The early stages in adult L2 syntax: additional evidence from Romance speakers

Abstract

Vainikka and Young-Scholten (1994) propose an analysis of the acquisition of German by adult Korean and Turkish speakers based on the Weak Continuity account of L1 acquisition. They claim that L2 acquisition initially involves a bare VP whose (final) headedness is transferred from the learner's L1, with functional projections evolving entirely on the basis of the interaction of X'-Theory with the input. In this article, we extend this account to data from Italian and Spanish speakers learning German. Our analysis reveals that these learners initially posit a bare VP whose (initial) headedness is transferred from their native languages but, while still at the bare VP stage, they adopt the head-final VP of German. At this bare VP stage the morphological elements incompatible with the VP are not attested (e.g., auxiliary verbs, verbs marked for agreement and obligatory subjects). At the next stage of acquisition, similar to what Vainikka and Young-Scholten observed for the Korean and Turkish speakers, the Italian and Spanish speakers posit a head-initial functional projection. This projection further resembles the first functional projection observed in the acquisition of German by children (Clahsen, 1991) and involves optional verb-raising and the emergence of elements which typically appear in INFL (auxiliaries, modals) and in Spec (IP) (obligatory subjects).We conclude that child L1 learners and adult L2 learners build up syntactic structure in much the same manner and propose that the Weak Continuity approach accounts for all instances of syntactic acquisition.

On the Evidence for Maturational Constraints in Second-Language Acquisition

“…In L2 development short of the end state (e.g., initial settings of parameters, transitional stages in parameter resetting, subjects' intuitions for L2 linguistic markedness, and rate of attainment of L2 features), the influence of a given native tongue on specific areas of a given target language has been amply established (e.g., Eubank, 1994;Giacobbe, 1992;Kellerman & Sharwood Smith, 1986;Montrul, 2000;Odlin, 1989;Vainikka & Young-Scholten, 1996;cf. Epstein, Flynn, & Martohardjono, 1996, for a view of L2 acquisition that minimizes L1 influence).…”

On the “Vulnerability” of Syntactic Domains in Swedish and German

“…Concerning the acquisition of V2 by learners whose L1 also has V2, Bhatt and Hancin-Bhatt thus made the same predictions as Platzack (2001), namely, that VP and IP syntax will be acquired earlier than CP syntax and that V2 will be acquired late. Vainikka and Young-Scholten (1994;1996a;1996b) also maintained that CP is absent in the early stages of L2 grammar but took a more radical stance than Platzack (2001) and Bhatt and Hancin-Bhatt (2002). Based on cross-sectional data from L1 Turkish, Korean, and Romance learners of German, Vainikka and Young-Scholten claimed that no functional projections whatsoever are transferred from the L1 and that all syntactic processes and morphemes associated with the IP-and CP-domains are initially unavailable (Minimal Trees).…”

“…For details, see Bohnacker (2005, 45-51). (2001)), and for models that invoke L1 transfer at lower, lexical projections only (e.g., VP) but not at higher, functional ones (e.g., CP) (e.g., Eubank (1993/94), Vainikka and Young-Scholten (1994;1996a;1996b). Vainikka and Young-Scholten, for instance, explicitly took the switching of VP headedness to the target value to precede the acquisition of any functional projection (1996b, 20, 25).…”

“…In generative terms, this means that lower structural projections are acquired before higher ones and that lexical categories and projections are targetlike before functional projections are. These assumptions have been made for both first (L1) and second (L2) and foreign language acquisition (e.g., Clahsen (1990Clahsen ( /1991, Clahsen, Penke, andParodi (1993/1994), Hawkins (2001), Radford (1988a), Vainikka and Young-Scholten (1994;1996a; syntax and of how the informants' acquisitional path(s) may best be captured by current L2 theories. Section 6 contains concluding remarks.…”

The acquisition of tense—aspect in child second language English

“…On similar grounds, Lardiere (1999) points out that mastery of the suppletive agreement paradigm entails that L2 speakers must have an agreement feature-checking mechanism, 'implicating the presence of the associated functional category in the syntactic representation' (Lardiere, 1999: 394). Vainikka and Young-Scholten (1996), on the other hand, argue that the acquisition of suppletive forms does not necessarily reveal knowledge of agreement 'given the potential for acquiring the suppletive forms as unanalysed lexical items' (Vainikka and YoungScholten, 1996: 154). It should be noted, however, that as discussed in (Haznedar, 2001), although early instances of the copula be in Erdem's L2 English predominantly occur with is, all three of the forms am, is and are seem to appear around the same time (e.g.…”