Acquiring the Scope of Disjunction and Negation in L2: A Bidirectional Study of Learners of Japanese and English

Abstract

While L1 transfer and L2 learnability have been studied extensively in the domain of syntax and the syntax/semantics interface, purely semantic phenomena have received little attention in the L2 literature. This paper presents two experiments examining the relative scope assigned to disjunction and negation by English-speaking learners of Japanese (Experiment 1) and Japanese-speaking learners of English (Experiment 2). Previous evidence from L1 acquisition shows a protracted initial default for the interpretation of the relative scope of disjunction and negation. Our results show no such default in L2 acquisition, contra the predictions of Epstein et al. (1996). Instead, we find evidence of L1 transfer, suggesting ‘Full Transfer’ at the L2 initial state extends to the domain of semantics. Results also show uneven success in the two L2 groups, which is explained through the different learnability scenarios that arise as a result of transfer and the availability of positive evidence in the L2 input.