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Título: Truncation in second language acquisition
Autores: Prévost, Philippe, 1966-
Fecha: 1997
Publicador: McGill University - MCGILL
Fuente:
Tipo: Electronic Thesis or Dissertation
Tema: Second language acquisition.
Children -- Language.
Grammar, Comparative and general -- Syntax.
Descripción: In this thesis, I argue that early child second language (L2) grammars allow truncation, on a par with proposals by Rizzi (1993/1994) and Haegeman (1995) for first language (L1) acquisition. This account (the Truncation Hypothesis) holds that Rizzi's (1994) Root Principle, according to which root declaratives are CPs, is initially underspecified in L2 systems (for processing reasons). This means that the root of main declaratives will not systematically be CP. Instead, different types of roots should be projected, such as CP, IP or VP, with VP underlying root infinitives. If one further assumes that functional categories are present in early grammars, the possibility of truncation can thus account for optionality of verb-movement and finiteness in early SLA, and more generally for why such categories seem to be optionally projected initially (Vainikka & Young-Scholten, 1994; 1996; Eubank, 1992; 1993/1994; 1996).
Predictions based on the Truncation Hypothesis were tested against longitudinal spontaneous production data from child and adult L2 learners. There were two child and two adult learners of L2 French (whose L1s were English and Arabic) and two child two adult learners of L2 German (native speakers of Romance pro-drop languages). The findings suggest that the distribution of finite and nonfinite verbs is structurally determined in L2 child grammar, i.e. tenseless verbs only appear when VP is the root, while finite verbs are found when functional categories are projected. This in turn means that children project truncated structures in early L2 acquisition. I argue that no other theory of the nature of early L2 grammars is able to account for the full range of properties of the child L2 data.
The adult data are less conclusive concerning the possibility of truncation in adult L2 grammars. In particular, the learners seem to use infinitival markers as substitutes for finite inflections, which means that nonfinite verbs are found in contexts which are not predicted by the Truncation Hypothesis. The difference between the child and adult learners is attributed to problems that adults may have in mapping the syntactic and morphological systems (Lardiere, 1996), and not to a discrepancy in syntactic knowledge.
Idioma: en