Conférence de Sarah Schimke le 23 avril

[aroui@tiscali.co.uk]

L'UMR 7023 a le plaisir de vous convier, dans le cadre des séances de 
son séminaire,

le lundi 23 avril 2007
10h00-12h00, Université Paris VIII, 2, rue de la liberté, 93200 Saint-
Denis (métro Saint-Denis Université, ligne 13), bâtiment D, salle D 
143,

à une conférence de Sarah Schimke (Nimègue, Max-Planck-Institute for 
Psycholinguistics)

intitulée

"Finiteness in native speakers and L2-learners of German"

Résumé :

According to a functional analysis of finiteness (Klein, 1998), the 
finite verb form in sentence (1) establishes the linking between the 
predicate and the topic of the sentence and thereby marks an 
assertion. 
(1) Peter schreibt einen Brief.
‘Peter  writes   a       letter’.
However, second language learners who acquire German in an immersion 
setting have been shown to first form morphologically and syntactically 
infinite sentences, such as (2) (Dimroth et al., 2003).
(2) Peter einen Brief schreiben 
‘Peter a       letter    write  ‘.
Dimroth et al. (2003) claim that this reflects a system of structuring 
utterances and of expressing assertions that is different from the 
target system: utterances contain a topic-part and a predicate-part, 
and not morphosyntactic finiteness, but the pure juxtaposition of these 
two parts marks assertions. 
In this presentation, I'm going to discuss comprehension experiments 
which were designed to test this claim. They were conducted with 
beginning and intermediate Turkish learners of and with a control group 
of native speakers of German.
It was found that beginning learners who have an infinite utterance 
structure in their production also process these types of sentences 
more easily and interpret them as marking assertions, whereas native 
speakers of German process finite sentences more easily and often don’t 
interpret infinite sentences as marking assertions. Finally, learners 
in an intermediate stage who already construct finite utterances in 
their production were found to still process infinite structures more 
easily, but to a lesser degree than the less advanced group.
These results show that investigating comprehension can lend 
additional support to the model by Dimroth et al. (2003), and shed more 
light on how the transition from the infinite to the finite stage takes 
place.

Dimroth, C., Gretsch, P., Jordens, P., Perdue, C. and Starren, M. 
(2003). Finiteness in GermanicLanguages: A stage-model for first and 
second language development. In Dimroth, C. and Starren, M. (ed.), 
Information Structure and the Dynamics Language Acquisition. Amsterdam, 
Benjamins, 65-93.
Klein, W. (1998). Assertion and finiteness. In Dittmar, N. and Penner, 
Z. (ed.), Issues in the Theory of Language Acquisition. Bern: Lang, 225-
245.






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