TY - JOUR
T1 - Genericity distinctions and the interpretation of determiners in L2 acquisition
AU - Ionin, Tania
AU - Montrul, Silvina
AU - Kim, Ji Hye
AU - Philippov, Vadim
N1 - Funding Information:
The research reported here was partially supported by a University of Illinois Campus Research Board grant to Tania Ionin and Silvina Montrul. We thank our research assistants Justin Davidson and Gretchen Shaw for help with instrument design and participant testing in the main study. We are grateful to Soondo Baek, Eunice Chung, Eunah Kim, and James Yoon for information and judgments about generics in Korean. Big thanks to Soondo Baek and Eunah Kim for implementing and administering the pilot study on Korean, and to Tatiana Luchkina for assistance with the pilot study on Russian. We are grateful to the audience of the 34th BUCLD (November 2009), where an earlier version of this work was presented, and to Donna Lardiere, Diane Lillo-Martin, and three anonymous Language Acquisition reviewers for comments on earlier versions of this article. Any remaining errors are our own.
PY - 2011/10
Y1 - 2011/10
N2 - English uses three types of generic NPs: bare plurals (Lions are dangerous), definite singulars (The lion is dangerous), and indefinite singulars (A lion is dangerous). These three NP types are not interchangeable: definite singulars and bare plurals can have generic reference at the NP- level, while indefinite singulars are compatible only with sentence-level genericity. This study investigates whether L1-Russian and L1-Korean L2-English learners, whose article-less L1s do not morphologically encode the distinction between the two types of genericity, can distinguish between the different types of English generics. The results of a written acceptability judgment task with intermediate/advanced L2-learners showed that the learners exhibited sensitivity to the two types of genericity. They were target-like on their interpretation of bare plural and indefinite singular generics, but had not acquired the interpretation of definite singular generics. Theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.
AB - English uses three types of generic NPs: bare plurals (Lions are dangerous), definite singulars (The lion is dangerous), and indefinite singulars (A lion is dangerous). These three NP types are not interchangeable: definite singulars and bare plurals can have generic reference at the NP- level, while indefinite singulars are compatible only with sentence-level genericity. This study investigates whether L1-Russian and L1-Korean L2-English learners, whose article-less L1s do not morphologically encode the distinction between the two types of genericity, can distinguish between the different types of English generics. The results of a written acceptability judgment task with intermediate/advanced L2-learners showed that the learners exhibited sensitivity to the two types of genericity. They were target-like on their interpretation of bare plural and indefinite singular generics, but had not acquired the interpretation of definite singular generics. Theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=80053198381&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=80053198381&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/10489223.2011.610264
DO - 10.1080/10489223.2011.610264
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:80053198381
SN - 1048-9223
VL - 18
SP - 242
EP - 280
JO - Language Acquisition
JF - Language Acquisition
IS - 4
ER -