An empirical L2 perspective on possessives: German/Norwegian

Abstract

The present paper reports on two empirical studies concerning the acquisition of possessive systems by L2 learners of Norwegian and German respectively. The first study investigates comprehension and production in written translation while the second study is a set of offline experiments testing the interpretation of possessives by both native speakers and German learners of Norwegian. Norwegian distinguishes between reflexive and irreflexive possessives, while German does not. The reflexive stem form si* is phonologically similar to German sein*, but may correspond to ihr*, a feminine or plural possessor, as well. These differences make the acquisition of Norwegian and of German as a foreign language a complex procedure of restructuring both at the phonological and the grammatical level. Results of the study indicate that the only partly overlapping forms and structural constraints on possessives in the two languages are cognitively demanding in L2 acquisition and subject to transfer effects.

Possessive parasitter eller parasittiske possessiver?

“…Dermed skulle det vaere duket for både positiv og negativ fonologisk/ortografisk transfer under tolkningen av Ln son/sa/ses; og siden de tyske og norske s-possessiver også innbyrdes er halv-falske venner (jf. Pitz et al 2017), ville vi vente at slik transfer arter seg noe forskjellig for FR-innlaerere med hhv. norsk og tysk morsmål.…”

An L2 perspective on possessives: Contrasts and their possible consequences

“…Our paper presents the cross-linguistic background and the basic objectives of L2-oriented research on adnominal possessives that may shed new light on this issue. Some preliminary empirical results are presented by Pitz et al (2017), Helland (2017) and Behrens (2017). 2 From a cognitive point of view, possessives seem more complicated than ordinary pronouns due to the fact that they are not only anaphoric (third person alone) or deictic but at the same time relational expressions: An anaphoric adnominal third person possessive like an ordinary anaphoric pronoun demands an antecedent DP; as a determiner or modifier (see section [3.1]) within a DP, it anchors the referent of its host DP to the referent of the antecedent DP by a relation of possession in a more or less broad sense (see references above), where the antecedent DP denotes the 'owner' (the possessor) and the host DP the 'owned' entity (the possessum).…”

“…As far as Norwegian versus German and French is concerned, see (Pitz et al 2017) and Helland (2017) for more detailed discussions.…”

“…Consequently, one might expect form-based priming between the two languages to be more frequent in translation tasks than in non-translational L2 production or comprehension; cf. Pitz et al (2017), Helland (2017 and Behrens (2017). 24 [23] We prefer the term process since processing, as used psycholinguistic literature, seems to used partly in a very general sense but also more specifically for the 'decoding' (comprehension) process.…”

“…In a similar vein, Norwegian and Like Norwegian Ge2 learners, Russian Ge2 learners -even when aware of the systematic differences -may tend to associate sein* with their native reflexive s-possessive (si* and svoj*, respectively), resulting in a skewed distribution of error types in Ge2 production (sein* used instead of correct locally bound ihr* more often than vice versa) and Ge2 comprehension (sein* more often than ihr* erroneously understood as locally bound, i.e. interpreted reflexively); for No1/Ge2 see Pitz et al (2017).…”