The gradual expansion of functional categories in L2 acquisition: Evidence from a learner corpus study

The study examines how child L2 learners acquire various functionalcategories and gain access to the syntactic and semantic features encoded in them. Thepresent research investigated child L2 learners’ written production of two targetstructures, collected from a learner corpus including six proficiency levels (age: 8-13),and specifically compared their acquisition of sentential negation and questionformation. The results of the study indicate that child L2 learners acquire certainstructures at different rates and with varying degrees of linguistic complexity. Theanalysis of the learner corpus showed that the acquisition of sentential negation andquestion formation is asynchronous, while the functional categories of NegP, TP, andCP are acquired in a specific sequence. Moreover, the study found that the complexityof the grammatical representations and derivations affects the gradual expansion offunctional categories in L2 grammar. In sum, the findings demonstrate that the orderin which L2 learners acquire two distinct constructions has implications for both theimpact of the distinct linguistic complexity and the gradual development of variousfunctional categories, from a relatively simple to a more complex level.