l3 acquisition of strongarticlesstrong in german by native japanese.pdfVIP

L3 Acquisition of Articles in German by Native Japanese Speakers Carol Jaensch University of Essex 1. Introduction Native (L1) speakers of languages which have no articles or other morphological markers for definiteness, must first establish two aspects when learning a language with articles; the distributional properties of articles, (where they can be used, where they must be used and where none are required); and the semantic or pragmatic properties of articles (what these articles mean in the context of the utterance). Previous research on these two aspects has been considerable; the following section will look at a selection thereof. This will be followed by details of the current study in section 3; with section 4 presenting the results and finally section 5 will discuss these results in light of the research questions posed. 2. Previous Research 2.1 Chierchia (1998) – Nominal Mapping Parameter Relating to the first aspect mentioned above, of the distributional properties of articles, Chierchia (1998) suggested the Nominal Mapping Parameter (henceforth NMP). This was proposed as a means of distinguishing between different types of languages with regard to articles. He suggested that languages differ in whether their noun phrases (NP) can function directly as arguments in syntactic expressions or not ([± argument] languages) and whether their NPs are predicates requiring a determiner of some kind to license them ([± predicate] languages). This typology predicts that there will be languages with three types of NP, as illustrated below. (1) [+arg, -pred] languages, which have no articles and lack number marking on nouns – any bare noun can be an argum