Info for readers
Info for authors
Info for editors
Info for libraries
Order form
Shopping cart
Tom Rankin
46-59 (complete pdf)
The paper deals with the transfer of V2 into the L2 English of L1 German and Dutch speakers by examining V2 verb movement diagnostics in the relevant subcorpora of the International Corpus of Learner English. The patterning of inversion and linear orders in which verbs raise over sentence-medial adverbs and sentential negation suggests that only subject-auxiliary inversion and inversion of copula be in declarative clauses are representative of the transfer of V2. This is analysed within the framework of the Interface Hypothesis, whereby topicalisation continues to give rise to movement of verbal elements to the left-periphery, while the narrow syntactic properties of English in terms of the non-movement of thematic verbs has been mastered. This is the result of interface difficulties in addition to the nature of the English input conspiring to make resetting V2 difficult.
Published in:
Proceedings of the 10th Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition Conference (GASLA 2009)
edited by Melissa Bowles, Tania Ionin, Silvina Montrul, and Annie Tremblay
Table of contents
ISBN 978-1-57473-434-8 library binding
v+294 pages
publication date: 2009
published by Cascadilla Proceedings Project, Somerville, MA, USA