237 Assertive strategies in English and Spanish: a new contribution to the debate on assertion in Romance and Germanic languages by Patrizia Giuliano and Salvatore Musto 1 Abstract Our paper analyses the way English and Spanish speaking informants build textual cohesion in a nar- rative task involving a non-prototypical information flow. The results are compared with those of Dimroth et al. (2010) in order to enlarge the debate about the “assertion oriented” and the “non-as- sertion oriented” languages. We shall demonstrate that a strict distinction between the Romance non-assertion oriented pattern, on the one side, and the Germanic assertion-oriented pattern, on the other side, is not possible and that this opposition, as for other phenomena, it is to be interpreted as a continuum rather than a contrast. Furthermore, we shall satisfactorily explain this result by an enunciative framework of analysis, thanks to which the semantic and linguistic choices that an enun- ciator makes are not simply seen as the expression of grammaticalization processes but rather as the reflex of (unconscious) decisions motivated by his/her communicative needs with respect to a specific co-enunciator Introduction The purpose of this paper is to analyse the way English and Spanish speaking in- formants build textual cohesion in an oral narrative task involving a non-prototyp- ical information flow, namely referential maintenance or contrast 2 with respect to entities, events, time spans and sentence polarity. We shall focus both on the se- mantic domains and the linguistic means speakers select in order to highlight such referential flow and will compare our results with those of Dimroth et al. 3 in order to enlarge the debate about the “assertion oriented” (German and Dutch) and the “non-assertion oriented” (Italian and French) languages (for this debate cf. § 1). The data were collected using the video clip The Finite Story 4 (cf. § 1 for a dis- cussion of this stimulus). With respect to the subjects interviewed, our results will show that: a) English, despite its Germanic origins, is not an “assertion oriented language”, differently from what Dimroth et al. have stated for Dutch and German, since its na- tive speakers do not normally emphasize cohesion on the sentence polarity (namely the assertion) level; brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by EleA@UniSA - Università degli Studi di Salerno