Syntax and its Interfaces in L2 Grammars - Situating L1 effects

Studies on the first language (L1) acquisition of word order optionality (e.g. Krämer 2000) report a developmental disjunction between syntactic and interpretive knowledge. We find suggestive evidence for a similar disjunction in the second language (L2) acquisition of German optional word order, so-called scrambling. This study examines scrambling in advanced and near-native English-German and Japanese-German Interlanguage (IL). Advanced L2 learners are found to have robust knowledge of underdetermined UG-specified syntax, but they show non-target-like behaviour on interpretive aspects of scrambling. We suggest that this distinction owes to protracted L1 transfer effects at the Interfaces, but does not necessarily entail representational deficits in the architecture of adult L2 grammars. Section 2 of this paper reviews scrambling in native and non-native language acquisition. In section 3, we formulate the experimental hypotheses. The study is presented in section 4, and its results are discussed in section 5. Section 6 concludes.