The (under)use of partitive objects in Estonian, German and Dutch learners of Finnish

• Autores: Marianne Spoelman
• Localización: Twenty years of learner corpus research: looking back, moving ahead / Sylviane Granger (ed. lit.), Gaëtanelle Gilquin (ed. lit.), Fanny Meunier (ed. lit.), 2013, ISBN 978-2-87558-199-0, págs. 423-433
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • The use of the partitive case has often been acknowledged as problematic for L2 learners of Finnish. The current study, focusing on Estonian, German and Dutch learners of Finnish as a foreign language, therefore aimed to explore the influence of prior linguistic knowledge on learners' (under)use of partitive objects. Research materials were selected from the International Corpus of Learner Finnish and aligned with the CEFR profi-ciency scales. Considering the outcomes, the finding that partitive object underuse errors occurred significantly less frequently in the Estonian learner corpus than in the other learner corpora (positive L1 influence resulting from the similarities between object case-marking in Finnish and Estonian) seemed to be contradicted by the frequent replacement of partitive singular by nominative singular objects in all learner corpora, including the Estonian learner corpus. However, it was shown that the underuse errors of this type observed from the Estonian learner corpus particularly reflected negative influence of L1 morphology (triggered by phonological similarity between Finnish nominative singular and Estonian partitive singular forms), while those observed from the other learner corpora indicated a tendency to leave the object uninflected for the sake of simplification. The rapid decrease of this underuse error category with increasing L2 proficiency observed from all learner corpora provides supporting evidence suggesting an inverse relation between L2 proficiency and the likelihood of simplification strategies or negative L1 influence to occur.