Against Full Transfer - evidence from Swedish learners of German

The role of the first language in the acquisition of a second language is an important issue in second language acquisition research and different stands have been taken during the past decades. From the perspective of Universal Grammar, Schwartz & Sprouse 1994, 1996 have proposed a Full Transfer/Full Access model according to which the final state of L1 acquisition is used as the initial state of L2 acquisition. They base their argument on the acquisition of German by Turkish learners. In this paper, it will be argued that stuctures that look as transfer on the surface are parts of universal developmental stages. The assumption is that syntactic rules are not transferable, but the L2 learners are building a new grammar from the lexicon. The order of appearance of syntactic structures can be predicted by Pienemann’s Processability Theory. Evidence from Swedish learners show that the German syntactical rules emerge in the same implicational order as in the Turkish learners. The fact that the Swedish learners, unlike the Turkish learners, have the same type of subject-verb inversion in their native languages does not change the order of the sequence (Less)

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