The Introduction of Topical Referents in Dialogues of Adolescents with Specific Language Impairment: The Case of the Presentative Cleft Construction

This paper is concerned with some aspects of cohesion in dialogic discourse involving four 13 years-old teenagers affected by specific language impairment (S.L.I.). We describe here how a referent is introduced in their discourse & the means by which something is predicated about it afterwards. That is to say, we are exploring how a referent becomes topic, understanding the notion of topic in terms of "aboutnesss" (Reinhart, 1981; Lambrecht, 1994). Thereby, we pay special attention to a specific syntactic construction, the French presentative cleft construction il y a...qui. Most researches on specific language impairment share a structural approach (Leonard, 1998; Jakubowicz, 1999). Studies on language impairment emanating from a discourse perspective are predominantly concerned with narrative productions (de Weck, 1996, 2003; Liles, 1996). Very few studies deal with dialogic productions. This kind of data, however, provides new insights into language pathology. This study shows that S.L.I. productions reveal a general mastery of pragmatic, informational constraints while still showing a certain number of pragmatic particularities: at moments, the S.L.I. teenagers omit referential expressions, they produce noncanonical forms of the presentative cleft construction investigated here & they sometimes seem to use this construction in particular ways. Tables, References. Adapted from the source document