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Darren Tanner
22-34 (complete pdf)
This paper presents a case study of an advanced L1 English speaker of L2 German and argues, contrary to proposals such as the Representational Deficit Hypothesis (Hawkins and Franceschina, 2004), that DP concord is acquirable in an L2, even when a speaker's L1 lacks the grammatical features required for concord. Couched in a framework of Generative grammar (Chomsky, 2001), this paper specifically argues that uninterpretable syntactic features from the UG lexicon are available to post-puberty learners and that agreement phenomena not present in a speaker's L1 are acquirable even by late L2 learners. The subject of this case study shows selective deficits in German nominal morphology, particularly with case and gender features. However, it is argued that these deficits are not a result of missing syntactic features, but rather are consistent with post-syntactic mapping difficulties (Lardiere, 2007).
Published in:
Selected Proceedings of the 2007 Second Language Research Forum
edited by Melissa Bowles, Rebecca Foote, Silvia Perpiñán, and Rakesh Bhatt
Table of contents
ISBN 978-1-57473-425-6 library binding
vi+262 pages
publication date: 2008
published by Cascadilla Proceedings Project, Somerville, MA, USA