The gradual expansion of functional categories in L2 acquisition: Evidence from a learner corpus study

초록

Linguistic Research 41(Special Edition): 209-239. The study examines how child L2 learners acquire various functional categories and gain access to the syntactic and semantic features encoded in them. The present research investigated child L2 learners' written production of two target structures, collected from a learner corpus including six proficiency levels (age: 8-13), and specifically compared their acquisition of sentential negation and question formation. The results of the study indicate that child L2 learners acquire certain structures at different rates and with varying degrees of linguistic complexity. The analysis of the learner corpus showed that the acquisition of sentential negation and question formation is asynchronous, while the functional categories of NegP, TP, and CP are acquired in a specific sequence. Moreover, the study found that the complexity of the grammatical representations and derivations affects the gradual expansion of functional categories in L2 grammar. In sum, the findings demonstrate that the order in which L2 learners acquire two distinct constructions has implications for both the impact of the distinct linguistic complexity and the gradual development of various functional categories, from a relatively simple to a more complex level.

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