La negazione nell'italiano degli svedesi : sequenze acquisizionai e influssi translinguistici

Sammanfattning: This thesis concerns the development of negation in the Italian L2 of a group of Swedish adults who live in Italy and acquire the language by formal and spontaneous learning. Various negative expressions and the verbal system were studied in a longitudinal analysis of a corpus with 29 recordings of seven subjects. The recordings consist mainly of spontaneous dialogue. While the development of the verb morphology turned out to be rather similar in all the subjects, the placement of negation developed differently among individuals. Contrary to what may be expected, five of the subjects tended to place negation postverbally, a position which rarely appears in the target language and in other observed L2 learners of Italian. In the L1 (Swedish) negation is placed after the finite verb in main clauses. The postverbal negation appeared mostly with the verbs essere (be) and avere (have), which is a typical distinction of verb types found in many L2 learners of target languages with postverbal negation, and indicates that the negative particle is placed before lexical and after functional elements. This could be explained with the tendency found in early stages of L2 acquisition to place negation immediately before the element it primarily operates on (i.e. semantic focus, according to our analysis). The results show that there is no obvious relation between finiteness and the preverbal negation of the target language in the subjects. Instead, there seems to be a relation between the first indications of finiteness in non lexical (thematic) verbs and postverbal negation. An alternative development was found in a learner who had studied French before coming into contact with Italian. In order to test a hypothesis of cross-linguistic influence from previously studied languages, a cross-sectional study was carried out on a group of Swedish high school students. All the students who had studied French or Spanish before Italian had easier access to the preverbal position of negation, present in Romance languages, than the students who had studied German. According to the results, the general developmental sequences found in learners of languages with postverbal negation can also be found in learners of a language with preverbal negation if the L1 has postverbal negation. In addition, transfer from previously studied languages seems to interact with more general principles of development.