Prosodic transfer and the representation of determiners in Turkish-English interlanguage

Abstract

Problems with the second language (L2) acquisition of articles in Turkish-English interlanguage are examined, specifically omission, substitution of other determiners in place of articles, overuse of stressed articles and differential treatment of articles in DPs with and without adjectives. Trenkic’s (2007) syntactic misanalysis account is argued against, that difficulties with articles for L2 English speakers from L1s like Turkish and Serbian stem from the absence of DP in the L1 grammar. Instead, in accordance with the Prosodic Transfer Hypothesis, it is proposed that L1 prosodic representations underlie these problems; L2 learners are argued to have difficulty in producing functional morphology in target-like fashion when the L2 requires a prosodic representation that is unavailable in the L1 grammar.