Swiss-German Additive Focus Particle auch in bi-/multilingual Speakers: The Role of Language Typology, Language Dominance and Proficiency

Prior research on information structure has yielded differences in the use of cohesive devices to highlight additive relations by speakers of Romance and Germanic languages (Dimroth et al., 2010). We investigated the focusing function of the additive particle auch [also/too/as well] in Swiss German-French (n = 71) and Swiss German-Italian (n = 70) bilinguals. Standard German (n = 40) and Swiss German (n = 40) monolinguals served as comparison groups. Participants retold related events shown in a video stimulus. Information was also gathered on language dominance and proficiency. The dependent variable was whether auch was placed left to the entitysubject (auch herr rot geht schlafen [mister red too goes to sleep]), the alternative being its positioning after the finite verb (herr rot geht auch schlafen [mister red goes to sleep, too]). German shares the left-of-entity position with Italian and prefers the post-finite-verb position, which is shared with French. The left-of-entity position of the additive focus particle is not shared with English. We tested the effects of the other main language (French or Italian), language dominance, proficiency in the main languages and proficiency in English and French as third languages (L3s). While the comparison groups show similar results regarding the left-of-entity positioning of auch, bilingual data show that this position is more used by Swiss German-Italian speakers. Moreover, the more proficient in German and dominant in Swiss German both groups of bilinguals are, the more they use auch in this position. Proficiency in L3s is not associated with the syntactic position of auch. The discussion focuses on the degree to which our findings can be understood as suggesting crosslinguistic influences. Furthermore, we address the methodological challenges in estimating the potential effect of L3 proficiency on the positioning of the additive particle.