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THE ROLE OF IS IN THE ACQUISITIONOF FINITENESS BY ADULT TURKISH LEARNERS OF DUTCH

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 2009

Ineke van de Craats
Ineke van de Craats*
Affiliation:
Radboud University Nijmegen
*
*Address correspondence to: Ineke vande Craats, Department of Linguistics, Radboud University Nijmegen, PO Box 9103,6500 HD Nijmegen, The Netherlands; e-mail: I.v.d.Craats@let.ru.nl.
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Abstract

This article deals with the interlanguage of adult second language (L2) learnersacquiring finiteness. Due to the inaccessibility of bound inflectionalmorphology, learners use free morphology to mark a syntactic relationship aswell as person and number features separately from the thematic verb, expressedby a pattern like the man is go. Results from longitudinally collectedproduction data of Turkish learners of Dutch are reported and present evidencefor the claim that (a) verb movement and production of inflectional morphologydevelop separately in various developmental steps and (b) finite forms innonfinite contexts (and vice versa) are by-products of this development.Moreover, all is-patterns in differentGermanic languages can be explained by the application of minimalist theory ofverb movement and recent views on morphology. Is-patterns that correspond neither to the first language nor to theL2—a poverty-of-the-stimulus problem—turn out to bepossible in other languages of the world and are constrained by UniversalGrammar.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 31 , Issue 1 , March 2009 , pp. 59 - 92
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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