This article explores a grammatical structure - differential object marking (DOM) - that is particularly difficult for L2 learners to acquire. DOM is a phenomenon in which some direct objects are morphologically marked and others are not. In Hindi, animate direct objects are always marked with the objective case marker ko, whereas specific direct objects are only optionally marked with ko. Inanimate and non-specific direct objects are never marked with ko and take the unmarked nominative form. DOM in Hindi has been found to pose a problem to heritage speakers of Hindi. The present study investigates whether similar difficulties exist for foreign language learners. A cross-sectional study was conducted among 31 foreign language learners of Hindi completing an oral production task. The results suggest that the learners do not have difficulties with the concept of DOM in itself – they know that not every direct object needs to be marked –, but rather with the variable conditions under which DOM occurs. The study defines five developmental profiles, which reflect a gradual accumulation of contexts appropriately marked with the objective case
This chapter proposes a developmental sequence for the L2 acquisition of two linguistic phenomena in Hindi, namely split ergativity and differential object marking. The proposal builds on the universal key mechanisms of Processability Theory, i.e., the transfer of grammatical information between constituents (i.e., so-called ‘feature unification’) and the linking of arguments and constituents to grammatical functions (so-called ‘a-to-f mappings’ or ‘c-to-f mappings’), which have been successful in explaining the acquisition of case markers cross-linguistically, i.e., in L2 German, L2 Russian, and L2 Serbian. In addition, the proposal will build on newer developments within PT, which give greater weight to semantic considerations, as evident from a study on differential object marking in L2 Spanish. The present chapter will argue for a development that starts with emerging mappings between prototypical semantic characteristics of thematic roles and case marking, and that evolves to eventual associations of these mappings with grammatical functions.
We investigated the acquisition of Hindi split ergativity (zero or ne-marking) and Hindi Differential Object Marking (zero or ko-marking) by L1 speakers of Dutch. Both grammatical This is the Accepted Author Manuscript. The article is currently accepted for publication in Language Acquisition. DOI will be added upon publication of the article.phenomena are conditioned by multiple syntactic and semantic features. On a descriptive level, the study aims to examine when and how Dutch-speaking learners acquire and apply the conditional features associated with ne-and ko-marking in Hindi as a foreign language (HFL). A specific learner corpus was created based on a picture description task that elicited semispontaneous oral production data from 15 Dutch-speaking learners of Hindi, from four crosssectional stages of the Hindi course trajectory. We annotated the corpus data for multiple features associated with ne-and ko-marking. Using a mixed-effects logistic regression analysis, we found an increase in the use and accuracy of each case marker over the different years of study, but individual learner profile analyses revealed considerable intersubject differences in learner behaviour. We argue that the developmental stages for the emergence of ne-and komarking are in line with predictions based on Processability Theory (Pienemann 1998). We additionally include mastery level analysis to account for a combined perspective on language development (Hulstijn 2015). Our findings reveal that that HFL learners reach higher mastery levels for split ergativity than for DOM, even though DOM (ko-marking) emerges before split ergativity (ne-marking). We conclude that developmental stages and between-learner variation are not mutually exclusive.
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