L1 English L2 German learners' grammaticality judgments and knowledge of demonstrative pronouns

Second language learners are often faced with difficult decisions while interpreting language. One specific difficulty of discourse is dealing with ambiguity, which is often made more challenging by the fact that second language learners' native language processes may carry over into their second language processes. Some learners may not have received any explicit instruction on how to deal with ambiguity and must rely on internal processing by their interlanguage to make a guess as to what the speaker means. This thesis explores the acquisition of German demonstrative pronouns by second language learners of German whose native language is English. Unlike German, which allows for both personal pronoun usage (er, sie, es etc.) and demonstrative pronoun usage (der, die, das etc.) to refer back to antecedents, English only allows personal pronouns. Thus English native speakers tend to rely on syntactic structure to resolve ambiguous pronoun usage, while German speakers can differentiate antecedents through the use of demonstrative and personal pronouns. Demonstrative pronouns in German typically encode for object pronoun reference, while English does not have an equivalent form. In order to determine how L1 English learners of German deal with this incongruity between English and German pronoun resolution, learners of German in advanced German classes were tested via a grammaticality judgment test to see whether they were able to successfully identify demonstrative pronouns in German as grammatical or if they interpreted the demonstrative to be an error. Additionally, participants were asked to discuss their thoughts on the use of demonstratives and their purpose in German through the use of a post-test interview. The results show that some participants recognize the difference between pronouns in German and can select the appropriate antecedent.

Author dc:creator

• Walter, Daniel Robert

Contributors dc:contributor

• Lovik, Thomas
• Goertler, Senta
• Kraemer, Angelika
• Winke, Paula

• German language--Study and teaching--Foreign speakers
• German language--Grammar, Comparative
• English language--Grammar, Comparative
• German language

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

Language dc:language

English

Identifier

etd:1067
isbn:9781124575285
isbn:1124575286
oclc:931842781
umi:1490887
local:Walter_grad.msu_0128N_10209

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:d.lib.msu.edu:etd_1067