Scholarly record

SELF-PERCEPTION OF NEAR-NATIVE FORMS IN ITALIAN: A STUDY ON THE UNIVERSITY STUDENTS OF PULA

D. Selvaggi, N.P. Jeletic

Abstract

In the near-native proficiency stage[26], the oral production of L2 and subsequent speakers is slightly different from the native speaker production, phonetically (foreign “accent”[13], [24]), pragmalinguistically and sociopragmatically[16]. The standard Italian language in the Croatian Istra is a minority language of lesser sociolinguistic prestige and reduced domains of usage[7], [14], [21], [23]. Language contact occurs between Italian, the Istrovenetian dialect, the Croatian standard language and the Chakavian dialect[9], [14]. Although lacking a diatopic variation (absence of regional Istrian or Quarnerine standards) found instead in Italy[6], a sociophonetic variability is in any case attested (Italophone speakers vs. Croatophone speakers)[11], [24]; this kind of variability co-exists with inner characteristics of the phonological[11], [24] and morphosyntactic Croatian system[14]. This research analyzes the adequacy judgments given on a sample of Italian near-native forms belonging to a corpus of spontaneous and semi-spontaneous speech that the authors previously collected in Croatia. The informants were Italian L2/L3/L4 or LS speakers in a foreign context (outside Italy), namely the university context of Pula. The participants were given a language biography sheet and two multiple-choice questionnaires (one printed into written form and the second one heard via an audio device): they were required to use from one to four options in order to express their evaluation respectively on the grammaticality, reasonability, pragmalinguistic appropriateness, sociopragmatical appropriateness or nativeness of some phrases (which included a brief note about their linguistic and situational context). All the informants acquired the Italian language in their childhood; in addition, almost all were born and lived in Istra. The overall results show a greater difficulty of the Croatophone speakers to recognize the Italian near-native forms, especially the excessively topicalized sentences built on the Croatian model, the misplaced position and/or construction of adverbs, conjunctions or prepositions, the overexpressed subject, the errors in the declination of the gender and number, the improper use of auxiliary verbs, the semantic calques and the wrong article. The comparison between the two questionnaires shows no substantial differences, except for the valuation of topicalized forms and native forms, where the gap between Croatophones’ answers and the Italophones’ ones in the listened questionnaire is much more reduced. Therefore, future teaching methods will have to better take into account the language biography of the learners with the aim of targeting appropriately the correction of the various groups of errors and near-native forms.

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DOI resolver: doi.org/10.5593/SGEMSOCIAL2017/HB31/S10.029

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