English Inversion in Second Language Acquisition of German Native Speakers

Thesis (M.A.) from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 3,0, 100 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: On the basis of questionnaire data, this study seeks to find a tendency for native languageinfluence in the judgement of German-speaking learners of English. Seeing that the conceptof language transfer has received diverse weight in the history of second language acquisition(SLA), the present account illuminates the issue anew, with a specific linguistic concern.Inversion structures, though not canonical, are very frequent in the German language,whereas the English language offers comparatively rare environments which trigger or allowfor inversions. As previous studies found, language transfer, in regard to word order,emerged when the native language exhibited flexible word order, and the language to belearnt, in contrast, had a rather fixed one. This gave rise to the assumption that Germannatives would generally accept subject-verb inversion in declarative sentences in English,even if for a native speaker of English the structure would not be acceptable. Thus, thesecond language learners are expected to score high on the acceptability rate for themajority of instances of inversion in English, since the German equivalents of the test itemsare basically quite acceptable in German.