L1 transfer, definiteness and specificity of determiners in L2 English
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2016/07/0014/000273Keywords:
determiners, definiteness, specificity, L1 transferAbstract
This study investigates L1 transfer from Cypriot Greek (CG), definiteness and specificity of determiners in L2 English. 100 CG undergraduate students (ages 17-23) participated in the study. The linguistic (socio-economic) background questionnaires were used. Their written corpus (100 essays) was analysed in terms of determiner production. They were also offered an elicitation task based on Ionin et al. (2003, 2004), which was focused on elicitation of definite determiner the in [+def; +spec] and [+def; ‒spec] environments and indefinite determiner a in [‒def; +spec] and [‒def; ‒spec] environments. The results of the study showed that the most problematic condition for CG students was [‒def; +spec] with target indefinite determiner as they fluctuated in their written production between target and non-target settings.
References
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