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Pedagogical Linguistics: Online-First Articles

Collostructional transfer effects in Turkish learners of English

The intransitive-unaccusative construction

ORCID logo | FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg

Second language acquisition studies have mainly considered transfer between two or more languages as a binary setting, it either happens or does not. However, research emerging out of usage-based approaches show that such transfer effects might be more gradient than ever thought before (e.g., Goschler & Stefanowitsch, 2019). Investigating a construction that has been reported to pose problems such as overpassivization to L2 English learners, i.e., unaccusatives, this study aims to trace gradient transfer effects between Turkish and English in the intransitive-unaccusative construction in Turkish learners of English. Following Goschler and Stefanowitsch’s (2019) method to analyze, extract experimental items from English and Turkish corpora, and experiment with collostructional transfer effects, the study revealed similar findings. Findings suggest that learners are likely to transfer strongly entrenched L1 items into the L2 even at advanced proficiency levels. Interestingly, when the item is weakly entrenched in L1, speakers attune to the input in L2 with growing proficiency. Furthermore, proficiency or experience helps with preempting non-optimal constructional combinations. Pedagogically, the study suggests that collo-profiles may help teachers and students with mitigating unconventional item-construction combinations at advanced levels.

Keywords: transfer effects, collostructions, construction grammar, unaccusative, Turkish
Article outline
  • 1.L1-L2 transfer: Usage-based perspectives
  • 2.L2 constructions and unaccusativity
  • 3.Methodology
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Overall means of grammaticality
    • 4.2Statistical analysis: ANOVA
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1Gradient transfer effects: An overview
    • 5.2When proficiency is included
    • 5.3Pedagogical implications
      • 5.3.1Explicit teaching of the construction
      • 5.3.2Fostering learning of the construction with collo-profiles
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 30 January 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pl.22019.ged
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