Page 48 - Diversity in Action

Marco Magnani, Federica Ricci Garotti, and Katharina Salzmann

c. I have three black cats/Mum have worked/Do Peter play tennis?
d. Is mum home?/Can Peter sing?
e. Mum loves rice/Why are you laughing?
f. I suggest that she go home/I wonder why you are laughing

Nevertheless, while all learners follow this universal developmental se-
quence, their rate of progression and level of accuracy may vary. Who will
learn English L2 more quickly? And who will achieve greater accuracy? The
factors at play here are many and varied, and crucial among them is the prox-
imity between L1 and L2. However, while such factors can accelerate learning
or enhance accuracy, they do not alter the fundamental order of develop-
ment.
Producing a deviant L2 form that resembles the L1 pattern is therefore not
an automatic sign of transfer. For example, if an English student of L2 Italian, a
null-subject language, formulates a question as in (4), using an unnecessary
subject (tu ‘you’), does this mean that they are straightforwardly translating
their L1 English structure? Or are they simply going through an earlier uni-
versal developmental stage?

(4) Cosa tu vuoi? (What you want?)

While it may seem tempting to assume that the influence of the L1 is more
significant in this case, extensive SLA research on the acquisition of pronom-
inal subjects suggests otherwise. Even at advanced levels of proficiency,
many learners tend to oversupply overt subjects in the target L2, regardless
of the typological characteristics of the L1 (i.e. whether or not the L1 allows
null subjects).
In this section, we will focus on a number of cases in which, contrary to
what one may expect at first sight, transfer does not occur. On the one hand,
we will show how typological proximity (i.e. the presence of similar, if not
identical, structures between L1 and L2) does not automatically result in pos-
itivetransfer, nordoesitguarantee theimmediateacquisition of theL2struc-
ture. On the other hand, we will examine the reverse scenario, showing that
typological distance (i.e. the presence of substantially different structures in
the two languages) does not necessarily lead to negative transfer or hinder
the learning process.

L1–L2 Proximity without Positive Transfer
Within the framework of Processability Theory, the Developmentally Moder-
ated Transfer Hypothesis (Pienemann et al., 2005) predicts that:

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