Publication details
Morphosyntactic patterns in adult learners with limited literacy
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| Year of publication | 2024 |
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| Description | Low or no adult literacy is widespread in new migrations. In addition, migrants very often experience social marginalisation and thus have little exposure to the target language. Whether these sociolinguistic variables produce differences in the development of an additional language has yet to be verified, as research on migrants' L2 is still peripheral in the broader field of second language acquisition. This lack of attention has not only deprived this discipline of the social relevance that characterised its beginnings (Young-Scholten 2013), but is also problematic on a theoretical level, as working with convenience samples undermines the reliability of research results (Andringa & Godfroid 2020; Plonsky 2023; Tarone et al. 2009). I will report some data from research I conducted at the University of Palermo (Mocciaro 2020), which involved a longitudinal collection of data on the language production of 20 adult migrants who had recently landed on Italian shores from sub-Saharan Africa and Bangladesh. The analysis of the data, conducted within the functionalist framework of the “basic variety” (Klein & Perdue 1997), brought to light non-target constructions that involve an overgeneralisation of functional elements that learners are acquiring (e.g. copula, light verbs), in order to cover the functional spaces of other (morphological) forms that have not yet been acquired. The focus is on the be- (copula) and do- (light verb) constructions, where verbal information is distributed over two formatives. In the be-constructions, the be-form conveys temporal and/or person information (in place of the absent morphology), while a non-inflected form of the verb expresses the lexical content (era mangio ‘(letter.) I was I eat' (target form: mangia-vo [I ate]’). In do-constructions, the do-form expresses ‘verbness/activity’ and is followed by a pure non-inflected lexical verb (io fare:INF cucinare:INF ‘I cook’). Similar constructions have been observed in L2 Dutch and L2 German (Benazzo & Starren 2007; Pfaff 1992; Starren 2001; see also Vainikka et al. 2017 for other morphosyntactic patterns in L2 English). We may therefore be dealing with a more general phenomenon that characterises interlanguages that develop naturalistically and under low contact conditions, and perhaps in learners with low literacy skills. Although further research is needed to test this hypothesis, the specific patterns described here would have gone unnoticed by analysing only language classes or, in general, learners with a high level of education. |