Morpho-Syntax von deutschen und französischen Bewegungsausdrücken im Fremdspracherwerb des Deutschen bei französischsprachigen Lernern
(2015)
Files
Thèse-VS-DIAL.pdf
Open Access - Adobe PDF
- 3.83 MB
Details
- Authors
- Supervisors
- Abstract
- The topic of this dissertation is the morpho-syntax and acquisition of German PATH-denoting motion expressions. Starting from a contrastive analysis of French and German motion expressions, this dissertation investigates the lexical, semantic and syntactic differences of the components of motion expressions (motion verbs and spatial prepositions) that lead to the typological differences between the two languages, with special emphasis on the so-called “case-alternating prepositions” in German and the apparent polysemy of French spatial prepositions. The resulting analysis, which is anchored in the generative framework, proposes that these prepositions are inherently locative, and that the directional reading is the result of morpho-syntactic incorporation operations that are not available in Modern French. However, a diachronic overview shows that Latin and Ancient French exhibit the same syntactic structure and operations as are posited for synchronic German. The above-mentioned morpho-syntactic differences between the two languages under investigation in this dissertation are reflected in the acquisition of German motion expressions by native French speakers. An elicitation study analysing the production of motion expressions by 104 learners of German (L1= French) at all levels in the CEFR, shows considerable qualitative and quantitative differences between (even advanced) learners of German and the native German control group. As a result of Belgian linguistic policies the learners of this study learnt German after at least one other L2, which enabled us to analyse the effect of previously learnt languages on the acquisition of German motion expressions. The elicited data shows that especially the typologically very close Dutch is an important source of positive and negative transfer, thus contributing to the relatively recent field of the generative study of cross-linguistic influence in third or fourth language acquisition (L3/L4).
- Affiliations
Citations
Scheirs, V. (2015). Morpho-Syntax von deutschen und französischen Bewegungsausdrücken im Fremdspracherwerb des Deutschen bei französischsprachigen Lernern. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/192912