Jennie Tran

<jennietr@hawaii.edu>

Department of Linguistics
University of Hawaii at Manoa

## Paper for BUCLD 29, Boston, 2004 ##

Verb position and verb form in English-speaking children’s L2 acquisition of German

Jennie Tran

One issue guiding research on child L2 acquisition concerns the extent to which it patterns like child L1 acquisition. Comparing the two, one hypothesis maintains fundamental similarity (e.g. (A)), another proposes nontrivial distinctions (e.g. (B)):

A. Prévost (e.g. 1997), following Rizzi’s (1993/94) Truncation Hypothesis, argues that, as in L1 French, L1-English children’s L2 French exhibits an early period during which VP roots (‘truncated structures’) are (optionally) projected, resulting in Root Infinitives (RIs). The verb in RIs is nonfinite, whereas in IP-/CP-sentences, the verb is finite.

B. Haznedar & Schwartz (1997), comparing L1 English acquisition with L2 English acquisition by an L1-Turkish child, argue that although alternation between finite- and uninflected-verb forms characterizes both, other differences show child L2 development lacks (true) RIs. They conclude that child L2 uninflected forms are actually finite with missing inflection––the Missing Inflection hypothesis.

This paper furthers this line of research, reporting on young English speakers’ acquisition of (nonsubject-initial) verb second (V2) in German.

L1 acquisition data indicate that children know very early the German position-form contingency: finite verbs in V2 position; nonfinite verbs in verb-final position (e.g. Poeppel & Wexler 1993). We thus ask whether child L2ers behave similarly.

Fifteen L1 English child L2ers of German, attending the communicative-oriented Waldorf School in Honolulu, completed two elicited-production tasks, one targeting topicalized-DO sentences, the other targeting topicalized-PP sentences. Age at testing ranged from 8;2 to 14;0 (age at onset: 4;0–5;0).

The results show that 4 subjects were target-like, producing only V2 utterances with finite verbs. The remaining 11 made word-order errors––several types unattested in L1 German––as well as verb-form errors. Even on the (only) two word orders found in early L1 German, our child L2ers do not pattern like L1 German children. Nonfinite forms are found in V2 position, similar to what’s been found in adult L2 acquisition of German (Vainikka & Young-Scholten 1994; Prévost & White 2000). Indeed, the L2 child’s V2 position hosts more nonfinites (53/91, (58%)) than finites (42%).

As V2 clauses are CPs, these results (i) contest Prévost’s extension of Truncation to child L2 acquisition, (ii) are thus more compatible with Missing Inflection, and (iii) suggest that (unlike in L1 acquisition but like in adult L2 acquisition) verb form and verb position are not developmentally interdependent in child L2 acquisition.


References

Haznedar, B. & B,D. Schwartz. 1997. Are there Optional Infinitives in child L2 acquisition? In E. Hughes, M. Hughes & A. Greenhill, eds., Proceedings of the 21st Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Vol. 1. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. pp. 257-68.

Poeppel D. & K. Wexler. 1993. The Full Competence Hypothesis of clause structure in early German. Language 69: 1-33.

Prévost, P. 1997. Truncation and root infinitives in second language acquisition of French. In
E. Hughes, M. Hughes & A. Greenhill, eds., Proceedings of the 21st Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Vol. 2. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. pp. 453-64.

Prévost, P. & L. White. 2000. Missing Surface Inflection or Impairment in second language acquisition? Second Language Research 16: 103-33.

Rizzi, L. 1993/94. Some notes on linguistic theory and language development: The case of root infinitives. Language Acquisition 3: 371-393.

Vainikka, A. & M. Young-Scholten. 1994. Direct access to X’-theory: Evidence from Korean and Turkish adults learning German. In T. Hoekstra & B.D. Schwartz, eds., Language Acquisition Studies in Generative Grammar. Philadelphia: John Benjamins. pp. 265-316.