Non-primary language acquisition of word order in German.
Item
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Title
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Non-primary language acquisition of word order in German.
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Identifier
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AAI9908378
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identifier
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9908378
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Creator
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Washburn, Marianne Janko.
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Contributor
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Advisers: Herbert Seliger | Gita Martohardjono | William Stewart
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Date
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1998
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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, Bilingual and Multicultural | Education, Language and Literature
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Abstract
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Second language acquisition research recently has focused on the development of functional categories which provide among other things the locus of inflectional morphology and verb movement landing sites. Functional categories are parameterized, requiring triggers to determine the language-specific values of the parameters. With respect to the acquisition of word order in German a number of triggers have been proposed for primary language acquisition (Lightfoot 1991, Weissenborn 1990).;A study was designed to test whether these triggers also hold for the non-primary language acquisition of German by adult learners. The triggers tested were phrasal verbs, negation, topicalization, finiteness, modals and the complementizer dass ('that'). Subjects participating in the study were university-level students studying German as a non-primary language in Germany. A total of 24 different languages were represented among the subjects. The study produced two results: The hypothesis that the acquisition of one structure posited as a trigger entailed the acquisition of other structures associated with it was not supported. The second result showed that non-primary language learners of German have more difficulties with structures involving lexical and morphosyntactic information, such as phrasal verbs or finiteness, than with verb raising phenomena, such as word order in negation.
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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.
