Acquisition of Structures at Syntax-Discourse Interface: Post-Verbal Subjects in L2 English

The present study explores the acceptability of postverbal subjects by intermediate andadvanced L2 English learners with L1 Macedonian, a pro-drop Slavic language with richverbal morphology. The two languages differ regarding the distribution of subject-verb inversion(SVI): in Macedonian, it is a de...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Theory and practice of second language acquisition Vol. 2; no. 9; pp. 1 - 22
Main Authors: Mitkovska, Liljana, Bužarovska, Eleni, Stojanovska-Ilievska, Nataša
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: University of Silesia Press 2023
Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego
Subjects:
Foreign languages learning
information structure
interface hypothesis
Language and Literature Studies
subject inversion
word order
word order
interface hypothesis
information structure
subject inversion
ISSN:2450-5455, 2451-2125
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:The present study explores the acceptability of postverbal subjects by intermediate andadvanced L2 English learners with L1 Macedonian, a pro-drop Slavic language with richverbal morphology. The two languages differ regarding the distribution of subject-verb inversion(SVI): in Macedonian, it is a default pattern in thetic sentences, but English severelyrestricts SVI to specific contexts. To test the hypothesis that Macedonian learners encounterdifficulties in acquisition of English SVI because of crosslinguistic influence, a grammaticalityjudgement and correction task was administered to two groups of Macedonian learners ofEnglish and a control group of English native speakers. The results revealed that L2 learnersfind English VS sentences and VS + it-insertion examples more acceptable than the nativespeakers, but the performance of the advanced group is closer to the native speakers than tothe intermediate learners. Both non-native groups accept more readily inappropriate Englishsentences that conform to typical L1 structures.
ISSN:2450-5455
2451-2125
DOI:10.31261/TAPSLA.13311