Volume 52, Issue 1

Investigating the linguistic repertoire of a classroom learner of English, this paper builds on an explorative methodology of tracing L2 development. The paper draws on longitudinal interactional classroom data, and the methodology is inspired by the traceback procedure from child language research (e.g., Lieven et al. 2009; Vogt and Lieven 2010). These studies showed, by way of tracing children's actual utterances backwards in development, that the children's emerging repertoires consisted of formulas and utterance schemas, and that only a few basic syntactic operations accounted for early syntactic creativity. Applying this traceback procedure to my L2 data reveals that L2 learning is also rooted in recycled formulas and utterance schemas, and that the syntactic operations identified by Lieven and colleagues, especially substitution of semantically similar items in open slots, also apply to adult L2 learning. Recycled formulas and novel utterances based on utterance schemas and brought about by substitution account for more than 85% of my focal student's production – a result which mirrors the findings for L1 in the work of Lieven and colleagues.

There is an extensive body of research concerning the second language (L2) acquisition of tense-aspect morphology in relation to an inherent aspectual property of verb predicates (Andersen and Shirai 1994, 1996; Shirai 2009). Specifically, it has been well documented that in an emergent use of tense-aspect morphology, L2 learners tend to use each tense-aspect form according to the inherent semantic aspectual property of verbs (Andersen and Shirai 1994, 1996). Although this phenomenon has been extensively attested in studies examining L2 learners' use of the simple past tense form, the progressive marker, and the present tense form (Andersen and Shirai 1994, 1996; Shirai 2004, 2009), relatively few studies have investigated the use of the English present perfect form in relation to the inherent semantic aspectual property of verbs. This is unfortunate in view of the unique aspectual characteristic the form exhibits (Leech 1970; McCord 1978; Smith 1991). In order to address this issue, the present study examines the L2 use of the present perfect form in relation to the inherent semantic aspectual property of verbs. A cloze test was administered to 29 Japanese learners of English. The results showed that learners associated the present perfect form with particular semantic aspectual properties of verbs, suggesting that L2 use of the present perfect form is constrained by such aspects. This study proposes multiple factors to account for this finding: perceptual saliency (Slobin 1985), cognitive processing principles, (Andersen 1993; Bybee 1985) and learners' prototype formation in the early use of tense-aspect morphology (Shirai and Andersen 1995).

Various accounts of overpassivization errors in the L2 acquisition of English unaccusative verbs have been proposed, but different studies have examined different factors (movement, transitivization, discourse, L1 influence) and some findings are in conflict. This study examines the factors of discourse (external causation), semantics (animacy) and L1 morphological influence (verb alternation), which were tested on 99 Chinese and 117 Korean students of English at four proficiency levels. The study shows that the effect of each factor varies depending on the L1s and the proficiency levels of L2 learners. An L1 morphological factor is the most strong and persistent for L2 English learners when their L1 morphology differs from the target language, and the discourse factor is stronger than animacy. Taken together, the findings suggest that a multi-faceted approach to SLA provides a broader perspective on SLA research and leads to a deeper understanding of SLA.