Development of the form and meaning of definiteness in Russian-speaking learners of Swedish

The study investigates the development of definiteness in two groups of Rus-sian-speaking learners of Swedish, one beginner group and one more advancedgroup. While Russian does not have articles, Swedish expresses definitenessthrough a complex noun-phrase (NP) structure. Using an oral elicitation task,the study examines the learners’ ability to produce morphemes that encode(in)definiteness, their ability to accurately choose between indefinite and defi-nite forms, and the relationship between these two abilities. Findings includethat the complex NP structure emerged gradually while there was no evidentdevelopment with regard to meaning. Initially, however, learners who used themorphemes more also tended to overuse them, while later in development thosewho produced many morphemes were also more likely to use them accurately.The paper thus demonstrates that the acquisition of a morphosyntactic form andthe association of this form with its meaning are two separate processes to someextent