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Article published In:
ITL - International Journal of Applied Linguistics
Vol. 168:2 (2017) ► pp.203–247

Morphological variability in L2 Italian

The imperative default hypothesis

| Stockholm University
Key accounts of morphological variability in L2 acquisition posit either deficits in the representation of abstract morphosyntactic features or the mapping between morpho-phonological forms and syntactic features due to computational limitations. This study extends previous research to L2 Italian, a richly inflected language. The production and grammatical intuitions of suppletive and affixal verb inflection were elicited from a cross-section of instructed adult L2 learners with L1 Spanish and L1 English. Although a clear production-intuition gap was found, supporting computational views, a strong regularity in the degree of variability across test conditions, L1s, and proficiency levels was also attested, supporting representational accounts. The findings suggest morphological development in L2 Italian is consistent with structure-building models that assume no L1 transfer of functional features. Imperative verb forms in L2 Italian are proposed as defaults equivalent to the bare verb forms of L2 English and non-finite defaults of L2 French and German.
Keywords: inflection, Italian, variability, imperative, second language acquisition
Article outline
  • 1.Inflection in Italian, Spanish, and English
    • 1.1Feature strength and verb-raising
    • 1.2Morphological richness
  • 2.Morphological variability in L2 development
    • 2.1Representational views of L2 morphology
    • 2.2Computational views of L2 morphology
    • 2.3Morphological omission in L2 English
    • 2.4Morphological misuse in L2 Spanish
  • 3.The present study
  • 4.Method
    • 4.1Participants
    • 4.2Proficiency test
    • 4.3Timed gap-fill
      • Materials
      • 4.3.2Procedure
    • 4.4Timed sentence-completion
      • 4.4.1Materials
      • 4.4.2Procedure
    • 4.5Untimed grammaticality judgment test
      • 4.5.1Materials
      • 4.5.2Procedure
    • 4.6Controlled oral task
      • 4.6.1Materials
      • 4.6.2Procedure
    • 4.7Scoring and analysis
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1Accuracy of inflection
      • 5.1.1Gap fill
      • 5.1.2Sentence completion
        • GJT
      • 5.1.3Oral task
    • 5.2Morphological variability
  • 6.Discussion
    • 6.1Main findings
    • 6.2The imperative default hypothesis
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 30 December 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/itl.16010.rom
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