Verb Second in Advanced L2 English: A Learner Corpus Study

The present study examines the interface between syntax and discourse-pragmatics in the production of verb second (V2) structures in a corpus of English texts by advanced L1 German and Dutch speakers. The evidence shows that the residual V2 produced by the learner groups studied is the result of a deficit at the interface rather than the transfer of narrow V2 syntax per se. The analysis offered suggests that the nature of V2 in the learners’ L1 combined with evidence in the English input make it difficult for learners to definitively lose the V2 constraint, which remains a persistent option after the fronting of certain constituents. This builds on the study of V2 transfer by Robertson & Sorace (1999). Their study looked only at patterns of inversion in the learner corpus and expanded this by eliciting judgements on various different inversion structures. In order to test the hypothesis that V2 transfer is connected to a deficit at the interface between syntax and discourse-pragmatics, the present study investigates various diagnostics for V2, i.e. verb movement past adverbs and negation and lexical verb movement in questions in the L1 German and Dutch components of the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE) (Granger et al 2002).