Typology and Second Language Acquisition

461 Pages·2002·13.63 MB·English

by  Anna Giacalone Ramat (ed.)

Typology and Second Language Acquisition
W
DE
G
Empirical Approaches
to Language Typology
26
Editors
Georg Bossong
Bernard Comrie
Yaron Matras
Mouton de Gruyter
Berlin · New York
Typology and Second Language
Acquisition
edited by
Anna Giacalone Ramat
Mouton de Gruyter
Berlin · New York 2003
Mouton de Gruyter (formerly Mouton, The Hague)
is a Division of Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin.
© Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines of the
ANSI to ensure permanence and durability.
Library of Congress — Cataloging-in-Publication-Data
Typology and second language acquisition / edited by Anna Giacalone
Ramat.
p. cm. - (Empirical approaches to language typology ; 26)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 3 11 017359 X
1. Second language acquisition. 2. Typology (Linguistics). I. Giacalone
Ramat, Anna, 1937— II. Series.
P118.2.T96 2002
418-dc21
2002015011
ISBN 3 11 017359 X
Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek
Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;
detailed bibliographic data is available in the Internet at <http://dnb.ddb.de>.
© Copyright 2002 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, 10785 Berlin.
All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may
be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publisher.
Printed in Germany.
Contents
Introduction 1
Anna Giacalone Ramat
Typology and language acquisition: the case of relative
clauses 19
Bernard Comrie
Relative clauses in early bilingual development: Transfer and
universals 39
Stephen Matthews and Virginia Yip
Learner varieties and language types. The case of indefinite
pronouns in non-native Italian 83
Giuliano Bernini
Adnominal possession: combining typological and second
language perspectives 125
Björn Hammarberg and Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm
Gerunds as optional categories in second language learning 181
Anna Giacalone Ramat
Iconicity and finiteness in the development of early grammar
in French as L2 and in French-based Creoles 221
Daniel Veronique
Lexicalisation of aspectual structures in English and Japanese 267
Yasuhiro Shirai and Yumiko Nishi
vi Contents
Using nouns for reference maintenance: A seeming
contradiction in L2 discourse 291
Henriette Hendricks
Crosslinguistic comparison and second language acquisition:
an approach to Topic and Left-detachment constructions from
the perspective of spoken language 327
Rosanna Sornicola
Typology and information organisation: perspective taking
and language-specific effects in the construal of events 365
Mary Carroll and Christiane von Stutterheim
Typological comparison and interlanguage phonology: maps
or gaps between typology and language learning of sound
systems? 403
Stefania Giannini
Index of subjects 441
Index of authors 447
List of contributors 453
Introduction
Anna Giacalone Ramat
This book* brings together two apparently distant sub-fields of lin-
guistics under the assumption that their interaction can enrich our
understanding of both.
Typological comparison and Universal research ("different facets
of a single research endeavour", Comrie 1989: 33) aim to establish
limits within human language. Taking this aspect into consideration,
we may state that a basic connotation of typology is cross-linguistic
comparison: implicational universals which are crucial in order to
create a typology of the languages of the world cannot be discovered
or verified by observing only a single language (Croft 1990: 1).
Second language acquisition (SLA) research aims to describe or-
ganisational principles of learner varieties (or "interlanguages"), that
is those dynamic systems that learners of a second language build
during the acquisition process. Another aim is to account for greater
or lesser difficulties encountered in acquiring second language con-
structions. The comparison of first language (LI) and second lan-
guage (L2) structures has traditionally been considered to be a
measure of learning difficulty. The need for comparison has been
recognised since the times of the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis
(Lado 1954), which operated within a structuralist theory of lan-
guage which is today inadequate.
Clearly both objectives of SLA need theoretical grounding from
general linguistics (Huebner and Ferguson 1991) which can be pro-
vided both by the formal generative and the functional-typological
framework. A number of recent studies have applied the Principles
and Parameters model to SLA and have made specific predictions on
how language acquisition should proceed. We will not discuss ex-
tensively here the Universal Grammar approach to SLA nor the
2 Anna Giacalone Ramat
question of access to Universal Grammar in L2 acquisition, since the
approach proposed in this volume is mainly oriented toward the in-
tegration of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic levels.
The functional-typological approach, called "functional" in that it
seeks to explain language structure in terms of language function, is
primarily associated with linguists such as Talmy Givon, Paul Hop-
per, John Haiman and has profited from the debate on Universals
based on Greenberg (1966). Potentially, functional typology has a
large number of suggestions which may be useful for SLA and we
intend to explore such possible suggestions in this book. We will
show that notions which are current in functional typology, such as
markedness or prototypicality, are relevant to SLA in order give a
better account of L2-learner data. The notion of implicational hierar-
chy, which can account for the presence of a certain feature on the
basis of the presence of another feature in the same learner variety,
may lead to a number of predictions regarding acquisition. Devel-
opmental stages of acquisition may be documented and checked:
e.g. it was found that a learner of Italian who has developed the im-
perfect will have developed the past participle and the present (Gia-
calone Ramat 1990, 1992).
It has also been claimed (Klein 1991) that second language ac-
quisition research can contribute to linguistic theory: although there
are relatively few instances in which it has been proposed that SLA
facts may have a bearing on general linguistic theory (Eckman 1993:
ix), there is anyway the expectation that insights on language nature
and human cognition in general can be gained by investigating the
process of acquisition (Comrie, this volume).
In the past decades, a few seminal papers (Comrie 1984, Hawkins
1987) have pointed out the relevance of implicational hierarchies
found in typological studies for second language research. On the
other hand, second language researchers have only considered a few
typological universals in their studies. This is especially the case of
the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy (Keenan and Comrie 1977,
Comrie 1989), which has proved to be of particular interest for the
study of relative clauses in second language acquisition (Gass 1979,
etc.) both in past and present studies, as shown in this book. Another
Introduction 3
proposal which brings together typological universals and SLA was
put forward by Eckman (1977, 1985) who used the notion of typo-
logical markedness to predict the areas of difficulty that a L2 learner
is likely to find {Markedness Differential Hypothesis) and to analyse
transfer phenomena in a more systematic manner with respect to
Contrastive Analysis, thus obtaining a stronger predictive power
(Braidi 1999: 86).
In recent years the amount of research on comparative typology
has led to reveal regularities and to formulate new constraints upon
variation for a broader range of phenomena. For the languages of
Europe the series of volumes of EUROTYP (Mouton de Gruyter
1998-) marks the outcome of a collaborative effort to outline a gen-
eral profile and the main typological features of a "European" area.
A wide range of grammatical structures and categories has been ex-
amined: adverbial clauses, word order relations, tense and aspect
marking, subordination. As the amount of typological research in-
creased, a growing interest arose for the implications that findings in
the typological field might have on acquisition: in this volume some
of the issues mentioned above are discussed on the basis of empiri-
cal evidence from second languages.
The problem of explanations of language universals has been
dealt with in several ways. Functional explanations typically refer to
principles external to the linguistic system itself, which are based on
pragmatic constraints or cognitive principles (Croft 1990) or on
economy/iconicity conflicts (Haiman 1985). For instance, the typo-
logical patterns discovered for relative clause formation have been
correlated with factors found outside the grammatical structure:
Keenan and Comrie (1977) refer to psychological ease of perception
as an independently testable factor. Acquisitional linguistics also
tries to relate generalisations about the development of learners'
grammar to external factors such as the learners' communicative
needs or the principles of discourse organisation (Klein and Perdue
1992).
Investigations carried out within the functional-typological ap-
proach follow an inductive methodology. Analogously, several pa-
pers in this volume share a common methodology in treating learn-