Expression of travel in Italian and French L2: translinguistic influence vs common trends

This paper presents a cross-sectional study of the expression of motion events in oral narrative discourse produced by second language (L2) learners of Italian and French, whose first language (L1) is either typologically close (Italian or French) or distant (English) from the target language. This combination of source and target languages aims at verifying the impact of crosslinguistic influence and its development with respect to L2 proficiency level (intermediate vs. advanced). While strong in tertypological variations are attested between English vs. French and Italian speakers in their native language, some intratypological variation is also found between the two verb-framed languages in question concerning the distribution of path information within a sentence (locus). The analysis of non-native data reveals some common tendencies related to general acquisitional principles in the productions of intermediate learners (e.g., use of idiosyncratic verb and prepositional forms, but no specific L1 effect in L2). Some differences related to L1 influence are attested but only at the advanced level, i.e. when the learner has developed a vocabulary rich enough to transfer L1 structures to L2 structures, and only if the input favours this phenomenon.