Abstract for Alison Gabriele's talk

The interaction of input and transfer in the L2 acquisition of aspect
Alison Gabriele (CUNY Graduate Center)
April 12, 2005 (Tuesday)
6:30 PM - 8:00 PM; Room 7102, The CUNY Graduate Center

Research on adult second language (L2) acquisition has only recently begun to explore questions of how meaning is acquired, examining whether learners assign target-like interpretations to sentences in a second language. This study investigates the acquisition of aspectual knowledge in both L2 English and L2 Japanese learners. The focus is on the acquisition of the semantics of the form that marks the progressive in the two languages. The two forms, be+ing in English and te-iru in Japanese, interact differently with the lexical semantics of the verb to which they attach. In English, the progressive denotes an ongoing interpretation regardless of verb type. In Japanese, achievement predicates such as 'die' are incompatible with a progressive interpretation, allowing only for a resultative interpretation of V+te-iru (McClure, 1995; Ogihara, 1998, 1999).

Results of an interpretation task targeting this crosslinguistic difference indicate that L2 learners of both English and Japanese can acquire an L2 interpretation that is not present in the native language, demonstrating the positive role of robust and consistent input. However, even learners who have reached very high levels of proficiency are still unable to rule out an interpretation that is available in the native language but not in the second language. In light of these findings, I consider two issues: the role of positive and negative evidence in L2 acquisition (Schwartz and Gubala-Ryzak, 1992; White, 1991, 1992) and the possibility that even very advanced L2 grammars exhibit optionality due to L1 influence (Sorace, 1999, 2003).