Language acquisition at the syntax–semantics interface

Abstract

This chapter investigates the acquisition of the definiteness effect – a semantic constraint on definite post-verbal nouns in existential sentences. The learners are two groups of Arabic-speaking adults: one group advanced in second-language French and the other advanced in third-language English. They completed a context-based acceptability judgment task with correction that tested existential constructions with nine post-verbal noun phrase types. The results in the second-language French group and third-language English group show that the learners are accurate, usually to a nativelike degree, on existentials that respect definiteness restrictions as well as those that violate them, with the exception of strong quantifier noun phrases in the third language. The nature of the post-verbal subject does not determine the pattern or order of acquisition of existentials in advanced second/third language interlanguage. Crosslinguistic differences do not negatively influence acquisition at this level of proficiency, neither do language similarities: the two learner groups wrongly overgeneralise the constraint to list reading existentials where it is suspended, though the three languages are similar on this construction. Eventually, aspects at the syntax–semantics interface are acquirable in non-native language acquisition. Another finding is that second and third-language acquisition processes converge on the same learning outcome.