Typological characteristics of interlanguage: Across native language types and L2 proficiency levels

Abstract

Interlanguage studies have shifted over time from the early qualitative studies to quantitative studies of specific linguistic structures. However, the focus of these studies is usually on a partial aspect of an interlanguage instead of the whole system. Therefore, there remains a paucity of quantitative studies on interlanguage from the typological perspective. Based on a syntactically-tagged corpus that we built, and taking a quantitative linguistic metric, this paper reports the typological change in Chinese interlanguage from two native language backgrounds i.e., English and Japanese. The findings show that (1) the interlanguage of native English speakers and native Japanese speakers have the same preference for SV and VO; (2) interlanguage is a gradual developmental system, and the typological features of native language have an influence on the development of interlanguage typological features; (3) typological markedness between NL and TL affect the development of interlanguage's typological features, and experience with L2 can also influence L2 acquisition; (4) the dependency direction can be universally applicable as an indicator to investigate the overall development of interlanguage typology.