Subject pronoun (non)realization in the English learner language of Macedonian speakers

Abstract

This article investigates phenomena related to subject pronoun realization in the English interlanguage of Macedonian learners. Preliminary research indicates that learners tend to omit the subject pronoun in both referential and non-referential contexts. It can be presumed that such interlanguage features are due to crosslinguistic influence, given that Macedonian is a pro-drop language and makes no use of a dummy pronoun. The goal of this article is to determine the distribution of these phenomena at four proficiency levels: beginners (A1), elementary (A2), pre-intermediate (B1) and upper-intermediate (B2) for children up to 15 years of age. This research is supplemented by a questionnaire in which learners at the same age and proficiency level are asked to judge the grammaticality of correct and erroneous sentences from the corpus. The results from both studies serve as a basis for postulating the acquisition sequence of subject realization in the learner language and also shed light on the reasons for these types of divergence from the L2 norm.