Finiteness in children and adults learning Dutch

Light verbs and the acquisition of finiteness and negation in Dutch as a second language

“…2 To account for the complexity of the task in L2 acquisition, several explanations have been proposed that range from UG-based theories concerning the availability of functional categories (Herschensohn 2001;Prévost & White 2000) to functional accounts that stress the importance of scope marking in L2 acquisition (Becker 2005;Jordens & Dimroth 2006).…”

Temporal adverbials, negation and finiteness in Dutch as a second language: A scope-based account

“…(Becker 2005: 287) The observation that beginning L2 learners use pre-verbal negation for reasons of scope marking receives support from a number of other studies involving L2 English and French , L2 Italian (Bernini 2003), and L2 Dutch (Jordens and Dimroth 2006). Adverbials and negation have two important properties in common.…”

“…In order to account for the differential behavior of TAPs on the one hand and TACs and negation on the other, let us consider a study by Jordens and Dimroth (2006) on the acquisition of finiteness by Moroccan and Turkish learners of Dutch. Since this study's outcomes are important for the interpretation of the current data, they are summarized below.…”

“…(Jordens and Dimroth 2006: 176) In both sentences, the temporal adverbial has scope over the entire utterance and marks the topic time or the time for which the utterance makes a claim (see Section 1). The modal verbs wil and moet in (27) and (28) are not yet considered instances of finite verbs at the current stags of acquisition by Jordens and Dimroth (2006). That is, they are not yet marked for finiteness but instead, consitute lexical, 'verb-like' elements that 'are not (yet) to be categorised as expressions of a verbal category' (Jordens and Dimroth 2006: 178).…”

Stepping stones and stumbling blocks. Why negation accelerates and additive particles delay the acquisition of finiteness in German

“…First and (untutored) second language learners are known to develop early learner varieties that lack productive inflectional morphology as well as functional elements (Jordens & Dimroth 2006, Klein & Perdue 1997 2 . The question of how learners move from this lexically-based utterance structure to more target-like organization of sentence grammar is crucial for theories of language acquisition.…”