A Role and Reference Grammar account of clause linkage development in second language: An application to English and French

Clause linkage, or the combination of multiple propositions in one complex syntactic unit, is an important concept to be mastered by anyone acquiring a language. Though its role in both first (L1) and second (L2) language acquisition has been studied before (Diessel & Tomasello, Véronique, Klein & Perdue), an overarching approach to its development is still lacking. This paper proposes a unified model of clause linkage and its development based on Role and Reference Grammar (Van Valin) and tests this model's applicability to L2 acquisition by analyzing oral L2 English and French productions by Dutch-speaking learners, focusing on the syntactic and the semantic aspect of clause linkage and on their interaction.