Abstract
Research on non-native pronoun resolution has predominantly been concerned with (i) ‘ordinary’ 3rd person pronouns/anaphors like En. "he", "she", "they" or "himself", "herself", "themselves", (ii) language pairs involving English as the native (L1) or the foreign (L2) language, and (iii) the role that binding constraints and syntactic structure in general play in L2 versus L1 processing. The present paper – a follow-up study to Pitz et al. (2017) – deviates from this trend in all three respects: We investigate how L1-Norwegian learners 
 of L2-German interpret the two German possessive pronouns/determiners "sein" (≈ his) and "ihr" (≈ her or their), arguing that lexical divergence between the possessive systems, and in particular the formal similarity between binding-neutral L2-German "sein" and the L1-Norwegian reflexive possessive "sin", may enhance or interfere with L2 comprehension, depending on the structural conditions. 
 In Section 2 we briefly present the two possessive systems. Section 3 summarizes relevant research on pronoun resolution, with a special view to possessives. Sections 4–6 present a pilot study on L1-Norwegian learners’ grammaticality judgments of "sein" and "ihr" in simple sentences (Sect. 5) and a forced-choice resolution experiment involving a group of L1-Norwegian learners with a background two or three years’ teaching of L2-German at high-school level and a control group of native speakers of German (Sect. 6). The final Section 7 provides a summary and concluding discussion of our findings.
Highlights
The paper is organized as follows: In Section 2 we give a brief contrastive presentation of the systems of pronominal possessives in the two languages
The informants were told not to focus on morphological endings, it is impossible to tell in how far their judgments were influenced by the latter. Expressions such as ihr Studium, ihr Pensum might appear odd without a morphological ending
The form ihr is homophonous with the singular dative form of the number-ambiguous 3rd person pronoun sie ‘she/they’
Summary
The paper is organized as follows: In Section 2 we give a brief contrastive presentation of the systems of pronominal possessives in the two languages. The examples illustrate the typical adnominal function of German possessives. In this use, possessives act like determiners: They are confined to the initial – functional head – position of their host DP, they inflect like determiners, agreeing with their head (possessee) noun with respect to number, gender and case; and they make their host DP semantically definite – like, e.g. English possessives (Gunkel et al 2017: 672–719, Fabricius-Hansen et al 2017: 12–14)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
