Tree growth and morphosyntactic triggers in adult SLA

Abstract

In previous papers (Vainikka & Young Scholten, 1994; in press a; and in press b), we proposed that in the acquisition of German, first language learners -- like second language learners -- gradually build up a syntactic structure. That is they posit only lexical projections at first, and then gradually posit the relevant functional projections. In this paper, we examine the role of triggers in second language acquisition. Specifically, we ask: given that in second language, as in first language acquisition, syntactic projections gradually emerge, and given the notion that something 'becomes available' in the input to trigger the reorganization of the L2 grammar, exactly what triggers second language development? We first describe the gradual building up of syntactic structures -- or tree growth -- in each of the stages of L2 acquisition (as described in Vainikka (1993/4)). We then consider what might constitute the relevant triggers of each of the stages of both L1 and L2 acquisitions ...

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 41 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.