Is there any order?: On word order in Swedish learner language

• Autores: Maria Bolander
• Localización: Journal of multilingual and multicultural development, ISSN 0143-4632, Vol. 9, Nº. 1-2, 1988, págs. 97-113
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This paper reports on a study of the acquisition of rules for the placement of the negative particle and some adverbs (mostly sentence adverbials) in Swedish. These elements may have the same position in main as well as in subordinate clauses. The study is based on three types of data from 60 tutored adult learners of Swedish with Finnish, Polish and Spanish as their native languages.

    In part, the results support earlier studies on favourable contexts for the correct application of the placement rules. Yet, an interesting outcome of this study is the learners’ placement of negation post‐verbal to non‐finite verbs in verb groups. An error analysis shows tendencies for negation of constituents and early phrasal learning of frequent and useful sequences to provide constraints on the application of the syntactic rules later. In addition, in many cases the errors seem to be caused by difficulties in the retrieval of adequate lexical units. This may lead to violations in the application of syntactic rules correctly applied in other contexts.

    Finally the results indicate influence of input by later learning of rules with variable input. This is the case for adverbs, despite Swedish grammar teaching focussing on them as following the same rules, and the placement of negation in some subordinate clauses with variable placement of negation.