Lisa filled water into the cup: The roles of entrenchment, pre-emption and verb semantics in German speakers’ L2 acquisition of English locatives

Abstract

A central challenge for learners of English is discovering verbs’ argument structure privileges; for example which verbs may appear in the figure-locative but not the ground locative construction (e.g. Lisa poured water into the cup/ *Lisa poured the cup with water), which show the opposite pattern (e.g. *Lisa filled water into the cup/ Lisa filled the cup with water), and which may appear in both (e.g. Lisa sprayed water onto the flowers/ Lisa sprayed the flowers with water). This study investigated how adult L1 German learners of L2 English acquire these restrictions, in the face of potential transfer effects from a similar - but subtly different - pattern in the L1. The study took the form of a replication of a previous grammaticality judgment study conducted with native-speaking adults. The findings provide some evidence that, like L1 learners, advanced L2 leaners use the fit between verb and construction semantics to acquire verbs’ argument structure restrictions. Unlike L1 learners, how-ever, they did not display any evidence of spontaneously using surface-based “inference-from-absence” processes such as entrenchment and pre-emption. We end by offering some potential learning and teaching strategies for L2 learners of English.