"Referring expressions in written vs. spoken L1 Spanish-L2 English narrative discourse: minimal and maximal marking in topic-continuity contexts" paper presented at APRAR conference 2021, 20th May 2021.

Abstract

The selection of referring expressions (REs) has been investigated extensively in a
variety of L1s and L2 language pairs, and in relation to a number of factors which
determine their selection, including the (lack of) maintenance of the topic, the
distance between the RE and its antecedent, participant activation, number and gender
of potential antecedents, the episodic structure of the discourse, etc. Research on REs
in L2 acquisition has disclosed patterns of development regardless of the language
combinations, insofar as, in comparison to the native speaker, beginners tend to be
underexplicit (for English, see Mitkovska & Bužarovska, 2018), while advanced
learners tend to be redundant (for L2 English see Crosthwaite, 2011; Hendriks, 2003;
Leclercq & Lenart, 2013; Ryan, 2015). It seems, however, that in L2 research on REs
the tendency is to consider either spoken language (Crosthwaite, 2011; Hendriks, 2003;
Kang, 2004; Leclercq & Lenart, 2013; Ryan, 2015) or written language (Lozano, 2016;
Quesada & Lozano, forthcoming), as the focus of investigation. While the results
may seem at first sight comparable, to our knowledge the effect of medium (written vs.
Spoken) on the native use and acquisition of REs still reminds an underexplored
area, (see, however, Christensen, 2000, for L1 Chinese; Bel et al., 2010, for
developmental Catalan).

The paper is part of project which investigates the nature of narrative discourse
syntactic contexts and of the subsequent selection of REs in written vs. spoken
L1 Spanish-L2 English at beginner to advanced levels, in comparison to written vs.
spoken L1 English respectively. The paper reports on major differences found in an
exploratory analysis of intermediate and advanced written vs. spoken L1 Spanish-L2
English narratives in comparison to written vs. spoken L1 English narratives. The focus
is topical subjects of maximal referential continuity encoded by minimal and
maximal marking, namely zero anaphora and NPs respectively. The study uses
comparable written and spoken data from the L1 Spanish-L2 English and L1 English

39

components from the COREFL (The Corpus of English as a Foreign Language)
(Lozano et al., forthcoming). The written and spoken data in both components have
been elicited from the same participant, using the same story-retell task and under the
same circumstances, which affords close comparability, as well as the exploration of
intra- and inter-learner variation.

References
Bel, A., Perera, J., & Salas, N. (2010). Anaphoric devices in written and spoken narrative discourse.
Written Language & Literacy, 13(2), 236–259. Christensen, M. B. (2000). Anaphoric reference
in spoken and written Chinese narrative discourse. Journal of Chinese Linguistics, 28(2), 303–
336.
Crosthwaite, P. (2011). The Effect of Collaboration on the Cohesion and Coherence of L2 Narrative
Discourse between English NS and Korean L2 English Users. Asian EFL Journal, 13(4), 135–
166.
Hendriks, H. (2003). Using nouns for reference maintenance: A seeming contradiction in L2 discourse. In
A. Giacalone (Ed.), Typology and Second Language Acquisition (pp. 291–326). Berlin: Mouton
de Gruyter.
Kang, J. Y. (2004). Telling a coherent story in a foreign language: Analysis of Korean EFL learners’
referential strategies in oral narrative discourse. Journal of Pragmatics, 36(11), 1975–1990.
Leclercq, P., & Lenart, E. (2013). Discourse cohesion and accessibility of referents in oral narratives: A
comparison of L1 and L2 acquisition of French and English. discours. Revue de Linguistique,
Psycholinguistique et Informatique, (12).
Lozano, C. (2016). Pragmatic principles in anaphora resolution at the syntax-discourse interface:
Advanced English learners of Spanish in the CEDEL2 corpus. In M. Alonso-Ramos (Ed.),
Spanish learner corpus research: Current trends and future perspectives (pp. 235–265).
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Lozano, C., Díaz-Negrillo, A., & Callies, M. (forthcoming). Designing and compiling a learner corpus of
written and spoken narratives: The COREFL. In Ch. Bongartz, & J. Torregrossa (Eds.), What's
in a narrative? Variation in story-telling at the interface between language and literacy.
Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang.
Mitkovska, L., & Bužarovska, E. (2018). Subject pronoun (non)realization in the English learner
language of Macedonian speakers. Second Language Research, 34(4), 463–485.
Quesada, T., & Lozano, C. (forthcoming). Which factors determine the choice of referential expressions
in L2 English discourse? New evidence from the COREFL Corpus. Studies in Second Language
Research.
Ryan, J. (2015). Overexplicit referent tracking in L2 English: Strategy, avoidance, or myth? Language
Learning, 65(4), 824–859.