Chapter 7. The entrenchment of semi-schematic time constructions by German foreign language learners of Swedish

Abstract

This chapter investigates the entrenchment of semi-schematic time constructions by a group of foreign language learners of Swedish. Results from a phrasal decision experiment with 30 German speaking learners of Swedish show that the learners of Swedish process these constructions significantly slower, compared to an L1 control group, and also recognize them as time expressions to a lesser extent. Additionally, we conduct an explorative corpus study to shed some light on the role of previously acquired languages for the entrenchment of the investigated constructions. The results from the comparison of the Swedish and German corpora show no clear indication of cross-linguistic differences in usage that might explain the L2 participants’ behavior, but rather some interesting similarities, which we discuss in relation to the experimental findings.