Resumen de Syntax and information structure in learner language
The paper reports on the first part of a longitudinal study of young immigrants’ spoken Danish during the first 3–17 months of their stay in Denmark. The subjects include Albanian, Vietnamese, and English speaking adolescents who at the time of recording attended schools in the Copenhagen area. The data was collected by means of audio‐taped interviews consisting of unguided conversation and elicited production (based on pictorial stimuli).
The study aims at comparing the developmental patterns of individual learners in order to investigate the role of their linguistic and sociocultu‐ral background and present conditions and to gain insight into language learning processes. The study focusses on syntactic development approached from a functional perspective, and in the part reported here, changes in early second‐language syntax are regarded as a result of changes in the ways in which information is organised in learner utterances and thus rooted in cognitive as well as interactional dimensions of language use.
