TOPIC CONTINUITY IN L2 ENGLISH ARTICLE USE

Abstract

Much of the research on L2 article acquisition has investigated the effects of semantic, syntactic, and discourse universals on the systematicity and variability of learners' article use. The present paper looks at systematicity from the combined perspective of two putative discourse universals related to topic continuity (e.g., Givón, 1983) that have been addressed only separately in past studies of article acquisition: the tendency to mark the distinction between topics and comments (e.g., Huebner, 1983) and the tendency to mark the distinction between new, continuous, and reintroduced NP referents (e.g., Chaudron & Parker, 1990). The present study examines how well these discourse universals account for the patterns of article use and nonuse found in narratives written by 199 Finnish-speaking and 145 Swedish-speaking adolescent learners of English. The quantitative results of the study cast some doubt on learners' sensitivity to the topic-comment distinction and also suggest that learners' tendency to mark distinctions between new, continuous, and reintroduced NP referents is influenced by the prominence of such distinctions in the L1. The quantitative results are supported by a qualitative analysis of a subset of the data that suggests numerous other elements that are needed to characterize the systematicity of individual learners' interlanguage article systems.