A corpus perspective on the development of verb constructions in second language learners

2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 268-290 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ute Römer
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
English Learners ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Second Language Learners ◽  
L2 Acquisition ◽  
Formulaic Sequences ◽  
Proficiency Levels ◽  
Data Analyses ◽  
Verb Constructions

Abstract This article reports initial findings from a study that uses written data from second language (L2) learners of English at different proficiency levels (CEFR A1 to C1) in a large-scale investigation of verb-argument construction (VAC) emergence. The findings provide insights into first VACs in L2 learner production, changes in the learners’ VAC repertoire from low to high proficiency levels, and changes in learners’ dominant verb-VAC associations from low to high proficiency levels. The article also addresses the question what role formulaic sequences play in the L2 acquisition of VACs. Data analyses indicate that, from lowest to highest proficiency levels, the VAC repertoire of L2 English learners shows an increase in VAC types, growth in VAC productivity and complexity, and a development from predominantly fixed sequences to more flexible and productive ones. The findings help to expand our understanding of the processes that underlie construction acquisition in an L2 context.

Why is ‘is’ easier than ‘-s’?: acquisition of tense/agreement morphology by child second language learners of English

2002 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 95-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tania Ionin ◽  
Kenneth Wexler
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
English Learners ◽  
Second Language Learners ◽  
First Language ◽  
Inflectional Morphology ◽  
L2 Acquisition ◽  
L2 Learners ◽  
Agreement Morphology ◽  
Verb Raising

This study of first-language (L1) Russian children acquiring English as a second language (L2) investigates the reasons behind omission of verbal inflection in L2 acquisition and argues for presence of functional categories in L2 grammar. Analyses of spontaneous production data show that the child L2 learners ( n = 20), while omitting inflection, almost never produce incorrect tense/agreement morphology. Furthermore, the L2 learners use suppletive inflection at a significantly higher rate than affixal inflection, and overgenerate be auxiliary forms in utterances lacking progressive participles (e.g., they are help people). A grammaticality judgement task of English tense/agreement morphology similarly shows that the child L2 English learners are significantly more sensitive to the be paradigm than to inflection on thematic verbs. These findings suggest that Tense is present in the learners’ L2 grammar, and that it is instantiated through forms of the be auxiliary. It is argued that omission of inflection is due to problems with the realization of surface morphology, rather than to feature impairment, in accordance with the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis of Prévost and White (2000). It is furthermore suggested that L2 learners initially associate morphological agreement with verb-raising and, thus, acquire forms of be before inflectional morphology on in situ thematic verbs.

When activity shapes the repertoire of second language learners

2007 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 121-147 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dolors Masats ◽  
Luci Nussbaum ◽  
Virginia Unamuno
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Second Language Acquisition ◽  
Community Of Practice ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
English Learners ◽  
Second Language Learners ◽  
Language Choice ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Language Choices ◽  
Pair Work

Interactionists interested in second language acquisition postulate that learners’ competences are sensitive to the context in which they are put into play. Here we explore the language practices displayed, in a bilingual socio-educational milieu, by three dyads of English learners while carrying out oral communicative pair-work. In particular, we examine the role language choice plays in each task.  A first analysis of our data indicates that the learners’ language choices seem to reveal the linguistic norms operating in the community of practice they belong to. A second analysis reveals that they exploited their linguistic repertoires according to their interpretation of the task and to their willingness to complete it in English. Thus, in the first two tasks students relied on code-switching as a mechanism to solve communication failures, whereas the third task generated the use of a mixed repertoire as a means to complete the task in the target language.

The case of the conditional and the imperfect in variable mood-choice contexts in second-language and native-speaker Spanish

2015 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 118-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aarnes Gudmestad
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
Second Language Learners ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Native Speaker ◽  
Proficiency Levels ◽  
Form Function ◽  
Verb Forms ◽  
Range Of Functions ◽  
Mood Choice

The current study builds on research on mood distinction in Spanish, which has focused on the subjunctive mood, by examining the full inventory of verb forms that second-language learners and native speakers (NSs) of Spanish use in mood-choice contexts. Twenty NSs and 130 learners corresponding to five proficiency levels completed three oral-elicitation tasks. The results show that participants use a wide repertoire of tense/mood/aspect forms in mood-choice contexts and that NSs and learners use largely the same forms. An analysis of the conditional and imperfect suggests that learners tend to restructure and strengthen their form-function connections between these verb forms and a range of functions.

scholarly journals The L2-acquisition of the German particle doch

2016 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lotte Hogeweg ◽  
Helen de Hoop ◽  
Stefanie Ramachers ◽  
Frans van der Slik ◽  
Verena Wottrich
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
Second Language Learners ◽  
Native Language ◽  
L2 Acquisition ◽  
Discourse Particles

AbstractDiscourse particles are notoriously difficult to acquire for second language learners. It has been argued that this difficulty is caused by a lack of equivalent concepts in the learner’s native language. In this article we compare the acquisition of the German particle

scholarly journals The acquisition of the determiner phrase in bilingual and second language French

2000 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 263-280 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonas Granfeldt
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
Second Language Learners ◽  
Phrase Structure ◽  
Determiner Phrase ◽  
Functional Categories ◽  
L2 Acquisition ◽  
Structure Building ◽  
Complementary Distribution ◽  
L1 Acquisition

This study deals with the acquisition of Functional Categories in the French Determiner Phrase. The development of determiners and prenominal adjectives in three bilingual Swedish–French children is compared with that of four Swedish second language learners of French. It is argued that acquisition is crucially different in these two cases. The bilingual children initially have restrictions on phrase structure, resulting at one stage in a complementary distribution of determiners and adjectives. These results support a structure building view of L1 acquisition. For L2 acquisition of the same structure, there is no evidence for an initially reduced phrase structure. This finding is explained in terms of a transfer effect. A preliminary comparison with the acquisition of finiteness suggests that, whereas there is some correlation over time in the L1B subjects, no such correlation is found in the L2 learners.

A case for 'acquisitional strategies': some methodological observations on investigation into second language learners' initial state'

1988 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 110-132
Author(s):  
Margaret Polomska
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
English Learners ◽  
Second Language Learners ◽  
Methodological Framework ◽  
Parameter Setting ◽  
Initial State ◽  
Preposition Stranding ◽  
Pilot Investigation ◽  
Individual Choices

This article reports on a pilot investigation into initial assumptions of second language learners in the methodological framework of 'acquisitional strategies'.2 Its focus is predominantly methodological, but experimental data is used to illustrate the approach. Acquisitional strategies constitute an elaboration of recent applications of the parameter setting model of grammar to the investigation of second language learners' initial state in that in this framework markedness and parameter setting interact with cognitive and psycholinguistc factors. Acquisitional strategies are understood as an identifiable, but subconscious plane according to which acquisition is handled and which is based on a subconscious assumption or a range of assumptions about the linguistic characteristics of the language under acquisition. Learners' initial state or their assumptions are seen as reflected empirically by a range of interacting formal and substantive choices, attached to a particular grammatical phenomenon. In contrast to the parameter setting model, the analysis of second language learners' initial state in the context of acquisitional strategies is essentially individual-based. An exploratory application of this framework to the investigation of second language learners' initial state has been undertaken in the context of acquisition of preposition stranding by English learners of Dutch. Preposition stranding refers to a marked phenomenon where movement extracts an NP complement of the preposition out of PP, leaving the preposition 'stranded' behind. The respective realization of this phenomenon in English and Dutch manifests interesting syntactic and morphological contrasts, which render it a valuable empirical tool for evaluation of acquisitional strategies. A tendency to statistically significant individual choices has been noted in this study. The predominant choice, manifested by the subjects, appears to be a strategy associated here with the assumption of nonequivalence of the phenomenon of preposition stranding in English and in Dutch.

scholarly journals Comprehension of grammatically modified and nonmodified sentences by second language learners

1992 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-171 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diana C. Issidorides ◽  
Jan H. Hulstijn
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
Second Language Learners ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Nonnative Speakers ◽  
Control Group ◽  
Grammatical Structure ◽  
L2 Acquisition ◽  
L2 Learners ◽  
State Of Affairs

ABSTRACTAt issue in the present research is whether native speakers' “simplified” or modified utterances, as in foreigner-talk (FT), actually facilitate comprehension for nonnative speakers hearing such utterances. It was hypothesized that (grammatical) Dutch inversion sentences (AdvVSO) that have proven to be problematic in studies on Dutch second language (L2) acquisition - as reflected both in the (ungrammatical) output of L2 learners and in the (ungrammatical) FT input to L2 learners - would not be problematic in terms of comprehension, when compared with modified, ungrammatical AdvSVO and AdvSOV sentences, as long as such sentences do not express an implausible state of affairs. Three subject groups participated in the experiment: 20 English and 22 Turkish L2 learners of Dutch and 30 Dutch native speakers (control group). Subjects heard and interpreted declarative Dutch sentences, in which word order (NVN, VNN, NNV) and animacy configurations (Al [i.e., animate/inanimate], AA, LA) were systematically manipulated. Subjects had to name the noun (first or second) that functions as actor/subject of the sentence. Positive evidence was found for the hypotheses. It is concluded from the present study, as well as from a previous study (Issidorides, 1988), that linguistically more complex input will not necessarily impede comprehension. The fact that normative speakers have difficulties in producing a certain grammatical structure (e.g., the AdvVSO structure) does not imply that such a structure is also more difficult to understand in the speech of others.

acceptability of American politeness from a native and non-native comparative perspective

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 263-287 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yi Sun
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
English Learners ◽  
Second Language Learners ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Mainland China ◽  
Comparative Perspective ◽  
Quantitative Results ◽  
High Level ◽  
Qualitative Exploration

This article examines the American politeness phenomena from a comparative perspective between American native speakers and intermediate- or high-level second language learners in mainland China. Both groups are invited to inspect the same ten conversations randomly elicited from the Oral Corpus of California University at San Barbara and evaluate the politeness acceptability in terms of a questionnaire. In that questionnaire, Likert scaling as a bipolar scaling method, also called summative scales, measures either positive or negative responses to a conversation in judging whether it is polite or not. With the assistance of statistical software SPSS 21, it continues to discuss the discrepant understanding of the groups towards the same politeness phenomena. It is found that all the Chinese subjects, though already intermediate- or high-level English learners for at least ten years, are somewhat weak in evaluating American politeness. There is an apparent blocking ‘plateau’ in their accurately interpreting politeness in naturally occurring American English conversations. The article then conducts a closed follow-up structured review to discuss why Chinese interviewees exhibit strikingly low scores in the questionnaire comparatively so as to complement the quantitative results of politeness judgment with an in-depth qualitative exploration. The main focus was in revealing the panoramic status of second-language learners’ politeness acceptability, their underlying explanatory motivations, as well as possible implications for pragmatic teaching

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