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Title:
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At the same time ... The expression of simultaneity in learner varieties
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Author:
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Barbara Schmiedtová
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Email:
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click here to access email
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Homepage:
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http://www.mpi.nl/world/persons/profession/barbsch2.html
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Degree Awarded:
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Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
, Doctoral Program of the Max-Planck Society
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Degree Date:
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2004
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Linguistic Subfield(s):
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Psycholinguistics
Semantics
Language Acquisition
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Subject Language(s):
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Czech
English
German, Standard
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Director(s):
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Wolfgang Klein
Stephen Levinson
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Abstract:
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This dissertation investigates the development of temporality by adult English and German learners of Czech, focusing specifically on the expression of simultaneity. In expressing simultaneity, all three languages employ various types of temporal adverbials, including temporal subordinate clauses and phase verb constructions. However only Czech and English make use of grammaticalized aspect to mark simultaneity. But how aspectual distinctions are morphologically marked in Czech differs considerably from English. This distribution of crosslinguistic differences allows closer inspection of the role of aspect in second language acquisition across different source languages. The focal research questions answered here are:
(i) How do native speakers of the three languages express simultaneity?
(ii) How do English and German learners express simultaneity in the target language Czech? (iii) How do the learner groups differ from each other and from native speakers of the target language?
I show that the grammatical system of the source language determines whether and how easily certain linguistic features of the target language will be acquired. In the expression of simultaneity two features influence the choice of the strategies learners employ: One is the presence or absence of grammaticalized aspect and the other is the position in the source language of a particular morpheme carrying aspectual meaning.
The latter is a perceptual saliency effect (formulated as 'The Perceptual Saliency Hypothesis') that appears to also be driven by the respective source language. However, strong typological similarities between the source and the target language (e.g. between English and Czech) can also be misleading for learners at higher proficiency levels. That is, due to the strong resemblance of the first and the second languages, English learners stay attached to their initial hypothesis about the target language grammar. German learners, on the other hand, who must assume from the beginning that there are more differences than similarities between the first and the second language, are able to revise their initial hypothesis and make less source language biased choices at later stages of acquisition.
In light of these findings it is proposed that the value of the typological similarity between a source and a target language follows the law of diminishing returns.
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