Markedness and the acquisition of the English dative alternation by L2 speakers  

Oleh:

Hawkins, Roger

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Second Language Research (Full Text & ada di PROQUEST) vol. 3 no. 1 (Jun. 1987), page 20-55.
Topik: acquisition of the English dative alternation
Fulltext: Roger Hawkins.pdf (1.73MB)

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Perpustakaan PKBB Nomor Panggil: 405/SLR/3 Non-tandon: tidak ada Tandon: 1

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A recent series of articles by Mazurkewich (1984a; 1984b; 1985) has suggested that the English dative alternation is acquired by L2 speakers in the sequence: [_ NP PP] ->¦ [_ NP NP]. This order of difficulty, it is argued in those papers, reflects an aspect of Universal grammar (UG): [ NP PP] construc tions are part of core grammar and are therefore unmarked in UG, while [ NP NP] constructions are peripheral and are therefore marked in UG. According to Mazurkewich, ’markedness’ as defined by UG directly explains order of difficulty: constructions that are deemed marked in UG cire more difficult for L2 speakers to acquire than unmarked constructions. The present study reexamines the acquisition of the English dative alternation across a wider range of dative verbs than was considered by Mazurkewich. A group of French L1 subjects were given two different tasks: a grammaticality judgment task and a sentence construction task. It was found that although the results confirm an order of difficulty: [ NP PP] -» [ NP NP], this developmental sequence conceals a more complex set of stages in the acquisition of the dative alternation involving features like the syntactic distributional subclass of the verb in question, whether the dative object involved is a lexical NP or a pronoun, and the syllabic structure of the base form of the verb. These features, it turns out, interact to produce a multistaged developmental sequence. This finding calls into question the usefulness of a UG definition of markedness in explaining the L2 acquisition of the English dative alternation. An alternative account is proposed in terms of the familiar psycholinguistic notion of ’learning comllexity’ which seems to offer a better account of the acquisition process

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