[lingtalks] Linguistics Colloquium Monday, April 24th

[Katie McGee]

I'm pleased to announce that our speakers for Monday, April 24th are:

Eunjeong Oh and Maria Luisa Zubizarreta, University of Southern California.

Their talk is titled:

"A case study of structural transfer: the acquisition of English double objects by Korean speakers"

Time: 2-3:30
Place: 2148 McGill (TV Studio)
Date: Monday, April 24th

Abstract below.


Recent research has addressed the question of what grammatical elements of the L1 (first language) affect the acquisition of a second language (L2).  According to the syntactic transfer view, the syntactic properties of a construction in the L1 influence the acquisition of the equivalent construction in the L2 (cf. Schwartz and Sprouse 1994, 1996). On the other hand, according to the morphological transfer view, morphological items in the L1 which lack equivalents in the L2 have a blocking effect on L2 acquisition of related syntactic structures (cf. Montrul 1997, Whong-Barr and Schwartz 2002).  In this talk, we report a study on the acquisition of the English Double Object (DO) constructions by Korean-speaking adult learners of English. More precisely, we compare the acquisition of goal DOs (give someone something) and of ben(efactive) DOs (buy someone something).  In previous work (Oh & Zubizarreta, in press), we argued against the morphological transfer view and, in the present work, we argue in favor of the syntactic (or structural) transfer view.  We first compare the English DO construction and its Korean counterpart. Based on evidence from scrambling and low adverb placement tests, we argue that goal DOs in Korean and English are structurally comparable (the goal DP in both languages is within the scope of V), while ben DOs are structurally distinct in the two languages (unlike the benefactive DP in English, its Korean counterpart is outside the scope of V). Concomitantly, the ben DO in English and its Korean counterpart are shown to be semantically distinct (the Korean ben DO covers a broader range of meaning than the English ben DO). Given the similarities and differences between English and Korean DOs, we hypothesize that the structural comparability between goal DOs in English and Korean leads the L2-English learners to accept goal DOs in English, while the structural incomparability between ben DOs in the two languages leads them to reject ben DOs. As predicted, low proficient L2 English/L1 Koreans treat goal and ben DOs in English fundamentally different. More specifically, the L2-English learners accepted goal DOs more strongly and more often than ben DOs (both licit as well as illicit forms).  We rule out an alternative interpretation based on developmental effects given that the L1 English-speaking children controls treated the goal and ben DOs similarly. We then raise the issue of how best to model the mental process of transfer. We suggest that a model based on competing grammars (cf. Roeper 2000, Yang 2002) is better equipped to model the gradual process of L2-acquisition than a parameter-triggering model that postulates an intermediate grammar for the L2 interlanguage.
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