Exploring the pragmalinguistic knowledge of the 是 shì...的 de cleft construction in L1 Italian learners’ L2 Chinese: Triangulation of corpus and experimental data

This study investigates the L2 Chinese acquisition of the syntactic and pragmatic properties of shì...de adjunct focus clefts with [VdeO] order by L1 Italian learners. It adopts a multi-method approach consisting in the triangulation of corpus and experimental data to provide different insights into the phenomenon under investigation. 103 learners at the beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels participated in the study, completing written and oral corpus and experimental tasks. Data were also collected from 30 native Chinese speakers to create a control corpus. The results show that learners tend to omit the construction, generally due to the overuse of the actual aspect marker -le. The results also suggest that, despite significant differences between Chinese and Italian clefts, L2 learners establish an L1 form-L2 form mapping between them, confirming predictions extended from the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis. Furthermore, the findings indicate that Italian learners have little knowledge of the pragmatic functions of shì...de clefts due to limited exposure in the L2 environment and L1 pragmatic transfer. The study confirms the Interface Hypothesis, as the application of grammatical and pragmatic knowledge through the recognition of the properties of a single construction was not fully achieved.