This thesis investigates the L2 acquisition of English root and deverbal noun-noun compounds (e.g. car company, car exporter) by Greek adults, within the theoretical framework of Minimalism (Chomsky 1995). Greek and English compounds have the same structure in that they are right-headed, with the non-head noun (NHN) in both of them being a stem, not a word. However, in Greek there is phonological difference between stem and word, unlike in English.
The participants (30 intermediate + 30 advanced Greeks and 20 native speakers of English) completed four tasks: picture-naming, grammaticality judgements, referentiality judgements and interpretations. The targeted items were novel or non-usualized noun-noun compounds.
Results show that learners differ significantly from the natives as to the production/acceptance of plural and genitive NHN, the order between NHN and head-noun and the (im)possibility of referring separately to the NHN in compounds. Moreover, the interlanguage forms reveal effects of L1 parametric options regarding noun modification in the phrasal domain, such as a) the strong (overt) number agreement between the DP members, b) the strong D feature of the functional category P which results in the overt marking of the NHN with the genitive case when the head is a root noun and c) the ability of deverbal nominals to assign genitive case to their complement nouns.
Additionally, results from the very advanced learners indicate that parameter resetting may not be feasible in adult L2 learning when it concerns features which are non-interpretable at LF. Still, the structure of the L2 compounds is compatible with Universal Grammar principles. Last, the dissociation between regular and irregular morphology is confirmed in the acquisition of compounds, but there is no conclusive evidence as to whether nativist or connectionist theories can better account for this dissociation.
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