Language Production in Turkish–German–English Trilinguals

Abstract

In the present study we investigate sentence production in the German interlanguage of Turkish students who have learned German as a first and English as a second foreign language. The students know both languages at an (advanced) intermediate level. Nevertheless, we observed some properties of the German interlanguage that seem to indicate an influence of the second foreign language English on the first foreign language German. We focused our investigation on the processing of the V2 mechanism in German and the fact that it is in certain cases replaced by a SVO ordering, which seems to be a transfer from English. However, an analysis of the SVO ordering in the German interlanguage showed that this syntactic processing is not the result of a transfer from English. By analysing sentence processing as a derivational process in terms of a minimalist grammar, we concluded that the SVO ordering is a derivational strategy of separating adjuncts from the process of morphological checking to derive the syntactic relations inside the checking domain as a local process.