The acquisition of the negative polarity item 'any' in L2 English by L1 German speakers

Abstract

The study explores the acquisition of properties of the English existential quantifier any by German-speaking learners of English. The English existential quantifier is of particular theoretical interest, since its subtle grammatical constraints are often unobservable and thus may induce learnability difficulties, especially if parallel constructions in the L1 are scarce or entirely absent. In addition, the properties are underspecified in pedagogical materials, which renders them an apt test case for the exploration of input and taught knowledge in relation to acquisitional processes. The research question asks whether observable and/or learned grammar knowledge can shape acquired knowledge as measured by means of acceptability judgement tasks. To test this, 72 German-speaking C1 learners of English provided paced acceptability judgement ratings of sentences with any, which systematically differed according to grammatical and acquisitional constraints, partly replicating an experimental design by Marsden et al. (2018). Our results suggest sensitivity of German learners of English towards the grammatical constraints of any. This sensitivity seems to partly rest on explicit pedagogical input, with minimal L1 influence, but with some marked deviations from previous findings.

Keywords

• any
• existential quantifier
• negative polarity
• l2 learning
• l1 transfer