The early stages in adult L2 syntax: additional evidence from Romance speakers

Abstract

Vainikka and Young-Scholten (1994) propose an analysis of the acquisition of German by adult Korean and Turkish speakers based on the Weak Continuity account of L1 acquisition. They claim that L2 acquisition initially involves a bare VP whose (final) headedness is transferred from the learner's L1, with functional projections evolving entirely on the basis of the interaction of X'- Theory with the input. In this article, we extend this account to data from Italian and Spanish speakers learning German. Our analysis reveals that these learners initially posit a bare VP whose (initial) headedness is transferred from their native languages but, while still at the bare VP stage, they adopt the head-final VP of German. At this bare VP stage the morphological elements incompatible with the VP are not attested (e.g., auxiliary verbs, verbs marked for agreement and obligatory subjects). At the next stage of acquisition, simi lar to what Vainikka and Young-Scholten observed for the Korean and Turkish speakers, the Italian and Spanish speakers posit a head-initial func tional projection. This projection further resembles the first functional projec tion observed in the acquisition of German by children (Clahsen, 1991) and involves optional verb-raising and the emergence of elements which typically appear in INFL (auxiliaries, modals) and in Spec (IP) (obligatory subjects). We conclude that child L1 learners and adult L2 learners build up syntactic structure in much the same manner and propose that the Weak Continuity approach accounts for all instances of syntactic acquisition.