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Article published In:
Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism
Vol. 14:6 (2024) ► pp.775–808

Telicity judgments in L2 English by L1 Slovak speakers

The role of proficiency and exposure in telicity interpretations

ORCID logo | Universidad del País Vasco/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea (UPV/EHU)
ORCID logo | Universidad del País Vasco/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea (UPV/EHU)
The study investigates the acquisition of telicity in L2 English by L1 Slovak speakers as a function of L2 proficiency (measured by a cloze test score), exposure (operationalized as length of stay in an English-speaking country) and instruction type (monolingual vs. bilingual). Telicity judgments were collected from Slovak learners of L2 English (n = 50) and a control group of American English native speakers (n = 15) in two offline acceptability judgment tasks. Two types of telicity encoding were examined: (1) the contribution of the [±quantized] feature of the object argument to predicate telicity, which involves processes in narrow syntax; and (2) the contribution of adverbial modifiers to telicity interpretations, including coercion contexts, which involve processes of aspectual reinterpretation. Based on previous research, it was hypothesized that the contribution of the [±quantized] feature of the object argument to predicate telicity, which is a syntactic phenomenon, will be easier to acquire than aspectual coercion by means of adverbial modifiers, which relies on pragmatic cues. The results indicate that the most significant predictor of telicity judgments based on syntactic cues is L2 proficiency, while length of stay affects telicity judgments in predicate categories involving coercion contexts.
Keywords: telicity, English, Slovak, L2 proficiency, L2 exposure
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Telicity in English and in Slavic
    • 2.1The syntax of telicity in English and in Slavic
    • 2.2Telicity and adverbial modifiers in English and in Slavic
    • 2.3Interface identification and aspectual coercion
    • 2.4L2 acquisition of telicity
  • 3.Research questions and predictions
  • 4.The present study
    • 4.1Context and participants
    • 4.2Materials and procedure
      • a.Proficiency cloze test
      • b.Acceptability judgment task 1
      • c.Acceptability judgment task 2
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1Acceptability judgment task 1
    • 5.2Acceptability judgment task 2
    • 5.3The role of proficiency and exposure
  • 6.Discussion and conclusions
  • Declaration of conflicting interest
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • Supplemental material
  • References
Published online: 2 June 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.21075.nad
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