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Part of
Focus on Additivity: Adverbial modifiers in Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages
Edited by Anna-Maria De Cesare and Cecilia Andorno
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 278] 2017
► pp. 237–264

Chapter 8
Additive focus particles in German-speaking learners of Italian as L2

| Goethe Universität, Frankfurt am Main

German-speaking learners of Italian as L2 often misplace the additive focalizer anche (‘also, too’) in the sentence and therefore fail at conveying the intended meaning. The present study investigates mistakes through a multiple-choice task in which participants choose the word order that sounds the most correct among alternatives that only differ in the positioning of anche. Short dialogues force the interpretation towards either an object-, a predicate- or a subject scope. Data shows that learners master the use of additive focalizers in structures with scope on the subject, rather than in those with scope either on the predicate or on the object. Moreover, learners tend to transfer the position of additive focalizers in the sentence from their L1, independent of the scope to be realized.

Keywords: additive focalizers, L2 acquisition, transfer, error analysis
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Additive focalizers
    • 2.1Additive focalizers: Italian anche and German auch
    • 2.2A syntactic analysis
  • 3.Additive focalizers in L2 acquisition
  • 4.The experimental study
    • 4.1Material
    • 4.2Participants
    • 4.3Procedure
    • 4.4Scoring
    • 4.5Results
      • 4.5.1Individual analysis
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1Controls
    • 5.2L2 learners: Group analysis
    • 5.3L2 learners: Individual analysis
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 24 August 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.278.08cal
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