The acquisition of Hindi split-ergativity and differential object marking by Dutch L1 speakers: systematicity and variation

Abstract

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.