Chapter 4. The acquisition of object drop in L2 Spanish by German speakers

Abstract

This study investigates the use of null objects in adult L1 German-L2 Spanish speakers. Spanish null objects are licensed under two conditions: (i) semantically, null objects must be [-definite, -specific] (Franco, 1993; Sánchez, 2004), and (ii) syntactically, null objects cannot be generated within an island or Phase Impenetrability in recent minimalist conceptions (Chomsky, 2001), as they involve A’-movement (triggered by [+ Top] feature). Object topic drop in German, on the other hand, does not exhibit the same semantic restrictions as Spanish (Müller & Hulk, 2001). Using a production task, the predictions of two competing models of L2 acquisition are tested. While the Interpretability Hypothesis (e.g., Hawkins & Hattori, 2006; Tsimpli & Dimitrakopoulou, 2007) claims that interpretable features can be fully acquired by adult L2ers, uninterpretable features not instantiated in the L1 are no longer available to adult learners, the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Lardiere, 2009) proposes that L2 speakers transfer features that share the same morpholexical expressions in the L1 and L2, and when they do not, learners must (re)assemble them into new configurations. Unlike the IH, FRH does not predict special difficulties with uninterpretable features. The results from the native speaker group show that they respect the semantic constraints in great measure, but show some variability with the syntactic restrictions by producing (unpredicted) null objects under some of the islands tested. Moreover, the results from the L2ers show sensitivity to the semantic constraint, although it is not as categorical as in the native group. Similarly, L2ers show sensitivity to the syntactic constraints in that they generally prefer explicit objects when these are generated inside islands, but it varies by island (not in the same way as in the NS group) and by speaker (group). In light of our results, we conclude that the results are more in line with the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis. Ultimately, these results show that adult L2ers are able to make distinctions which would not be expected if second language acquisition were fundamentally different from L1 acquisition and UG were inoperative in this population.