Title: Semantics before Syntax: L2 Knowledgeof anyone by Korean Speaking Learners
Abstract: One of the key issues in second language acquisition in recent years concerns how learners integrate knowledge from different components of the interlanguage grammar. This has brought about new developments such as the interface hypothesis (Sorace & Filiaci (2006); Tsimpli & Sorace (2006), among others) and new debates such as which component of the grammar (if any) is more susceptible to failure in achieving native like knowledge (e.g., Slabakova (2006); Lardiere (2000)). Related to this issue, our paper is a report of a pilot study which investigated how L2 knowledge of syntax and semantics is integrated. Specifically, we tested Korean speaking learners of English on their knowledge of the syntactic and semantic properties of polarity item anyone.2 Anyone is a notoriously complex item in terms of its syntactic and semantic properties, governing its distribution and interpretation, respectively. Briefly, anyone can occur only in a restricted set of environments, and it has differing interpretations depending on the environment in which it occurs. Korean, on the other hand, does not have a direct equivalent of anyone. Instead, Korean utilizes whwords as indefinites and they, or their combination with different particles serve as quantifiers including any. Their distribution is not restricted and their interpretation is not context-dependent. To obtain the different interpretations conveyed by anyone different forms of wh-indefinites are used. The present study aims to tease apart certain syntactic and semantic properties of any, and to investigate whether Korean-speaking learners of English can acquire them, given their contrasting L1 with respect to this quantifier. Our experiment tests hypotheses based on Sprouse’s (2006) Lexical Transfer model of L2 acquisition to investigate, firstly, whether or not Korean-speaking learners can overcome the differences between Korean and English ‘any’ and achieve nativelike intuitions about any in English, and secondly, if they do, whether this is the result of the successful integration of syntactic and semantic knowledge of anyone. This paper is organised as follows. Section 2 gives details of syntactic and semantic properties of the polarity item anyone in English, and its counterparts in Korean. Section 3 sets out the acquisition problem facing Korean-speaking learners with respect to attaining knowledge of anyone in English. Section 4 outlines our L2 acquisition experiment and the findings. Section 5 discusses the findings in the context of the Lexical Transfer model of L2 acquisition. Section 6 concludes by addressing the implications of the present findings for the integration of L2 syntactic and semantic knowledge.
Publication Year: 2010
Publication Date: 2010-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 5
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