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Optionality in non-native grammars: L2 acquisition of German constructions with absent expletives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 November 2005

ALDONA SOPATA
ALDONA SOPATA
Affiliation:
Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland
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Abstract

This paper investigates the knowledge of constructions with absent expletives by advanced and high-proficiency non-native speakers of German whose first language is Polish. German grammar is known to license null subjects due to the strength of AGRP but not to identify them. Therefore only expletive subjects can be absent in German, except for Topic-drop and, crucially, the expletive subjects have to be absent in certain cases due to the Projection Principle. The knowledge of this phenomenon by second language (L2) learners has been investigated by two methods, elicited written production task and grammaticality judgment tests. High-level non-native speakers of German differ significantly from native speakers in both types of tasks. The differences are clearly not the result of transfer. The results reported here reveal permanent optionality in L2 grammars suggesting a deficit in the grammatical representations of L2 learners.

Type
Research articles
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 8 , Issue 3 , December 2005 , pp. 177 - 193
Copyright
Cambridge University Press 2005

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Footnotes

I would like to thank Jürgen Meisel and other researchers in Collaborative Research Center on Multilingualism in Hamburg for their valuable discussion of the issues and problems involved in this research. I am grateful to Lynn Eubank and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on the early versions of this paper. All remaining errors are my own