Le rôle des expressions additives dans les narrations en italien et en français: réflexions intra-typologiques et apports pour la didactique des langues étrangères

Our study focuses on the way French and Italian native speakers build discourse cohesion in a complex narrative task. Our work aims at analysing the use of “additive” means, namely the scope particles anche/aussi/également (‘also, too, as well’), ancora/ encore (‘more’) and the temporal adverbs sempre/toujours (‘always’), ancora/encore (‘still’). The corpus that we used is composed of two groups of informants, French and Italian speakers. Our framework is functional and discursive (cf. Klein et von Stutterheim 1989, 1991). The data were collected by an illustrated story with no words created by Dimroth (2002). Our research made it possible: (a) to compare the means exploited by the two groups of speakers; (b) to identify the “perspective” that they adopted (cf. the Thinking for Speaking Hypothesis by D. I. Slobin). We singled out some conceptual and formal differences between French and Italian with respect to the use of additive means, which brought to some interesting reflexions about these genetically very connected languages but also to considerations about the teaching of Italian and French as foreign languages.