Information Structure and the Dynamics of Language Acquisition (review)

The role of information structure (IS) has been addressed in both first- and second-language acquisition (SLA) research. The function of IS in the early stages of SLA has been studied mostly from a functional-typological perspective. Research findings suggest that IS plays an important role in the liberalization of learners’ utterances in a ‘basic variety’, influenced by semantic and pragmatic constraints, and that in the early stages of untutored acquisition, the linearization of discourse elements is shaped by universal principles of information organization.

The influence of IS in advanced stages of SLA has also been investigated, most recently in line with a growing interest in questions of near-native competence. Early studies have shown the relevance of L1 discourse-structure for L2 acquisition as well as transfer effects of discourse-related phenomena such as topic-prominence and pragmatic word order. More recent findings suggest that IS is a sensitive area even for advanced learners, and that these learners have problems in applying specific linguistic structures according to the principles of information organization in the L2, retaining core IS principles typical of their L1.

The papers in the present volume reflect the increasing research into IS and investigate the impact of information organization on both first- and second-language acquisition, that is, how the interplay of the principles of information structure and linguistic structure affect the functioning of learner systems at different developmental stages. The contributions adopt a crosslinguistic approach, providing and examining data from natural L1 and L2 acquisition, and covering a wide range of learner varieties from early learner language to native speaker production, and from gesture to Creole prototypes. Most papers focus on L2 acquisition and are organized into two thematic sections.

‘Finiteness and scope relations’ includes nine papers that analyze the temporal features of learner utterances in their discourse context and the interaction of verbal morphology with scope-bearing elements such as particles and negation. In ‘Development of verb morphology and finiteness in children and adults acquiring French’, Suzanne Schlyter examines the relation between the development of verb morphology and syntactic phenomena such as negation and word order in the L1 acquisition of bilingual Swedish-French children and Swedish adult L2 learners of French. ‘ “Tinkering” with chunks: Form-oriented strategies and idiosyncratic utterance patterns without functional implications in the IL of Turkish speaking children learning German’ by Stefanie Haberzettl studies an idiosyncratic structural pattern in the speech of two Turkish learners of German. In ‘Finiteness in Germanic languages: A stage-model for first and second language development’, Christine Dimroth, Petra Gretsch, Peter Jordens, Clive Perdue, and Marianne Starren compare the development of finiteness marking in German and Dutch in child L1 and adult L2 acquisition, and identify three acquisitional stages in finiteness marking that suggest strong similarities between L1 and L2 acquisition. Petra Gretsch’s chapter, ‘On the similarities of L1 and L2 acquisition: How German children anchor utterances in time’, studies the L1 acquisition of specific strategies that languages provide to anchor utterances in time, based on free narratives from three longitudinal German child corpora, while Patrizia Giuliano examines ‘Negation and relational predicates in French and English as second languages’. Giuliano Bernini discusses ‘The copula in learner Italian: Finiteness and verbal inflection’, and Sandra Benazzo investigates ‘The interaction between the development of verb morphology and the acquisition of temporal adverbs of contrast: A longitudinal study in French, English and German L2’. The final two papers in this first section are ‘Merging scope particles: Word order variation and the acquisition of aussi and ook in a bilingual context’ by Aafke Hulk and ‘Creole prototypes as basic varieties and inflectional morphology’ by Angelika Becker and Tonjes Veenstra.

Section 2, ‘Anaphoric relations’, includes four papers that examine the acquisition...