When finiteness gets marked: the relation between morpho-syntactic development and use of scopal iterms in adult language acquisition

This paper investigates the acquisition of scope in L2 English and French, using longitudinal data from five informants from the ESF database (Perdue 1993). The scopal items analyzed are negation and additive, restrictive, and temporal items. These items are found to be acquired in a fixed order, with negation preceding additive and restrictive particles (also, only, and equivalents), which in turn precede the temporal items. For these latter, forms marking the iteration of an event (again) are used before temporal adverbs of contrast (“TACs”: already, still, no more). The learners studied have been independently shown (Klein and Perdue 1992, 1997) to progress from a nominal utterance organization, through an organization based on an uninflected verb (the “basic variety”), and on to utterances organized around a finite verb, and the placement and scopal properties of the items analyzed correspond closely to this development. Items occur first in nominal utterances adjacent to the constituent they affect, then immediately before the VP or at the utterance boundary, then immediately behind the finite verb. It is only at this final stage that an item is integrated within the utterance structure while affecting a nonadjacent constituent. Furthermore, it is only at this stage that TACs occur, in the same position. Two types of explanation can be proposed for this correspondence between the acquisition order of the particles and the development first of VP, then of verbal morphology: i. These particles affect the constituent available at a given point of development. The first (additive and restrictive) particles apply their meaning to NP referents and the first temporal items to be used quantify over whole events (different tokens of the same Topic Time-Time of Situation relation: Klein 1994), while TACs affect phases of an event, thus requiring an independent specification of tense, on the finite verb. ii. The development of finiteness marking is a central feature of the grammaticalization of utterance organization. This development strongly constrains the combinatorial possibilities of the particles within the utterance structure. The paper concludes by retracing the interaction between the development of finiteness marking and the overall organization of learner varieties over time. W. Klein, 1994, Time in Language, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul. W. Klein / C. Perdue, 1992, Utterance Structure, Amsterdam, John Benjamins. W. Klein / C. Perdue, 1997, "The basic variety", Second Language Research 13(4), 301-348. C. Perdue, 1993, Adult Language Acquisition: Cross-Linguistic Perspectives, vol. 1, Field Methods, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.