Typological considerations on second language acquisition

Abstract

In this paper I claim that the functional typological approach may offer fruitful insights to interpret Second Language data. I assume that the range of grammatical choices languages of the world use to code a given semantic relation is potentially available to learner languages and it is thus expected that learner languages show features which, although different from their source or target languages, may find a counterpart in some other languages of the world. To this purpose, I will draw on second language data in the domain of relative clause formation and will also discuss the notion of relative clause construction in typology and acquisition. I also address a terminological and methodological point, namely whether the learning of the grammatical structures of a target language may be compared to grammaticalization as a diachronic process concerning the historical development of grammatical categories. Despite clear differences of conditions, I will nonetheless argue that both types of grammaticalization may help to discover general properties of language change.