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Typological considerations on second language acquisition
Author(s) -
Ramat Anna Giacalone
Publication year - 2000
Publication title -
studia linguistica
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.187
H-Index - 28
eISSN - 1467-9582
pISSN - 0039-3193
DOI - 10.1111/1467-9582.00054
Subject(s) - grammaticalization , linguistics , computer science , typology , point (geometry) , process (computing) , sociology , mathematics , philosophy , geometry , operating system , anthropology
In this paper I claim that the functional typological approach may offer fruitful insights to interpret Second Language data. I assume that the range of grammatical choices languages of the world use to code a given semantic relation is potentially available to learner languages and it is thus expected that learner languages show features which, although different from their source or target languages, may find a counterpart in some other languages of the world. To this purpose, I will draw on second language data in the domain of relative clause formation and will also discuss the notion of relative clause construction in typology and acquisition. I also address a terminological and methodological point, namely whether the learning of the grammatical structures of a target language may be compared to grammaticalization as a diachronic process concerning the historical development of grammatical categories. Despite clear differences of conditions, I will nonetheless argue that both types of grammaticalization may help to discover general properties of language change.