Grs LX 700 Language Acquisition and Linguistic Theory Week Transfer and the “initial state” for L2A. And other things

But neither group (and notably not even F>L2C) ever produced/accepted the V-Adv order. *VFH, but also possibly *FTFA (to be discussed soon).

One further note: Yuan’s subjects were adults, White’s were children. This might have mattered.

Eubank’s own experiments

• Eubank & Grace (1998) tried an interesting methodology in an experiment to test for grammaticality of raised-verb structures in IL grammars. Something like a “lexical decision task” but with sentences (“are these the same or different?”), recording the reaction time, and based on the finding that native speakers are slower to react to ungrammatical sentences.

Eubank & Grace (1998)

• E&G tested C>L2E speakers, divided them into two groups based on a pretest of their production of subject-verb agreement (idea: “no-agreement” subjects would have not valued their features yet, “agreement” subjects have at least valued some of them).

• Finding: No-agreement subjects acted like native speakers, agreement subjects didn’t differentiate between grammatical and ungrammatical verb-adverb orders.

• Hmm.

Eubank et al. (1997)

• Same basic premises, different tasks:

• Tom draws slowly jumping monkeys.

• For a V-raiser, this should be ambiguous (is the jumping slow or is the drawing slow?). Eubank et al. (1997) used a kind of TVJ task to test this.

• Even prior to looking at the results, one problem here is that this is fine in L1 English if slowly is taken as a parenthetical (“Tom draws— slowly— jumping monkeys”). But that’s the crucial interpretation that is supposed to show verb raising is grammatical. What could we conclude, no matter what the results are?

Eubank et al. (1997)

• The actual results didn’t go along very well with the predictions either. Pretty low acceptance rate of raised-V interpretations if they’re really supposed to be grammatical in the IL. And the agreement group wasn’t acting native-speaker-like either, even though they should have valued the feature.

• Eubank et al. actually go further with the VFH, hypothesizing that this is not only the initial state, but also the inescapable final state—L2 features cannot be valued (hence the lack of serious improvement among the agreement group—”Local Impairment”, for next week).

Schwartz 1998

• Promotes the idea that L2 patterns come about from full transfer and full access.

• The entire L1 grammar (not just short trees) is the starting point.
• Nothing stops parameters from being reset in the IL.

Erdem (Haznedar 1995)

• An initial SOV stage (transfer from Turkish) is evident, followed by a switch to SVO.

N-Adj order Parodi et al. (1997)

• jene drei interessanten Bücher those three interesting.pl books

• ku se-kwon-uy caemiissnun chaek-tul that three-cl-gen interesting book-pl

• ben-im pekçok inginç kitab-Im 1sg-gen many interesting book-1sg

• quei tre libri interessanti those three books interesting.pl

• esos tres libros interesantes those three books interesting.pl

N-Adj in Romance

• The standard way of looking at N-Adj order in Romance (in terms of native speaker adult syntax) is like this:

• Adj N is the base order
• German, Korean, Turkish
• N moves over Adj in Romance
• Spanish, Italian

• What did the L2’ers do learning German?

Parodis 1997—N-Adj order

So…

• So, movement seems to be initially transferred, and has to be unlearned.

• The evidence for the tree building approach doesn’t seem all that strong anymore.

• No nice Case results like in L1.
• Higher parameters seem to transfer (*VFH, *Minimal Trees)
• Morphology and finiteness somewhat separate (to be discussed in two weeks).

No transfer/Full access

• Epstein, Flynn, and Martohardjono (1996) wrote a well-known BBS article endorsing the view that L2A is not only UG-constrained, but that it basically “starts over” with UG like L1A does.

• Editorial comment: It’s worth reading, but the responses are at least as important as the article.

New parameter settings

• Japanese vs. English = SOV vs. SVO.

• EFM make a mysterious statement:

• “Left-headed C° correlates with right-branching adjunction and right-headed C° with left-branching adjunction”

• …followed by an example of how English allows both left and right adjunction.

• What EFM must mean is that SVO language-speakers prefer postposed adverbial clauses.

• The worker called the owner [when the engineer finished the plans].
• [When the actor finished the book] the woman called the professor.