Comparative Perspectives on Language Acquisition: A Tribute to Clive Perdue
664
Comparative Perspectives on Language Acquisition: A Tribute to Clive Perdue
664eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
This volume aims to provide a broad view of second language acquisition within a comparative perspective that addresses results concerning adult and child learners across a variety of source and target languages. It brings together contributions at the forefront of language acquisition research that consider a wide range of open questions: What are the precise mechanisms underlying acquisition? How can we characterize learners’ initial state and predict their degree of final achievement? What role do specific (typological) properties of source and target languages play? How does fossilization occur? How does the relative complexity of cognitive systems in adult and child learners affect acquisition? Does language learning influence cognitive organization? Can language learning shed light on our general understanding of human language and language processing?
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781847696052 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Multilingual Matters Ltd. |
| Publication date: | 01/09/2012 |
| Series: | Second Language Acquisition , #61 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 664 |
| File size: | 10 MB |
About the Author
Marzena Watorek is Professor in Linguistics at the University Paris 8. Her research interests include first and second language acquisition, particularly discourse production, initial processing of the input by adult learners, and the interface between language acquisition and teaching.
Sandra Benazzo is Associate Professor in Linguistics and French as a Second Language at the University Lille 3. Her research mainly concerns L2 acquisition in the domain of temporality, information structure, discourse organization and the comparison with L1 acquisition.
Maya Hickmann is Research Director in the Laboratoire Structures Formelles du Langage (CNRS and Université Paris 8). Her research mainly focuses on the role of structural vs. functional and universal vs. language-specific determinants in first and second language acquisition.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
A Way to Look at Second Language Acquisition
Wolfgang Klein
Thinking Back
It is peculiar, but often it is neither the most recent nor the most important events that are most vividly remembered. I must have met Clive Perdue for the first time at a workshop of the GRAL group in Vincennes 30 years ago. But while I clearly remember Larry Selinker pouring a glass of red wine over my jacket, there is no recollection whatsoever of speaking with Clive. Still, the impression must have been deep, because when, soon afterwards, the European Science Foundation in Strasbourg decided to fund a Europewide research project on the second language acquisition of immigrant workers, and the Max Planck Society in Munich granted me money for a coordinator for this project, it was Clive Perdue who immediately came to my mind. So, I called him in Paris, he listened, and after one of those long and thoughtful pauses that were so characteristic of him, he asked 'Ah, ah, are you offering me a job?' And I still hear the slight tone of disbelief and the distinct rise on the word 'job' in his voice, as if it had been yesterday. I said 'yes', and this was the beginning of a wonderful cooperation and of a wonderful friendship spanning almost three decades. In fact, friendship as well as cooperation last well beyond his death, because once in while, I note to my own surprise that I keep asking him questions, and he keeps answering them.
When you learn a second language, be it in the classroom or in the wild, you often face substantial problems because a particular feature of this language – a sound, a word, a construction – has no immediate counterpart in your earlier linguistic knowledge. French learners of English often struggle with the first sound in this because there is no such sound in French; and English learners of French often struggle with the last sound in tu, because there is no such sound in English. But you may also have problems because a particular feature has a counterpart which is very similar but not completely identical. French as well as English have an unvoiced dental stop /t/; but in English, it is aspirated, and in French, it is not; such little differences belong to the hardest pièces de résistance for ultimate achievement. German learners of English regularly have problems with the choice between the progressive form and the simple form: He was singing – He sang. There is no grammatical distinction of this sort in German; both meanings are expressed by the same verb form, which in shape and history corresponds to the English simple form: Er sang. But they also have problems with the present perfect He has sung; while the German counterpart Er hat gesungen is very close in composition and meaning, there are subtle differences, reflected for example in the fact that in English, the time of the event, although clearly in the past, cannot be specified by a past time adverbial, such as yesterday or a while ago. In the early 1980s, when I still tried, or was trying or have tried, to improve my English, I once asked Clive: 'Can you tell me in a single sentence how the English continuous form is used?' I do not remember exactly in which year this was, but I do remember exactly that he first began to roll a cigarette, and just before lighting it, he answered: 'You use it when you are 100% in the action.' This is not what I had read in the grammar books, and it had never occurred to me when I tried to speak English. But I thought it was a perfect answer, for at least three reasons:
• It is simple.
• It helps the learner because it takes his perspective.
• It captures the crucial semantic intuition.
So, this one-sentence explanation is not a perfect linguistic account of the meaning of the English progressive form, but it contains the decisive empirical germ for such an account.
A few years later, our findings on how second language learners express temporality in the absence of inflectional morphology increasingly excited my interest in how time is encoded in general by natural languages. And more than any tradition of tense studies (which one must not ignore, of course), it was this simple and direct way of looking at the phenomena which guided my interest. If you are 100% in the action, this means that the time about which you make a claim when you speak must be fully contained in the time during which the action lasts. And if you use the past tense I was singing, this means that the time about which you talk (the 'topic time', so to speak) (a) precedes the moment of speech, and (b) is fully included in the time of singing – the 'situation time'; you are 100% in the action; but it does not imply that the action itself cannot include the moment of speech. Hence, tense does not express a relation between the time of speaking and the time of the event, as you read in every text book; instead, it expresses a relation between the time of speaking and the topic time. The aspectual dimension, as brought in by the choice of the progressive rather than the simple form, reflects the fact that the topic time is properly included in the time of the action (see Klein, 1994). If you follow the grammar books and teach your students that tense serves to place the action before the moment of speech, then this is not entirely false; nevertheless, the learners will often be misled, and if they make mistakes, it is the teachers and the linguists who are to be blamed, not the learner. So, if one wants to understand how language works and how people learn languages, one should not, at least not as the first stage, ask what tradition tells one, but just have a fresh, simple and unbiased look at the phenomena at hand.
This is the way in which we – Clive Perdue, myself and many others around the original ESF (European Science Foundation) project and various follow-up projects – began to look at second language acquisition in the early 1980s. This is not the place to recapitulate this work (see e.g. Klein & Dimroth, 2009; Klein & Perdue, 1997; Perdue, 1984, 1993). But in what follows, I will try to characterise the perspective which underlies a great deal of this work in the form of four simple maxims, each of which will be illustrated with a few examples. This perspective is not a theory of language acquisition; it is just a way to approach a field, no more, no less.
Don't Lose Sight of the Obvious!
Here is a small list of facts which, I believe, no one can seriously deny.
(1) No one is born with a specific language in his or her head. But we are all born with the capacity to learn any language. We pass through this long and tedious process which we call language acquisition once, and frequently more often, in life. It can take very different forms, depending on factors such as
• ge
• learning conditions,
• previous linguistic knowledge
and perhaps many others. The course, speed and eventual result of this process vary considerably according to these factors. This is what language acquisition researchers aim to find out.
(2) Language acquisition is not the only possible transition between 'language' as a biologically given language faculty, which is more or less the same for all human beings (though minor variation is not excluded), and 'language' as specific linguistic systems, which are quite different from each other, and of which there are several thousands on earth. There must have been a time, very long ago, in which the language faculty already existed in the brain of our ancestors, due to some genetic changes in our species, but in which there was no single linguistic system. At that time, no one was exposed to a language: there was no input that our ancestors could learn from. They could not copy an existing system – they had to invent, to create, to construct such systems. And they did.
(3) There is a net conclusion: the genetically given human language faculty involves at least two quite different capacities: (i) the faculty to copy a linguistic system, and (ii) the faculty to construct a linguistic system. Apparently, these faculties correspond to two types of transition from language faculty to linguistic system: language learning and language creation. And the crucial difference between them seems to be that one of them works on input, and the other one does not. But is this really the true case? No. At best, it is only half the truth.
(4) Nobody really knows how our ancestors developed the first linguistic systems. But it seems obvious that the creation of a language also involves a lot of copying. It seems unlikely that, in some idle hours, a particularly talented person among our ancestors thought up the first linguistic system in his or her head and then passed it on to his/her family and his/her best friends. The creation of the first linguistic systems was the result of a fundamentally social process, which of necessity involved a massive amount of mutual copying. On the other hand, the learning of a language, under whichever conditions, is a long process which does not only require copying others, but also involves a lot of construction. Otherwise, we could not explain how rules are learned, at least those rules which are language specific. These rules do not show up in the input, although they underlie it; rather, they are constructed on the basis of input.
(5) Again, there is a net conclusion: both language acquisition and language creation are essentially social processes, and both involve the copying faculty as well as the construction faculty. How do these two faculties come together? The answer is very easy in one sense and very complex in another. These faculties come together in communication: someone says something with a certain aim, others understand it and in doing so, gain access to the other's knowledge. Our ancestors constructed a linguistic system together because they communicated in the absence of a linguistic system, and then with the help of a developing system. Ever since, both children and adults learn an existing language by listening to others and talking to others. So, we have a third type of language faculty which comes into play – the communicative faculty. This faculty must not be confused with the other two, but it interacts with them in complex ways. Communication is possible both with and without a linguistic system. Thus, it makes these systems possible on the one hand, and changes with these systems on the other. We cannot understand language creation or language acquisition, if we do not realise that they are fundamentally social in nature.
(6) We are all born with the ability to build and to learn linguistic systems, but there is not a single uniform and well-defined 'language faculty'. Instead, there is a genetically given set of capacities which may be partly species-specific and partly domain-specific. Other species do not construct or copy linguistic systems. This may be due to the fact that one or more of the entire set of capacities is not found in other species, or is inoperative in other domains of cognition. But it may also be due to the particular way in which all of these capacities interact in specific social contexts. It is this interaction, not just one element of the entire set, which brings about linguistic systems.
(7) There is no structural resemblance between 'language' as genetically given linguistic capacities and 'language' as specific linguistic systems. This idea, advocated in theories of Universal Grammar, strikes me as no less bizarre than the idea that there should be a structural resemblance between a cook and the meals which he prepares: the relation between the innate 'language faculty' and a 'linguistic system' is a relation of production, not of similarity. Therefore, it makes no sense to consider language acquisition as a transition from an initial state of the 'language faculty' to a 'steady state' of this faculty.
Take the Learner's Point of View!
When nature equipped us with the many properties that are necessary to develop or to copy a language, it did not think of a classroom. In the history of humanity, language teaching is a very late phenomenon, and it is always an intervention into a naturally occurring process. The chances of rendering this intervention successful increase with our understanding of the regularities which underlie the naturally occurring process, that is, the regularities of what is often called 'untutored language acquisition', as if tutored language acquisition were the normal case. In fact, there is one sense in which tutored language acquisition is indeed the normal case: by far most work on second language acquisition is devoted to learning in the classroom. This has two massive consequences: (a) the study of second language acquisition is primarily concerned with a very special, quite artificial form of language acquisition, rather than the natural one; (b) it is dictated by the teacher's perspective, rather than that of the learner. Taken together, these factors result in a particular perspective, which can be described by two key assumptions (Klein, 1998: Section 2.2):
(1) There is a well-defined target of the acquisition process – the language to be learned. This 'target language', as any 'real language', is a clearly fixed entity, a structurally and functionally balanced system, mastered by those who have learned it in childhood, and more or less correctly described in grammars and dictionaries.
(2) Learners miss this target by varying degrees and in varying respects they make errors in production as well as in comprehension, because they lack the appropriate knowledge or skills.
I shall call this view the target deviation perspective. It is the teacher's task to erase or at least to minimise the deviations; it is the researcher's task to investigate which 'errors' occur when and for which reasons. As a consequence, the learner's performance in production or comprehension is not so very much studied in its own right, as a manifestation of his or her learner capacity, but in relation to a set norm; not in terms of what the learner does but in terms of what he or she fails to do. The learner's utterances at some time during the process of acquisition are considered to be more or less successful attempts to reproduce the structural properties of target language utterances. The learner tries to do what the mature speaker does, but does it less well.
But this is not the way things look from the learner's point of view, especially if he or she has to learn in the manner in which nature itself has designed for language learning. A language is learned by communicating with others. This means that the learners have to learn how to transform their thoughts, wishes and feelings into a well-structured stream of sounds such that others – due to this stream of sound and all the other information available to them in the communicative situation – can reconstruct these thoughts, wishes and feelings. In doing so, structures evolve, which linguists describe as phonemes, words, inflectional paradigms, direct objects, adverbial phrases, sentences, texts and so forth. In other words, learners do not learn linguistic structures, they learn how to solve verbal tasks in cooperation with others, and in doing so, regularities evolve which observers, applying special analytical tools, describe as a particular kind of structure. Typically, this description does not look at what learners factually do at a certain time in a certain context, when they indeed communicate; it is dictated by assumptions about how a 'real language' – the target of the acquisition process – is supposed to be.
This stands in sharp contrast to a perspective which places the learners and what they do at the centre of observation and analysis. We may call this the 'learner variety perspective'; it can be characterised by three key assumptions (Klein & Perdue, 1997: 307s):
(1) During the acquisitional process, the learner passes through a series of learner varieties. Both the internal organisation of each variety at a given time, and the transition from one variety to the next, are essentially systematic in nature.
(2) There is a limited set of organisational principles of different kinds which are present in all learner varieties. The actual structure of an utterance in a learner variety is determined by a particular interaction of these principles. The kind of interaction may vary, depending on various factors, such as the learner's source language. With successive input analyses, the interaction changes over time. For example, picking up some component of noun morphology from the input may cause the learner to modify the weight of other factors to mark argument status. From this perspective, learning a new feature is not adding a new piece to a puzzle which the learner has to put together. Rather, it entails a reorganisation of the whole variety, at times minimal, at times more substantial, where the balance of the various factors successively approaches the balance that is characteristic of the target language.
(3) According to this perspective, learner varieties are not imperfect imitations of a 'real language' – the target language – but systems in their own right, error-free by definition, and characterised by a particular lexical repertoire and by a particular interaction of organisational principles. Fully developed languages, such as English, German and French, are special cases of learner varieties. They represent a relatively stable state of language acquisition – the state in which the learner stops learning because there is no difference between his variety and the input – the variety of his social environment.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Comparative Perspectives on Language Acquisition"
by .
Copyright © 2012 Marzena Watorek, Sandra Benazzo, Maya Hickmann and the authors of individual chapters.
Excerpted by permission of Multilingual Matters.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introduction-Marzena Watorek, Sandra Benazzo & Maya Hickmann: New Comparative Perspectives in the Study of Language Acquisition – Clive Perdue’s Legacy
Part I. Second Language Acquisition: From Initial to Final Stages
1. Wolfgang Klein: From the Learner’s Point of View
2. Rebekah Rast: L2 Input and the L2 Initial State: The Writings of Clive Perdue
3. Angelika Becker: Finiteness and the Acquisition of Negation
4. Sara Schimke, Joshe Verhagen & Giusy Turco: The Different Role of Additive and Negative Particles in the Development of Finiteness in Early Adult L2 German and L2 Dutch
5. Giuliano Bernini: Lexical Categories in the Target Language and the Lexical Categorisation of Learners: The Word Class of Adverbs
6. Jili Sun: Is it Necessary for Chinese Learners to Mark Time? Reflexions about the Use of Temporal Adverbs with Respect to Verbal Morphology Relations
7. Pascale Trévisiol: The Development of Reference to Time and Space in L3 French: Evidence from Narratives
8. Alexandra Vraciu: Accounting for Verbal Morphology in Advanced Varieties of English L2: Aspect or Discourse?
9. Inge Bartning: High-level Proficiency in Second Language Use: The Case of French
10. David Singleton: Ultimate Attainment and the CPH: Some Thorny Issues
11. Sandra Benazzo: Learner Varieties and Creating Language Anew: How Acquisitional Studies can Contribute to Language Evolution Research
12. Ivani Fusellier: Multiple Perspectives on the Emergence and Development of Human Language: B. Comrie, C. Perdue and D. Slobin
Part II. L1 and L2 Acquisition: Learner Type Perspective
13. Dan Slobin: Child Language Study and Adult Language Acquisition: Twenty Years Later
14. Natasha Müller & Nadine Eichler: Mixing of Functional Categories in Bilingual Children and in Second Language Learners.
15. Suzanne Schlyter & Anita Thomas: L1 or L2 Acquisition? Finiteness in Child Second Language Learners (chL2), Compared to Adult L2 Learners (adL2) and Young Bilingual Children (2L1)
16. Rosmary Tracy & Vytautas Lemke: Young L2 and L1 Learners: More Alike than Different
17. Christine Dimroth & Stefanie Haberzettl: The Older the Better, or More is More: Language Acquisition in Childhood
18. Sandra Benazzo, Clive Perdue, Marzena Watorek: Additive Scope Particles and Anaphoric Linkage in Narrative and Descriptive Texts: A Developmental Study in French L1 & L2
19. Patrizia Giuliano: Discourse Cohesion in Narrative Texts: The Role of Additive Particles in Italian L1 and L2
20. Henrëtte Hendriks & Marzena Watorek: The Role of Conceptual Development in the Acquisition of the Spatial Domain by L1 and L2 Learners of French, English and Polish
21. Ewa Lenart: The Grammaticalisation of Nominals in French L1 and L2: A Comparative Study of Child and Adult Acquisition
Part III. Typological Variation and Language Acquisition
22. Anna Giacalone-Ramat: Typology Meets Second Language Acquisition
23. Rainer Dietrich, Chung Shan Kao & Werner Sommer: Linguistic Relativity…Another Turn to the Screw
24. Annie-Claude Demagny: Path in L2 Acquisition: The Expression of Temporality in Spatially Oriented Narratives
25. Carmen Muñoz: A Cross-linguistic Study of Narratives with Special Attention to the Progressive: A Contrast between English, Spanish and Catalan
26. Tatiana Aleksandrova: Reference to Entities in Fictional Narratives of Russian/French Quasi-Bilinguals
27. Cecilia Andorno: The Cohesive Function of Word Order in L1 and L2 Italian: How V-S Structures Mark Local and Global Coherence in the Discourse of Native Speakers and of Learners
28. Christiane Von Stutterheim, Ute Halm & Mary Carroll: Macrostructural Principles and the Development of Narrative Competence in L1 German: The Role of Grammar in 8-14 Year Olds
29. Michèle Kail: On-line Sentence Processing in Children and Adults: General and Specific Constraints: A Crosslinguistic Study in Four Languages
Closure-Sir John Lyons: A Personal Tribute