Markedness and Second Language Acquisition

In this paper, various definitions of markedness are discussed, including the difference in the assumptions underlying psychological and linguistic approaches to markedness. It is proposed that if one adopts a definition derived from theories of language learnability, then the second language learner's prior linguistic experience may predispose him or her towards transferring marked structures from the first language to the second, contrary to usual assumptions in the literature that suggest that second language learners will avoid marked forms. To test this hypothesis, adult and child learners of French as a second language were tested using grammaticality judgment tasks on two marked structures, preposition stranding and the double object construction, which are grammatical in English but ungrammatical in French, to see if they would accept French versions of these structures. It was found that the second language learners did not accept preposition stranding in French but did accept the double object construction, suggesting that transfer takes place only with one of the two marked structures. In addition, the children took tests on these structures in their native language to see if they perceived them as in any sense psycholinguistically marked. Results show that they do not treat marked and unmarked structures differently in the native language. It is suggested that the concept of markedness may cover a range of phenomena that need to be further clarified and investigated.

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