A corpus-based contrastive analysis of local coherence in L1 and L2 German

Abstract

The sentence-initial constituent of declarative main clauses in German that immediately precedes the finite verb (the Vorfeld, ‘prefield’) is not grammatically determined, but is rather influenced by information structure i.e. the presentation of old and new information in a sentence. It contributes to local coherence – the fluency of a text on a sentence-by-sentence basis – by linking a sentence to its textual context, e.g. by coreferring elements, and other pragmatic means. In this study we compare the use of the Vorfeld constituent in texts of the learner corpus ALeSKo which consists of essays by Chinese learners of German (level: ~B2) and comparable essays by German native speakers. The results indicate that the learners have acquired the German Vorfeld structure and that they use a range of different grammatical functions in this position almost in a target-language-like way. However, with respect to pragmatic functions they tend to overuse certain coreferring elements, which we interpret as a transfer of pragmatic properties of their native language, Chinese, to their second language, German.