THE ACQUISITION OF PREPOSITIONAL CONSTRUCTIONS AND THEIR ASSOCIATED CASE-MARKING PROPERTIES IN THE L2 GERMAN OF L1 ENGLISH SPEAKERS

Native speakers of English learning L2 German face a complex learning problem in acquiring locational and directional prepositional constructions such as Das Buch liegt auf dem Tisch /The book is on the table, Er legte das Buch auf den Tisch /He put the book on the table, Das Bild hängt an der Wand /The picture is hanging on the wall, Er hängte das Bild an die Wand /He hung the picture on the wall. In this paper the author argues that this is because the two languages differ lexically in the way they represent spatial orientation and functionally in the way they represent direction: through the preposition (English) or through case-marking (German). Within the generative grammar framework, lexical and functional properties have been central to much research into second language acquisition (see, among others, Eubank (1994), Schwartz and Sprouse (1994, 1996), Vainikka and Young-Scholten (1994, 1996a, 1996b) and Hawkins (2001)). The present study tested the knowledge of the prepositional and associated case-marking properties in 30 native English speaking learners of second language German at 3 proficiency levels, compared to 10 native controls, using a forced elicitation task and a quasi-production task. Results show that, although learners follow an incremental development path in their acquisition of both preposition and case, lexical properties emerge before functional properties and hence locational expressions are acquired before directional expressions. However, use of case becomes largely native-like with proficiency, but problems correctly selecting the German prepositions auf and an persist into advanced proficiency. These appear to be connected with the processing complexity of these items for L2 speakers rather than the acquisition of the features they encode. 1. Introduction and Rational