Cross-linguistic influences in the acquisition of Italian as a foreign language: a syntactic and lexical analysis

Among the large number of unsolved problems in applied linguistics the role of the mother tongue in second language acquisition occupies a central place. This subfield of SLA has come to be known as ‘language transfer’, the term most frequently used to indicate the learner’s reliance on L1. Contrastive analysis hypothesis and current approaches to SLA predict language transfer between two languages, the native language and the target language. It is clear, however, that this does not capture the full extent of the phenomenon, because L2 learners often have knowledge or at least parts of third and fourth languages. Cross-linguistic influence between native and non-native languages in a European context has been shown to occur primarily in lexis. The effect of grammar and phonology is accorded much less space and importance. For the purpose of this analysis, I will concentrate on the syntactic and lexical levels only