In this paper we investigate whether learners of L2 English show knowledge of the Definiteness Effect (Milsark, 1977), which restricts definite expressions from appearing in the existential there-insertion construction. There are crosslinguistic differences in how restrictions on definiteness play out. In English, definite expressions may not occur in either affirmative or negative existentials (e.g. There is a/*the mouse in my soup; There isn't a/*the mouse in my soup). In Turkish and Russian, affirmative existentials observe a restriction similar to English, whereas negative existentials do not. We report on a series of experiments conducted with learners of English whose L1s are Turkish and Russian, of intermediate and advanced proficiency. Native speakers also took the test in English, Turkish and Russian. The task involved acceptability judgments. Subjects were presented with short contexts, each followed by a sentence to be judged as natural/unnatural. Test items included affirmative and negative existentials, as well as items testing apparent exceptions to definiteness restrictions. Results show that both intermediate and advanced L2ers respond like English native speakers, crucially rejecting definites in negative existentials. A comparison with the groups taking the test in Russian and Turkish confirms that judgments in the L2 are quite different from the L1, suggesting that transfer cannot provide the explanation for learner success.

This paper reports on a study investigating restrictions on definiteness (the Definiteness Effect) in existential constructions in the two languages of Turkish heritage speakers in Germany. Turkish and German differ in in how the Definiteness Effect plays out. Definite expressions in German may not occur in affirmative or negative existentials, whereas in Turkish the restriction applies only to affirmative existentials. Participants were adults and fell into two groups: simultaneous bilinguals (2L1) who acquired German before age 3 and early sequential bilinguals (2L1) who acquired German after age 4; there were also monolingual controls. The tasks involved acceptability judgments. Subjects were presented with contexts, each followed by a sentence to be judged, including grammatical and ungrammatical existentials. Results show that the bilinguals, regardless of age of acquisition, make judgments appropriate for each language. They reject definite expressions in negative existentials in German and accept them in Turkish, suggesting distinct grammars.

Assuming that word-prosodic parameters are organized into a hierarchical tree where certain parameters are embedded under others, this paper proposes the Prosodic Acquisition Path Hypothesis (PAPH). The PAPH predicts different levels of difficulty and paths to be followed by L2 (and L1) learners based on the typological properties of their L1 and the L2 they are learning. On the PAPH, L2 acquisition is assumed to be brought along via a process of parameter resetting. During this process, certain parameters are expected to be easier to reset than others, based on such factors as economy, markedness, and robustness of the input, which is reflected in part by their location on the tree of parameters proposed in this paper. Evidence for the proposal comes from previous formal phonological and L1 acquisition literature. The predictions as concerns the learning path are tested through an experiment which examines productions of English-speaking learners of Turkish, thereby involving two languages that are maximally different from each other regarding the location of word-level prominence, as well as how it is assigned. The PAPH is a restrictive (and falsifiable) approach, where the predictions regarding the stages learners go through are constrained both by certain learning principles and by the options made available by UG.

This paper presents a novel approach to capturing exceptional stress that relies on prespecification of foot edges in the input. Focusing on Turkish, this approach accounts for both regular and exceptional stress in a unified manner and within a single grammar, and unlike other approaches, does not overpredict. On this account, Turkish is a footless, but trochaic, language. Both regular and exceptional Turkish morphemes are subject to the same constraint ranking ; exceptional morphemes are different only in that they have one or more syllables already footed in the input, although the type of foot (e.g. trochaicity, binarity) is determined by the constraints of the grammar. As regular morphemes vacuously satisfy these constraints (which act on the foot), trochees appear on the surface only if there is an input foot available (i.e. in words with exceptional morphemes), since the grammar itself has no apparatus to parse syllables into feet.I would like to express my deepest thanks to Heather Goad, Glyne Piggott, Michael Wagner, Lydia White and the audience at NELS 40 for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. Heather Goad, in particular, has provided many ideas, support and guidance for this project, for which I am extremely grateful. I would also like to thank the three anonymous reviewers of Phonology, as well as the associate editor, for their helpful comments and suggestions. *

Certain grammatical morphemes are variably produced in the speech of children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Previous research tends to view this as a consequence of either a deficit in linguistic knowledge or a limitation in processing capacity; however, both approaches raise problems. For example, linguistic accounts are unable to explain why these children’s problems are mostly with production rather than comprehension. Processing accounts, on the other hand, have difficulty explaining why affected children have differing levels of problems with grammatical morphemes that are similar on the surface (e.g. English plural -s vs. third person singular -s). In this paper, a new, phonological account is proposed which avoids these problems, and better captures the wide array of data presented in the literature. It is proposed that children with SLI have problems with organizing segmental data into prosodic structures that are linguistically highly marked, in particular those that involve various forms of extraprosodicity.