L'acquisizione delle domande in italiano come lingua seconda

This thesis concerns the acquisition of questions in Italian as a second language within the framework of Processability Theory (Pienemann 1998; Pienemann, Di Biase & Kawaguchi 2005). Questions are sentences marked both pragmatically and linguistically. According to Levelt’s Model (Levelt 1989; Levelt 1999) their conceptualization involves the selection of the interrogative mood and an information structure that gives prominence to the new information, namely the focus. The grammatical encoding of this pragmatic information (interrogative mood and focus prominence) goes through linguistic constraints that are language specific and often difficult to acquire by L2 learners. In Italian questions the focusing of the new information is mostly syntactic (Fava 1984; Fava 1995), especially so in WH questions and more rarely also in Y/N questions. The present study contributes to the exploration of the interface between discourse-pragmatics and syntax in the development of Italian L2 by applying to Italian questions the Topic Hyopthesis formulated within the framework of Processability Theory. The implicational hierarchies hypothesized in this study, based on those developed for Italian declaratives (i.e. Di Biase 2005; Di Biase & Bettoni 2007; Bettoni, Di Biase & Nuzzo 2009), are tested both cross-sectionally and longitudinally on a group of 12 adult learners with L2 language competence and different L1s. The production of the relevant structures was elicited through a set of tasks partly inspired by those used for the elicitation of English questions (Pienemann 1998; Kaetinge 2008) and partly especially devised for Italian (Ferrari, Ginelli & Nuzzo in press), a prodrop head-marking language. Data were collected twice at a one month interval. Results of the analysis conducted on both the cross-sectional and longitudinal data fully support the hypothesised implicational hierarchy. Results indicate that learners can free up canonical word order, as required in Italian questions, quite early in their interlanguage development as far as the emersion of the VS structure is concerned. Progress then occurs in several ways: a more frequent use of this emerged structure when the referential subject is pragmatically required, an increasingly more target-like use of prodrop, and the acquisition of the relevant morphology for the topicalization of the object.