The BV is based on a limited set of organizational principles of different types. These principles interact, and it is this which determines the actual organization of a given learner variety. The BV works structurally so long as the semantic, pragmatic, and phrasal constraints that organize it can be reconciled. In the following report, we focus on these two sections. The work of Hendrik s and Starren was done at the Institute itself.
Dislocation is a particularly interesting device to look at.
If the assumption that discourse organization follows universal pragmatic principles is correct, adult Chinese, speaking a topic-prominent source language, should have no problems discovering its functions in French. Similarly, if these principles have to be acquired in L1, French children should have trouble discovering its functions. A separate question concerns the acquisition of its linguistic form . In Chinese, topics are marked by the first position in the sentence. In French, the topic is marked by dislocations, which consist of a full noun and a clitic.