Deverbal categories and the split vP hypothesis

The goal of this paper is to independently motivate the assumption made by Sleeman and Brito (forthcoming) and Sleeman (2007a,b) that both for nominalizations and for participles five readings can be distinguished. In Sleeman & Brito’s (forthcoming) and Sleeman’s (2007a,b) syntactic approach to morphology, these different readings are reflected in different syntactic structures for each of the five types, more specifically in different features attributed to vP and AspP, and in the presence/absence of vP and AspP, dominating the lexical root of the deverbal category. In this paper I show that the verbal root of the five types corresponds to five different combinations of Ramchand’s (2008) split vP, which is composed of functional heads representing certain features of AspP and vP used in earlier analyses of nominalizations and participles

The L2 acquisition of the French quantitative pronoun <i>en</i> by L1 learners of Dutch:vulnerable domains and cross-linguistic influence

Success or failure in L2 acquisition has been attributed to different factors, such as the linguistic domain involved, (the absence of) instruction or positive or negative transfer. Whereas in most of the literature these factors are studied separately, in this paper we investigate the relative impact of each of them, analyzing the L2 acquisition of the French quantitative pronoun en by native speakers of Dutch. On the basis of acquisition data elicited in a Grammaticality Judgment Task, we show that the L2 acquisition of en proceeds very slowly. We argue that this is mainly caused by the presence of a similar, but not completely equivalent pronoun in Dutch