Can Greek Learners Acquire the Overt Subject Property of English? A Pilot Study

Abstract

This paper reports the results of the pilot part of a wider study exploring the second language (L2) grammars of beginner, intermediate and advanced Greek learners of English. The experiment considers the acceptability of structures with null and postverbal subjects, as well as the acceptability of permutations inducing that-t violations in L2 English. The results have suggested that there is a developmental trend with increasing proficiency with the more proficient groups exhibiting improved performance. However, it was found that L2 performance does not reach native standards, since the advanced group fared significantly less successfully than the English control group in all the structures tested. This data lends empirical support to recent theoretical proposals that cross-linguistic differences between L1 and L2 in the form of syntactic feature mismatch can cause prolonged learnability problems which are difficult, if not impossible, to overcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]