Grammar and pragmatics

This paper compares grammatical and pragmatic development in foreign language learners of Swedish. For the analysis of grammatical proficiency, data from translation tasks and essays were tested against the stage model proposed in Processability Theory, which identifies five stages of morpho-syntactic development for Swedish (Pienemann 1998, Pienemann and Håkansson 1999). For the pragmatic analysis a gap-fill task was used, inspired by the discourse completion task (Blum-Kulka 1982, Kasper and Roever 2005), but taking into consideration sequential aspects of the interaction. All tasks were piloted with a control group of Swedish native speakers. The results indicate a relationship between native-like pragmatic command and a high level of morpho-syntactic processability. The findings suggest that students whose grammatical processing capacity is restricted to lower levels find it difficult to contextualise their utterances in a pragmatically appropriate way.