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Meaning and Structure in Second Language Acquisition: In honor of Roumyana Slabakova
Edited by Jacee Cho, Michael Iverson, Tiffany Judy, Tania Leal and Elena Shimanskaya
[Studies in Bilingualism 55] 2018
► pp. 67–94

Chapter 3
Another look at L2 acquisition of French clitics and strong pronouns

| West Virginia University

The present study investigated the L2 acquisition of French clitic and strong object pronouns by adult Anglophone learners. While most previous research has focused on French object clitics and acquisition of their placement, the current study reports on two experiments comparing acquisition of clitics with acquisition of strong pronouns, investigating how L2 knowledge of pronominalization is connected to knowledge of argument structure. A grammaticality judgment task with corrections was used to examine learners’ interlanguage in each experiment. Emerging knowledge of clitics appears not to be delayed when compared to knowledge of strong pronouns complements of prepositions. Additionally, acquiring target-like associations between argument structure and pronominalization in L2 French proved as challenging (if not more) as acquiring clitics’ non-canonical sentential position.

Keywords: French, clitics, strong pronouns, argument structure, accusative case
Article outline
  • French and English object pronouns
  • Previous L2 studies
  • Experiment 1
    • Method
    • Materials
    • Participants
    • Results
    • Grammatical sentences
    • Ungrammatical sentences
    • Discussion of Experiment 1
  • Experiment 2
    • Materials
    • Participants
    • Results
    • Discussion of Experiment 2
  • General discussion and conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 16 November 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sibil.55.03shi
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