Transitivity alternations in second language acquisition : a crosslinguistic study of English, Spanish and Turkish

This thesis studies the L2 acquisition of transitivity alternations in English, Spanish and Turkish within the Generative framework. in particular, it sets out to investigate the interaction of universal principles and L1 knowledge in interlanguage grammars, as well as whether similar patterns of development are observed across typologically different languages. The focus is on verbs that participate in the causative/inchoative alternation, verbs whose lexico-semantic composition---[x CAUSE [ y BECOME predicate]]---is not matched by morphological derivation uniformly across, and even within, languages.The thesis adopts a templatic account to verb classes. Verbs are decomposed into primitive semantic predicates (CAUSE, BECOME, BE) which map onto an X-bar configuration as the heads of light verbs. Thematic roles like Agent and Theme occupy the specifiers. Different verb classes---alternating, transitive non-alternating, unaccusative and unergative verbs---derive from the interaction of semantic subpredicates and thematic roles. Transitivity alternations are determined by other narrower aspects of meaning: namely, the nature of the Agent role and the CAUSE subevent. Causative and anticausative morphology is the overt manifestation of the CAUSE and BECOME subpredicates.Causative errors in L1 acquisition have been attributed to the overgeneralization of the causative/inchoative alternation to unergative and unaccusative verbs. This study proposes that these errors result when children incorrectly map non-alternating transitive and intransitive verbs onto a default transitive template. By extending this proposal to the L2 acquisition situation, it is hypothesized that L2 learners of Turkish, Spanish and English of different language backgrounds and at lower proficiency levels also rely on this universal mechanism when learning transitivity alternations; L1 influence only plays a role with the overt/non-overt morphology of alternating verbs in these languages.Three independent but methodologically identical experimental studies on English, Spanish and Turkish as second languages are presented. Overall, results of a Picture Judgment Task confirm the hypotheses in the three studies. This work argues against the Full Transfer/Full Access Hypothesis (Schwartz & Sprouse 1996) as a theory of L2 competence and advances a modular view of Transfer which proposes that L1 influence does not affect all linguistic domains in the same way

Influential factors in incomplete acquisition and attrition of young heritage speakers’ vocabulary knowledge

This study investigates whether young heritage speakers, either simultaneous or sequential bilinguals, have limited vocabulary knowledge in their family language compared to matched monolingual counterparts and, if so, what factors help to account for this difference. These factors include age, age at emigration, length of emigration, frequency of heritage language use, and parents’ attitude toward heritage language acquisition and maintenance. Thirty young Persian-English bilinguals (aged 6–18) living in New Zealand took a productive and a receptive vocabulary test. These tests were also administered to thirty monolingual speakers of Persian who were matched with the bilinguals for age, gender, number of siblings, and their family’s socioeconomic status. Information about the heritage speakers’ language use and their parents’ attitude toward heritage language maintenance was collected through semistructured interviews. The results showed that the heritage speakers were outperformed by the monolinguals in both vocabulary tests, but the gap was wider in the case of the simultaneous bilinguals. Of the factors investigated, the parents’ attitude was found to be the strongest predictor of the simultaneous bilinguals’ vocabulary knowledge, which highlights the role parents can play in the heritage language development of their children if they are exposed to a majority language early on in life. On the other hand, the sequential bilinguals’ vocabulary knowledge was associated mostly with age at emigration—the older the children were when they moved to the second language environment, the better their family language vocabulary tended to be