The acquisition of the Chinese shì...de cleft construction by L1 Italian learners: Triangulating corpus and experimental data

This study investigates the L2 acquisition of the Chinese shì...de proper cleft construction by L1 Italian learners. It adopts a multi-method approach consisting in the triangulation of corpus and experimental data to provide different insights into learners’ knowledge of the syntactic and pragmatic properties of the construction under investigation. 106 Italian learners and 35 L1 Chinese speakers participated in the study, completing the same corpus and experimental tasks. The corpus tasks were aimed at compiling BILCC (Bimodal Italian Learner Corpus of Chinese), which includes written and spoken data from Italian learners, accompanied by parallel data from of Chinese native speakers. The corpus was tagged at the error and pragmatic levels. The results show that learners have limited knowledge of proper clefts, which they tend to omit, generally due to overuse of the perfective aspect marker -le. 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.