Contingency learning and perfective morpheme productivity in L2 Italian: A study on lexeme–morpheme associations with ΔP

Abstract

This study utilized unidirectional association score ΔP to track perfective morpheme productivity in longitudinal spoken L2 Italian data. Research questions concerned whether early L2 perfectives were contingent upon telicity of predicates, whether lexeme–morpheme association changed as proficiency increased, and whether distribution of perfectives in the L1 input affected the patterns of morpheme emergence. Results showed that (i) the productive use of the perfective was contingent upon a few, infrequent telic predicates but also upon some actionally underspecified, very frequent general-purpose ones; (ii) a generalized decrease in association scores over time accompanied the productivity of the perfective morpheme; (iii) distribution of perfectives in L2 data did not reflect distribution in the L1 input. The statistical analysis adopted in this study is replicable to other domains where contingency of stem-affix alternations may provide cues for observing the developing L2 grammar

Apparently identical verbs can be represented differently: comparing L1–L2 inflection with contingency-based measure ΔP

“…Moreover, according to the AH, such morpheme-lexeme association would characterize only the early stages of acquisition. Therefore, the reliance values are expected to decrease as learners' proficiency increases, which seems in fact to be the case (Rastelli, 2020). Interestingly, rank correlation analysis shows that the most reliable L2 predicates do not correspond to those predicates having similar L1 vs L2 frequency (Kendall τ = 0.21; p-value = 0.407).…”

“…Indeed, formulaicity and productivity in this paper concern how stems and inflectional morphemes (in our case, the perfective) are represented in L2 Italian learners' competence. While 'initial formulaicity' characterizes the stage in development when inflected forms are still unanalysed, 'productivity' characterizes the stage when the morpheme is represented independently of the lexical entry (Rastelli 2020). This is the topic of next section.…”

Telic for whom? The Lexical Underspecification Hypothesis

“…There is another logical possibility: L2 learners at early stages of acquisition may not be able to distinguish between telic and atelic verbs. This claim was put forth in the Lexical Underspecification Hypothesis (LUH) (Rastelli 2008(Rastelli , 2009(Rastelli , 2019(Rastelli , 2020a(Rastelli , 2020b(Rastelli , 2021Rastelli and Vernice 2013). The LUH states that there could be a developmental pattern which constrains the ways learners can represent the lexical aspect of TL verbs over time.…”

“…The distributional explanation of the AH claims that most early L2 perfectives are telic, highly contingent (i.e., the lexeme and the perfective morpheme are strongly associated), and frequent. Rastelli (2020a) utilizes the contingency-based, unidirectional association score delta-pi to track the emergence of the perfective morpheme in the Corpus Pavia, the largest and best-known longitudinal learner Italian corpus to date (~700,000 tokens, ~15,000 types overall (Giacalone Ramat 2003). 3 The study aims to find out whether early L2 perfectives are contingent upon telicity of verbs, and whether distribution of perfectives in the Italian input 4 affects the patterns of morpheme emergence.…”

“…Such verbs are actionally underspecified because they can be either telic or atelic depending on the kind of sentential completion. Admittedly, Rastelli (2020a) utilized verbs in isolation – and not predicates – as the unit of analysis because none of the Italian and learner corpora currently available are tagged for the aspectual categories of predicates (at VP level and above). This is an important shortcoming that leaves open the issue of whether, when, and how L2 learners and native speakers alike can derive lexical aspect compositionally by computing the verb and its surroundings.…”