Callies examines aspects of second-language (L2) discourse competence by looking at how advanced German learners of English mark information structure (IS). The eight chapters are arranged conventionally, guiding the reader through the background literature, research design, an experimental study, a corpus-based study, results, and a short discussion and pedagogical implications. Copious appendixes provide the experimental materials.
The study is cast in a functionalist framework and draws on familiar notions of IS (e.g., Lambrecht, Reference Lambrecht1994). The inquiry centers on the marking of focus (encoded in English via prosody), emphatic do, subject-verb inversion, topicalization, numerous cleft structures, and a range of lexical means. A discussion of German sets the stage for a contrastive analysis approach with reference to typology and principles of markedness and transfer. The research hypotheses draw on points of divergence between German and English IS marking and predict persistent first-language effects, overuse and underuse of certain forms, preservation of canonical subject-verb-object order, and overuse of lexical items to compensate for minimal awareness of pragmatically marked syntax by advanced German learners of English. Two studies are reported. The first is experimental, with a 16-item discourse-completion task, a judgment task, and retrospective interviews with a subset of the 25 learner participants (but not with the native controls). The second study compares data from a corpus of native English writing with a learner corpus. The most notable results are that the German learners overuse clefts and topicalizations in English. Overall, the range of IS strategies is reduced in the learners compared to the natives. Often, when a strategy is used, its form-function mapping is either less rich than in native English or somehow infelicitous. Among the major conclusions is the following: Learners prefer conventional subject-verb-object structures to marked structures, possess minimal explicit knowledge of IS marking, and may approach variant word-order constructions as formulaic.
Researchers excited to see a large-scale study of discourse organization and IS marking will likely be perplexed by this volume. On the one hand, Callies is correct in pointing out the relative lack of such studies in L2 research to date. On the other hand, the presentation of the study and elements of the design may leave some readers unsatisfied. The organization of the volume belies its origins as a doctoral thesis. The literature review feels jumbled, with a large number of approaches, studies, and frameworks, whose sometimes conflicting predictions are not sorted out. There are numerous perceptive insights—the author has a clear mastery of the field—but the first half of the volume does not lead organically to the second. Given the length of the literature review, as well as the volume’s subtitle, the complete absence of any mention of the important generative literature on the syntax-pragmatics interface (e.g., the long list of studies inspired by Sorace, Reference Sorace1993) is difficult to justify. Conversely, the discussion of language typology seems more concerned with accounting for crosslinguistic differences than contextualizing a study in SLA.
The study itself is detailed and—importantly—includes large numbers of valuable examples. Unfortunately, many issues are left unaddressed. Callies is correct to point out the difficulties in operationalizing advanced and near-native proficiency, but the definition adopted for the study is based solely on length of classroom instruction. Participants with 7 years of classroom instruction are considered advanced, with no other measure of proficiency. It is not surprising that the data reveal a highly heterogeneous learner group. Without any discussion of individual results, the reader cannot determine to what degree the observed nonnativeness generalizes across the group. For the figures that list individual results, at least a few learners appear to pattern identically to the majority of the native-speaker controls. The large number of structures examined leads to token counts that are often quite low (less than 10 per group); some results are consequently much less robust than others. With this in mind, and taking into account the range of proficiency levels probably represented in the learner data, the results must be interpreted with caution. Callies should be lauded for undertaking a study in a valuable and underexplored area of L2 research. Nonetheless, this volume is of interest more for the numerous avenues that it suggests for future research than as a strong statement about discourse competence at advanced L2 proficiency.
