Discourse cohesion and Topic discontinuity in native and learner production. Changing topic entities on maintained predicates

In order to realize text cohesion, speakers have to select specific information units and mark their informational status within the dscourse; this results in specific, language particular perspective-taking, linked to typological differences (Slobin 1996). A previous study on native speakers production (Dimroth et al. 2010) has highlighted a "Romance way" and a "Germanic way" of marking text cohesion in narrative segments involving topic discontinuity. In this paper we analyze how text cohesion is realized in the same contexts by advanced learners of L2 French and Italian (with either German or French/Italian L1). Our aim is to verify the hypothesis of an advanced stage where learners manage the target language utterance grammar whereas their discourse organization still reflects L1 preferences. The results confirm the persistence presence of L1 influence, but also show learner-specific tendencies (favouring lexical means over morphosyntactic ones), which are independent of their source language.