A LAST EXAMPLE OF SYSTEMATICITY: CUMULATIVE SEQUENCES OF WORD ORDER

Let us finish this overview of findings about interlanguage systematicity with an examination of a large-scale study conducted by Jürgen Meisel, Harald Clahsen and Manfred Pienemann in the late 1970s, known as the ZISA project (the acronym for

Zweitspracherwerb Italienischer, Portugiesischer und Spanischer Arbeiter or ‘The

Second Language Acquisition of Italian, Portuguese and Spanish Workers’; see Meisel et al., 1981). The project culminated with the discovery of a developmental pattern for the emergence of word order in German L2 among 45 informants, all

Cumulative sequences of word order 131

migrant workers from Romance language backgrounds living in Germany. The pattern consists of five stages, summarized in Table 6.8. At the time, two processing strategies were hypothesized by Meisel et al. to be relevant in order to explain the findings: a canonical word order strategy (COS) and an initialization/finalization strategy (IFS). The strategy of COS posited that producing subject–verb–object word order is easier than other word orders. The strategy of IFS was predicted on the assumption that initial and final edges of strings are perceptually more salient to learners and therefore moving material to the initial or final position of a syntactic string is easier than moving material from or to positions inside the same string.

In order to appreciate the observed stages illustrated in Table 6.8, it is important to stress that the findings are based on emergence, or the first productive use of a given word order. The benchmark of emergence indicates what level of processing (operationalized as COS and IFS) a learner is capable of handling – even if only part

Table 6.8

The emergence of word order in L2 German according to Meisel et al. (1981)

Stage Strategies Description Illustration

1 [+COS] Canonical word order Subject–Verb–X:

[–IFS] ein junges Mädchen geht durch die Straße

[a young woman walks along the street] 2 [–COS] Adverb preposing *X–Subject–Verb:

[+IFS] *und dann die Mädchen kommt [and then the girl comes]

3 [–COS] Particle separation Verb ……… AUX/COMP and Particle:

[+IFS] Ich hab sie gesehen

[I have her seen]

der arme Mann wollte ihr helfen [The poor man wanted her to help] sie sieht sehr hungrig aus [she looks very hungry like]

4 [–COS] Inversion X–Verb–Subject:

[–IFS] Und am Ende seiner Mahlzeit will er nicht dafür bezahlen [and at the end of his meal, doesn’t he want for it to pay] 5 [–COS] Verb-end Clause-final verbs in subordinate clauses:

[–IFS] die Frau, die das Brot gestohlen hat

[the woman who the bread stole]

Note: COS = Canonical Word Order Strategy; IFS = Initialization/Finalization Strategy. Illustrations are

from German L2 oral narratives of Charlie Chaplin’s Alone and Hungry clip, produced by Australian L1 English college students; unpublished author data © Ortega, Iwashita, Rabie and Norris. Close English translations reflect German word order; underlined parts show the scope of the IFS movement.

of the time – in spontaneous production. In addition, the developmental stages in Table 6.8 are implicationally constrained in an upward direction, meaning that learners tend to traverse this developmental progression without skipping stages. This implicational systematicity is unlike the systematicity discovered for the negation stages (see section 6.7 and Table 6.2), which learners also traverse without skipping. With negation, each lower stage is gradually ‘outgrown’ and eventually abandoned (in the case of learners who converge towards the target language). By contrast, the word order development is cumulative, as each attained stage adds another possibility to the full repertoire of German word order.

All stages of German word order are grammatical, with the only exception of stage 2, which, while more advanced than stage 1, happens to result in an ungrammatical solution. This is because, in German, placing an element other than the subject in the beginning of a sentence (see Table 6.8, ‘then + the girl comes’) triggers inversion of the subject–verb sequence: dann kommt das Mädchen, ‘then comes the girl’ (German is a V2 language, where the verb in a main clause always needs to take the second position). Only after separation has emerged at stage 3 are learners finally able to cope with movement inside the string and hence with the subject–verb inversion rule, thus producing at least some adverb-initial sentences that are grammatical in German. Remember, however, that these developmental sequences are about emergence and not accuracy. Therefore, a learner could apply the inversion rule to only one or two relevant cases and miss its application to another ten cases, which therefore are cases of stage 2 ungrammatical adverb preposing without inversion, and we would still consider her to be at stage 4, not 2 (some researchers use a conventional safety minimum of three successful applications out of at least four attempted cases). The non-target-like stage 2 may or may not eventually fade away from learners’ interlanguage, depending on how accurate they become, but all other stages are cumulative, as already noted.

The same rationale for the initial developmental sequences uncovered for German L2 word order was later applied by Manfred Pienemann and colleagues in Australia to explain the developmental order of emergence of word order in English questions (Pienemann et al., 1988), which was briefly introduced in Chapter 3 (section 3.4). Table 6.9 summarizes and illustrates the stages. Once again, one stage typically results in ungrammatical solutions (stage 3) and thus may be phased away (in the case of learners who become accurate), but all other stages result in grammatical solutions and are cumulatively added to the repertoire of how to ask questions in English.

In the late 1990s, Pienemann’s thinking evolved into a processing-sensitive but largely linguistic framework that he called Processability theory (Pienemann, 1998). In a nutshell, he proposed that in the beginning L2 learners are limited in their capacity for what syntactic information they can hold in memory during processing (hence the term ‘processability’ in the name of the theory). They need to gradually develop the psycholinguistic capacity to match grammatical information contained within and across units in the linguistic material they encounter, and they are capable to do so gradually with more distant elements in linguistic units. This matching presents a hierarchical and increasingly more difficult processing

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problem: within categories (e.g. walk + ed = pastness), then noun phrases (e.g. two girl + s = plural agreement), then verb phrases (e.g. John walk + s = person agreement), then sentences (e.g. it is raining / is it raining? = question inversion) and finally subordinate clauses (e.g. he will come / he said he would come = reported speech). Remarkably, the current formulation of Processability theory has offered explanations for a variety of word order phenomena across several target languages, including morphosyntactic aspects of typologically distant languages such as Arabic, Chinese and Japanese (Pienemann, 2005).

6.13 FOSSILIZATION, OR WHEN L2 DEVELOPMENT COMES TO A STOP