Reference to kinds in L2 English

Yılmaz Köylü

doi:10.3765/plsa.v4i1.4537

Abstract

This study investigated the acquisition of kind referring noun phrase interpretation in L2 English by learners with Turkish, Arabic and Chinese L1 backgrounds. 37 advanced learners of English with Turkish (10), Arabic (10) and Chinese (10) L1 backgrounds, and 7 native English speakers were recruited. The tasks were a 48-item Fill in the gaps task and a 64-item Acceptability judgment task. The results indicated that: (a) native speakers, and L2 learners mostly produced bare plurals for count nouns and bare singulars for mass nouns for kind reference; (b) L2 learners of English transferred the morphosyntactic manifestation of kind reference from their L1s, substantiating the Full Transfer Full Access Hypothesis (Schwartz & Sprouse, 1996); and (c) the similarity between the participants’ L1s and L2 did not always lead them to produce correct noun forms and articles for kind reference, neither did such a similarity consistently help the learners in their acceptability judgments for kind reference.

Highlights

Generic statements and kind referring expressions are conveyed using different nominal morphosyntax, and articles crosslinguistically
To investigate whether Turkish, Arabic, and Chinese L2 learners of English can successfully acquire kind reference in L2 English, two experimental tasks were employed. These were a Fill in the gaps task (FTG) and an Acceptability judgment task (AJT)
The findings based on 2 experimental conditions in 2 different tasks will be presented

Summary

Introduction

Generic statements and kind referring expressions are conveyed using different nominal morphosyntax, and articles crosslinguistically. These expressions clearly pose a learnability problem in second language acquisition of English as they are seldom taught explicitly, and neither are such expressions abundant in the input to guide learners to use correct nominal morphosyntax, and articles. L2 learners seem to acquire the morphosyntactic manifestation of kind reference successfully despite the poverty of the stimulus as evidenced by Ionin & Montrul (2010); Ionin et al (2011), and Ionin et al (2014). The first one is reference to a kind, illustrated below

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