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Why Does the Production of Some Learners Not Grammaticalize?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2008

Clive Perdue  and
Wolfgang Klein
Clive Perdue
Affiliation:
Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Wolfgang Klein
Affiliation:
Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
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Abstract

In this paper we follow two beginning learners of English, Andrea and Santo, over a period of 2 years as they develop means to structure the declarative utterances they produce in various production tasks, and then we look at the following problem: In the early stages of acquisition, both learners develop a common learner variety; during these stages, we see a picture of two learner varieties developing similar regularities determined by the minimal requirements of the tasks we examine. Andrea subsequently develops further morphosyntactic means to achieve greater cohesion in his discourse. But Santo does not. Although we can identify contexts where the grammaticalization of Andrea's production allows him to go beyond the initial constraints of his variety, it is much more difficult to ascertain why Santo, faced with the same constraints in the same contexts, does not follow this path. Some lines of investigation into this problem are then suggested.

Type
Articles
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 14 , Issue 3 , September 1992 , pp. 259 - 272
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

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