Riassunto analitico
Interlanguage (IL), or, as Corder (1967) termed it, the learner's "transitional competence", is the intermediary language system which is naturally supposed to thrive in the speaker's cognitive framework. It sets itself the ambitious goal of illustrating, in the language-acquisition transaction process, how structural and non-structural components from two different natural languages, namely the learner’s First Language (L1, or Native Language, NL) and Second Language (L2, or Target Language, TL), subsume in an idiosyncratic combination in the mind of the language learner, which preserves features of both languages, ultimately determining an idiolect. This implies thus the idea of an internal, interfacing mechanism which is supposed to accompany the learner along the path of acquisition. The domain indeed discloses an evident interdisciplinarity such as to range from the merely linguistic dimension to involve even external issues with which it is narrowly correlated, like psychology and social sciences. In other words, what lies at the core of this work is the speaker’s anthropological sphere in its wider sense, with the language field clearly constituting the final layer of that network-based arrangement. Most of the discoveries in the field of such discipline are due to the pioneering researches mainly conducted by Larry Selinker (1972), according to whom variable IL performance may include an array of factors ranging from such endogenous field as social norms, the identity and role of the interlocutor(s), and the different functions played by language forms within specific contexts, to more exogenous ones, highlighting the importance of ‘attention to language form’; this source of IL variation suggests the existence of a proportional relation between the learner’s attendance to language form and the improvement in performance accuracy, and directly stems from psycholinguistic instances. However, from the second chapter of the dissertation onward, the focus shifts to the social sphere within which cultural-linguistic exchanges take place; in fact, structural linguistic changes are made possible because of certain dominance configurations which give shape to our present state of being; one example of this is provided by the influence of behavioural rules established by culture-determined phenomena, like the history of a country and the way in which events came in succession throughout its territory, eventually defining what that country is like nowadays, and how it can interconnect its own past experiences with those of the histories of other countries, establishing an intercultural contact which is still on going at the present time. As it is obviously not exempt from cultural implications, language undergoes these diachronic processes too, and finds its final product in the speech of the society which hosts it. In the realm of the societal determination, of major prominence are the in-depth analyses of the socio-cultural as well as ideological backgrounds in which each language is embedded, based on the seminal work of such authors as Hymes, Labov, Gumperz, and other notable figures in the field of sociolinguistics, who provided the theoretical foundations for subsequent discoveries in the subject matter. focusing on the concept of 'nativeness' and hinting at some modern, multimedial tools on the web which ensure a more practical approach to it. Finally, since IL is a matter of interest for both language students and teachers, a two-side dissertation of the phenomenon is discussed in the final chapter, with the last section relying on two empirical works conducted in both an instructive and a naturalistic environment.
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