Contrasted and maintained information in a narrative task: Analysis of texts in English and Italian as L1s and L2s

This paper proposes an analysis of 100 narrative texts concerned with English and Italian as L1s and L2s. We will compare the way both native speakers and learners build textual cohesion when faced with a narrative task involving several referential restrictions: contrasts of entity and polarity, maintenance of the same predication, temporal shifts etc. The stimulus used to collect the data is the film retelling The Finite Story by Dimroth (2006). Our results will add to the debate about the learners’ tendency to establish anaphoric linkage according to the specific grammaticised (readily encodable) concepts of their mother tongue. In particular, we will show that even at very advanced and almost native levels learners tend to exploit formal and conceptual means resembling those of their mother tongue, demonstrating by that that they have not completely abandoned the L1 specific “perspective taking”.