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La finitude chez les apprenants et les locuteurs natifs de l'allemand| old_uid | 2667 |
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| title | La finitude chez les apprenants et les locuteurs natifs de l'allemand |
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| start_date | 2007/04/23 |
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| schedule | 10h-12h |
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| online | no |
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| summary | According to a functional analysis of finiteness (Klein, 1998), the finite verb form in sentence (1) establishes the linking between the predicate and the topic of the sentence and thereby marks an assertion.
(1) Peter schreibt einen Brief.
‘Peter writes a letter’.
However, second language learners who acquire German in an immersion setting have been shown to first form morphologically and syntactically infinite sentences, such as (2) (Dimroth et al., 2003).
(2) Peter einen Brief schreiben
‘Peter a letter write‘.
Dimroth et al. (2003) claim that this reflects a system of structuring utterances and of expressing assertions that is different from the target system: utterances contain a topic-part and a predicate-part, and not morphosyntactic finiteness, but the pure juxtaposition of these two parts marks assertions.
In this presentation, I'm going to discuss comprehension experiments which were designed to test this claim. They were conducted with beginning and intermediate Turkish learners of and with a control group of native speakers of German.
It was found that beginning learners who have an infinite utterance structure in their production also process these types of sentences more easily and interpret them as marking assertions, whereas native speakers of German process finite sentences more easily and often don’t interpret infinite sentences as marking assertions. Finally, learners in an intermediate stage who already construct finite utterances in their production were found to still process infinite structures more
easily, but to a lesser degree than the less advanced group.
These results show that investigating comprehension can lend additional support to the model by Dimroth et al. (2003), and shed more light on how the transition from the infinite to the finite stage takes place. |
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| responsibles | Aroui |
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