Verb Placement in L2 Dutch

Abstract

In this paper we report on the acquisition of verb placement in L2 Dutch by one Moroccan and one Turkish subject. The data originate from a three-year lon-gitudinal research project on spontaneous second language acquisition by adult immigrants which was financed by the European Science Foundation. After describing the routes the two L2 Dutch learners followed in their acquisition of verb placement, we compare our results with those obtained in the project entitled "Zweitspracherwerb italienischer und spanischer Arbeiter" on the acquisition of L2 German word order (the ZISA project). As the results of this project are relevant to our research in view of the structural similarities between Dutch and German, we began by trying to establish whether our data could be described in terms of the developmental sequence in the acquisition of word order in L2 German proposed by the ZISA group. The conclusion is that the implicational scale proposed by the ZISA group does not emerge from the data from our subjects. Neither can their acquisition of verb placement in L2 Dutch be explained in terms of the processing strategies suggested by the ZISA researchers. Instead we would like to suggest that the learners' preferences are attributable to the combined influence of source and target languages.