

shift discourse situations.

Rothman (2009) investigated a very similar acquisition situation: contrastive focus in

English-Spanish interlanguage. One of the tasks of his study was a pragmatic felicity judgment

task, in which he gave a context story and a test sentence to judge for acceptability. Unlike

Belleti et al’s near-natives, Rothman’s advanced speakers performed similarly to the native

speakers in all conditions of this particular task.

Another property demonstrating discourse sensitivity, whose acquisition has received

much attention, is clitic doubling as a marker of topic (Valenzuela 2005, 2006; Ivanov 2009,

31
Parodi 2009). Topicalization in Spanish and Bulgarian may involve a dislocation of an object

that has a discourse antecedent and the clitic-doubling of that object. Note that Spanish and

Bulgarian clitic-double the dislocated object while English does not, because clitics are not part

of its grammatical system.

(21) Context: Where did you buy theses shoes?

a. These shoes, I bought in Madrid. (English)

b. Estos zapatos, los compré en Madrid (Spanish)

these shoes, Cl I-bought in Madrid

‘These shoes, I bought in Madrid’

c. Tezi obuvki gi kupix v Madrid. (Bulgarian)

these shoes, Cl I-bought in Madrid

‘These shoes, I bought in Madrid’

There is a crucial requirement that when the object is specific, clitic doubling is

obligatory. However, when the object is non-specific or generic, native speakers allow less

categorical judgements, demonstrating subjective interpretations of the situation (see Slabakova

and Ivanov, 2011, for more discussion). Near-native speakers of Spanish in Valenzuela (2005)

were 100% accurate on observing the specificity requirement in a sentence felicity judgment

task. Very advanced learners of Bulgarian in Ivanov (2009) were non-distinguishable from

native speakers in a very similar task. On the other hand, Valenzuela’s near-natives demonstrated

variability in judging generic dislocated objects, perhaps supported by the larger variability in the

input, as ascertained by the native results. To contrast with that, Ivanov’s advanced learners

again patterned with the natives on judging the inappropriateness of clitic-doubling in focus

contexts. Finally, Parodi (2009) used a grammaticality judgement task and contrasted definite

32
and indefinite objects. She found that advanced learners of Spanish patterned like the native

speakers while advanced learners of Greek do not.

We shall compare two online processing studies next, which, although they do not

investigate the same property, come to a similar conclusion. Roberts, Gulberg and Indefrey

(2008) studied the online and offline performance of Turkish (a null subject language) and

German (non-null subject) learners of Dutch (another non-null subject language) with respect to

ambiguous pronoun resolution. The Turkish speakers chose a clause-external antecedent for an

ambiguous pronoun more often than the German learners. Recall that there is a discourse

preference for an overt pronoun in null subject languages to signal a topic shift (see Italian

example in (20) above. Thus Turkish learners were essentially showing L1 transfer in the offline

task of this study. However, in the online task both advanced learner groups diverged from

native speaker behavior, suggesting that processing of ambiguous pronouns where the choice of

antecedent depends on the context is hard, even if the native language of the learners gives them

an acquisitional advantage.

Hopp (2009) also investigates ultimate attainment at the syntax–discourse interface,

specifically, discourse-related word order optionality in German. English, Dutch and Russian

speakers who were advanced-to-near-native speakers of German were tested on an off-line

acceptability judgment task and an on-line self-paced reading task. Hopp’s results indicate that

convergence at the syntax–discourse interface is in principle possible in adult L2 acquisition,

both in off-line knowledge and on-line processing, even for L1 English speakers, whose L1 does

not correspond to L2 German in discourse-to-syntax mappings. At the same time, just like

Roberts et al’s conclusions, Hopp points to the fact that L2 speakers have computational

difficulties in the matching between discourse and syntactic information even when their native

33
language has very similar properties to the ones they are acquiring. The challenge for research at

the syntax-discourse interface, then, will be to reconcile the findings of the on-line studies

(Roberts et all 2008, Hopp 2009) with the discrepant findings of the off-line studies (Belletti et

al. 2007 versus Rothman 2009, Valenzuela 2005 versus Ivanov 2009). More online studies of

various properties at this interface involving more languages as L1s and L2s will shed light on

the issue of computational resources as the bottleneck of this type of discourse-related word

orders and meaning construals.

In conclusion, this chapter has taken the point of view of pragmatics as a field of

linguistic inquiry. In this respect, it adheres to the Anglo-American conception of pragmatics of

Grice, Carnap and Peirce as opposed to the more sociological conception of other, especially

European-based, traditions (Mey, Crystal, Verschueren). Pragmatics was defined as pertaining to

all context-dependent aspects of meaning encoding and decoding. As in all modules of the

linguistic system, there exist in pragmatics universal properties as well as language-specific

properties, where mismatches between L1 and L2 can occur. It was argued that not all areas of

L2 pragmatics have enjoyed equal attention and inquiry. For example, research on

presuppositions is practically non-existent while research on speech acts is abundant. Rectifying

these imbalances in the coming decades will elucidate the big question of how second language

speakers bring context to bear on syntactic and semantic computations and process both what is

said and what is meant by the linguistic message.

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