Singular

Nominative—Mein guter Freund, my good friend. Genitive—Meines guten Freundes, of my good friend. Dative—Meinem guten Freund, to my good friend. Accusative—Meinen guten Freund, my good friend.

Plural

Nominative—Meine guten Freunde, my good friends. Genitive—Meiner guten Freunde, of my good friends. Dative—Meinen guten Freunden, to my good friends. Accusative—Meine guten Freunde, my good friends.

Now let the candidate for the asylum try to memorize those variations, and see how soon he will be elected. One might better go without friends in Germany than to take all this trouble about them. I have shown what a bother it is to decline a good (male) friend; well this is only a third of the work, for there is a variety of new distortions of the adjective to be learned when the object is feminine, and still another when the object is neuter. Now there are more adjectives in this language than there are black cats in Switzerland, and they must all be as elaborately declined as the example above suggested. Difficult? Troublesome? (Mark Twain, ‘The Awful German Language,’ in Twain, 1879, pp. 271–272)

In this paper we follow two beginning learners of English, Andrea and Santo, over a period of 2 years as they develop means to structure the declarative utterances they produce in various production tasks, and then we look at the following problem: In the early stages of acquisition, both learners develop a common learner variety; during these stages, we see a picture of two learner varieties developing similar regularities determined by the minimal requirements of the tasks we examine. Andrea subsequently develops further morphosyntactic means to achieve greater cohesion in his discourse. But Santo does not. Although we can identify contexts where the grammaticalization of Andrea's production allows him to go beyond the initial constraints of his variety, it is much more difficult to ascertain why Santo, faced with the same constraints in the same contexts, does not follow this path. Some lines of investigation into this problem are then suggested.

This paper treats the development of the expression of grammatical categories in German in the early second language acquisition of Turkish and German children attending a bilingual day-care center in a multilingual speech community in Berlin. We examine case and gender marking on noun phrases and pronouns and tense/aspect and agreement marking on verb phrases. These are examined in light of the following general issues: (a) Do grammatical markers develop from independent lexical items in child language as well as in diachronic development? (b) Do the markers initially mark pragmatic categories before being grammaticalized as syntactic functors? (c) Do grammaticalizations of the first language influence the development of the second language?

We find no evidence that pragmatic precede syntactic categories; however, some evidence indicates that grammatical markers develop first as independent words—for example, pronominal use preceding definite article use of der, die, das, and main verb use preceding auxiliary use of sein (‘be’) and haben (‘have’). Some evidence that the categories of the first language (Turkish) play a role in the development of German second language is found in compound verb constructions.

This study investigates some instances of linguistic development in the acquisition of a second language that might be subsumed under the issue of grammaticalization. First, the notion of grammaticalization is discussed with reference to the current linguistic debate and its applicability to the domain of language acquisition is evaluated. Then, some cases are examined drawing on data on the acquisition of Italian collected during several years at the University of Pavia. With respect to temporality and modality, learners are shown to move from lexical means or context-dependent strategies to a gradual acquisition of the morphological devices required by the target language. The results of the analyses are discussed in terms of their implications for both general linguistic theory and language acquisition research.

This contribution will compare the acquisition of German of three adult Poles over a period of 3 years. As background to the acquisition of grammatical features in German (e. g., morphology, auxiliary and modal verbs, constituency structure, temporality), an acquisition profile of the informants will be constructed. With the help of computer-aided corpus descriptions, the sequences in acquisition will be specified.