At sea in SLA: Evidence of UG in the acquisition of French and English verbs.
Item
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Title
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At sea in SLA: Evidence of UG in the acquisition of French and English verbs.
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Identifier
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AAI9130373
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identifier
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9130373
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Creator
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Sheppard, Ken.
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Contributor
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Advisers: Martin Chodorow | Richard Kayne | Herbert Seliger
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Date
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1991
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Language, Linguistics | Education, Language and Literature
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Abstract
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This study compares the acquisitional states of two groups of foreign language learners (a Francophone group learning English and an Anglophone group learning French) with a view to establishing the influence of Universal Grammar (see, for example, Chomsky 1981) in the process. Specifically, the two groups (48 each) were asked to render acceptability judgments about 50 sentences in each language; the sentences exemplified syntactic properties (the permissability or impermissibility of fully tensed clausal complements, Exceptional Case Marking and Control structures (PRO)) associated with three verbs in the two languages (believe/croire, promise/promettre and want/vouloir). Four overlapping hypotheses (predictions based on markedness differences between the two languages, the possibility of an underlying similarity in assumptions about the grammar of the L2, a putative preference of the French parameter setting and an alleged predisposition for L1 transfer) were addressed by means of several analyses of the data (chiefly ANOVA). The results indicate some support for the second of these hypotheses and ambiguous support for the other three. Reformulation of the study around the issues of transfer and success suggests that, while Universal Grammar may play some role in learner judgments of the L2, there is little reason to see it as the dominant factor in the generation of L2 grammars.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
