“Literatur ist ein Plural Begrif”
(“Literature is a plural concept”) –GUNTER GRASS
Over the past few decades, numerous studies have focused on article, noun type, or plural marking errors amongst second language (L2) learners of English at all different proficiency levels.
Researchers have spent their time examining the distributions of such errors amongst different populations and theorizing the sources of them. While most of the previous work has focused on adult L2 learners (Master, 1997, 2002; Trenkic, 2008; Whong, Gil, et al., 2013b), there has also been some work with children (Barner & Snedeker, 2005, 2006; Gathercole, 1985). This body of research has produced a number of hypotheses on relating to the acquisition of articles, noun types, and semantic features: the Article Choice Parameter and the Fluctuation Hypothesis (Ionin, 2003, 2006; Ionin, Ko, & Wexler, 2003; Ionin et al., 2004; Ionin, Zubizarreta, & Maldonado, 2008;
Ionin, Zubizarreta, & Philippov, 2009), the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Lardiere, 2007, 2008, 2009a, 2009b), the Bottleneck Hypothesis (Slabakova, 2009a, 2009b), among others.
In this chapter, we will provide an overview of key findings in both seminal and more recent L2 English article and noun type acquisition research. This chapter will be divided into three main parts. The first part of Section 5.1 will look at L2-English article acquisition research. It will begin with an overview of early L2 article acquisition studies and then give a detailed summary of how the feature definiteness, as defined in Chapter 2, has been applied to explain patterns of article misuse. In the second part of Section 5.1, we will look at classroom intervention studies regarding L2-Englsih article acquisition and misuse. Section 5.2 will shift the focus to theoretical studies on
the role of semantic features as defined in Chapter 2. Section 5.3, will look at the only study, to my knowledge, that investigates the acquisition of both L2-English articles and noun types. In the final section, we will consider the implications of and gaps in the findings of the previous research. This will set the stage for the present study which explores the acquisition of L2-English articles and noun types by L1 speakers of Mandarin in an Instructed Second Language acquisition (ISLA) context.
5.1 | Second Language Acquisition of Articles
Prior to the early 2000s, many studies focused on the semantic properties of ‘specific referent’, that is the noun in reference is a unique individual in the set denoted by the noun phrase (NP), and ‘hearer knowledge’, or the knowledge of the noun in reference that the hearer holds as assumed by the speaker. This work was later developed into the Article Choice Parameter (ACP) by Ionin (2003). Following this seminal piece of work, much research was carried out trying to provide evidence for or reject the ACP and the Fluctuation Hypothesis (FH) (Ionin et al., 2004).
Around 2010, many studies moved away from the notions of the ACP and FH and began to consider the effects of classroom intervention on the second language acquisition of articles. This section has two main goals: first, it will discuss previous research surrounding the ACP and FH in the second language acquisition and misuse of articles and, second, it will review intervention studies that investigated the effect of instruction on the second language acquisition of articles.
Previous Research on Second Language Article Acquisition & Misuse Between 2000 and 2010, much research was conducted considering article acquisition and misuse.
Early studies focused on the semantic properties of ‘specific referent’ and ‘hearer knowledge’, which were both considered to be required for use of the definite article. These concepts were later developed into the Article Choice Parameter (Ionin, 2003) and the Fluctuation Hypothesis (Ionin et al., 2004). The Article Choice Parameter (ACP) (Ionin, 2003, p. 12) was a proposed parametric variation that that suggested the possibility that two-article languages select articles on the basis of either specificity or definiteness. In languages that take the Definiteness Setting, such as English, “articles are distinguished on the basis of definiteness” and in languages that select the Specificity Setting, like Samoan, “articles are distinguished on the basis of specificity.” These two possibilities are visually represented in Table 5.1 below (Ionin et al., 2004, p. 13).
Table 5.1. Article grouping cross-linguistically: Two-article languages
Article Grouping by Specificity Article Grouping by Definiteness
+definite –definite +definite –definite
+specific +specific
–specific –specific
Ionin (2003) conducted a series of studies using a written elicitation task and a forced-choice elicitation task. Her results suggested that L2 learners who lack an article system in their L1 fluctuate between correct and incorrect usage of definite and indefinite articles in English. She hypothesized that errors would be made more frequently in either [+definite, –specific] or [–
definite, +specific] contexts, see examples in (3) and (4) below (Ionin et al., 2004), because of the two possible article groupings as proposed by the ACP, and L2 learners from an article-less L1 then fluctuate between the two parameter-settings of the ACP. The Article Choice Parameter was then used to explain the experimental results obtained in the three studies of Korean and Russian adult learners of L2 English conducted by Ionin (2003) and published in Ionin et al. (2004).
(3) [+definite, –specific]: Narrow scope
a. Reporter: Several days ago, Mr. James Peterson, a famous politician, was murdered! Are you investigating his murder?
b. Police officer: Yes. We are trying to find (a, the, –) murder of Mr. Peterson—
but we still don’t know who he is.
(4) [+definite, –specific]: No scope interactions, denial of speaker knowledge a. Bill: I’m looking for Erik. Is he home?
b. Rick: Yes, but he’s on the phone. It’s an important business matter. He is talking to (a, the, –) owner of his company! I don’t know who that person is—but I know that this conversation is important to Erik.
(5) [–definite, +specific]: Wide scope
a. Jeweler: Hello, this is Robertson’s Jewelry. What can I do for you ma’am? Are you looking for some new jewelry?
b. Client: Not quite—I heard that you also buy back people’s old jewelry.
d. Client: In that case, I would like to sell you (a, the, –) beautiful silver necklace.
It is very valuable
(6) [–definite, +specific]: No scope interactions, explicit speaker knowledge
a. Roberta: Hi, William! It’s nice to see you again. I didn’t know that you were in Boston.
b. William: I am here for a week. I am visiting (a, the, –) friend from college—
his name is Sam Brown, and he lives in Cambridge now.
Following the seminal work by Ionin (2003), Ionin et al. (2004) conducted a study to further support the proposal that L2 learners of English fluctuate between the two settings of the ACP, that is selecting articles on the basis of definiteness and/or selecting articles on the basis of specificity. Ionin et al. (2004) conducted a forced-choice elicitation task that covered four contexts, as well as previous-mention definites and partitive indefinites—both of which are obligatorily specific. The task included 76 dialogues that covered four contexts, as seen in examples (7)–(10) (from Ionin et al., 2004, pp. 22-23).
(7) [+definite, +specific]
a. Kathy: My daughter Jeannie loves that new comic strip about super mouse.
b. Elise: Well, she is in luck! Tomorrow, I’m having lunch with (a, the, –) creator of this comic strip—he is an old friend of mine. So I can get his autograph for Jeannie!
(8) [+definite, –specific]
a. Bill: I’m looking for Erik. Is he home?
b. Rick: Yes, but he’s on the phone. It’s an important business matter. He is talked to (a, the, –) owner of his company! I don’t know who that person is—but I know that this conversation is important to Erik.
(9) [–definite, +specific]
a. Meeting on a street
b. Roberta: Hi, William! It’s nice to see you again. It didn’t know that you were in Boston.
c. William: I am here for a week. I am visiting (a, the, –) friend from college—
his name is Sam Brown, and he lives in Cambridge now.
(10) [–definite, –specific]
a. Chris: I need to find your roommate Jonathan straight away.
b. Clara: He is not here—he went to New York.
c. Chris: Really? In what part of New York is he staying?
d. Clara: I don’t really know. He is staying with (a, the, –) friend—but he didn’t tell me who that is. He didn’t leave me any phone number or address.
To explain their results, Ionin et al. (2004), propose the two-part Fluctuation Hypothesis (FH):
“(a) L2 learners have full access to UG principles and parameter-settings” and “(b) L2 learners fluctuate between different parameter-settings until the input leads them to set the parameter to the appropriate value” (p. 16).
The way in which Ionin (2003) and Ionin et al. (2004) present the ACP and FH does not appear to be very clear and could lead to misunderstanding. While the ACP considers article systems that encode definiteness and specificity, this can be viewed as cutting across a conceptual distinction being as both definite and indefinite articles (e.g., English) can receive either [+specific] or [–
specific] interpretations regardless of any morphological marking for it. The opposite can be said about an article system that has morphology for specificity but not for definiteness being as a specific or non-specific articles (e.g., Samoan) could receive either [+definiteness] or [–definite]
interpretations regardless of any morphological marking for it. This becomes problematic when [+definite, –specific] contexts are considered more closely: “While indefinite environments take well the subdivision into specific and non-specific both conceptually … and linguistically …, this is less clearly the case for definite contexts” (p. 7). In other words, the claim made by Ionin et al.
(2004) that a phrase like “whoever is your father” is [+definite, –specific] appears to be weakly based on the premise that possessive nominal phrases are “always grammatically definite in English” (Trenkic, 2008, p. 7). Trenkic goes on to state that this claim overlooks a number of issues, such as the fact that possessives are not semantically compatible with indefinites, and “more crucially, that the given phrase [is] not even headed by a possessive but by an indefinite pronoun”
(p. 7).
Ionin et al. (2004) gathered their results via a forced-choice elicitation task (Ionin et al., 2003)
specific] dialogues, the error rates for the Russian and Korean learners were 33% and 14%
respectively, whereas the [–definite, +specific] contexts, the error rates for the two groups for the learners were slightly higher at 36% and 22% respectively (Ionin et al., 2004). In contrast, both [–
definite, –specific] and [+definite, +specific] resulted in error rates below 10% for Russian learners and below 5% for Korean learners. The authors attribute these results to a systematic pattern of misuse errors amongst these learners based on [±definite] and [±specific], and, therefore, support the Fluctuation Hypothesis which states that learner errors will fluctuate between possible UG parameter settings in the ACP—the definiteness setting and the specificity setting—until there is sufficient evidence from the input to select the correct settings.
In order to look at performance across the four contexts, Ionin et al. (2004) divided the learners into four possible patterns of article use, seen in (11)–(15) below.
(11) Definiteness Pattern: correct parameter-setting a. ≥75% the use in [+definite, +specific] contexts b. <25% the overuse in [–definite, –specific] contexts c. One of the following:
i. no specificity distinction with definites or indefinites OR ii. a small (<25%) specificity distinction with definites only OR iii. a small (<25%) specificity distinction with indefinites only (12) Fluctuation Pattern:
a. ≥75% the use in [+definite, +specific] contexts b. <25% the overuse in [–definite, –specific] contexts c. Evidence for a specificity distinction:
i. more overuse of the with [+specific] than with [–specific] indefinites ii. less use of the with [–specific] than with [+specific] indefinites d. Evidence for a definiteness distinction:
i. more overuse of the with [+specific] definites than with [+specific]
indefinites
ii. the specificity distinction with indefinites does not exceed the specificity distinction with definites by more than 50% (and vice versa)
(13) Specificity Pattern: parameter-mis-setting a. ≥75% the use in all [+specific] contexts
b. <25% the use in all [–specific] contexts
c. Equally high use of the with [+specific] definites and [+specific] indefinites (14) Partial Fluctuation Pattern:
a. ≥75% the use in [+definite, +specific] contexts b. <25% the overuse in [–definite, –specific] contexts c. One of the following:
i. the specificity distinction is made only with definites OR ii. the specificity distinction is made only with indefinites OR
iii. the specificity distinction is much (>50%) larger with indefinites than with definites (or vice versa)
(15) Miscellaneous Pattern: any patterns that do not fit into the above four categories Following the publication of their results, Ionin et al. (2004) came under intense scrutiny because while both learner groups showed significant effects with regard to definiteness and specificity, individual results did not hold up. Nine learners showed Partial Fluctuation Patterns and another thirteen showed Miscellaneous Patterns which could not be accounted for by the Fluctuation Hypothesis. The authors argue that only four of the learners show random behavior, with the other nine leaning towards Fluctuation Patterns or Definiteness Patterns. The reason for not classifying these learners as one of the particular patterns is because they fall below the somewhat arbitrary cut-off of 75% of article use which matches either the Fluctuation Pattern, the Definiteness Pattern, or the Specificity Pattern. In the end, there does not appear to be any recognizable effect of the L1 on the behavior of the learners in this study. This has led to alternative explanations of article acquisition such as R. Hawkins et al. (2006) and Trenkic (2008), which will be discussed later.
Another point of interest in the research conducted by Ionin et al. (2004) is that the data from their written production task did not provide enough [+definite, –specific] contexts to test the theory of [–definite] article overuse. In addition, there was some observance of omission of the [+definite] article in such contexts. Ionin et al. (2004, p. 48) give the examples in (16)–(18) as learner errors taken from the production data of their study.
(16) My husband met us in airport and drove us to our new home. Then we went to our neighbours’ house for the small party.
(17) When I was a boy, I found a mine (I mean, an armour, from the World War Two). I liked this kind of things, so I kept it initially in the secret place in our yard and then at home.
(18) On Thanksgiving week-end we went to NY for the first time. We took the room in the New-Yorker Hotel and went outside to seethe town.
These examples clearly show overuse of the [+definite] article with [–definite, +specific] contexts, since the speaker appears to have a particular referent in mind, according to Ionin et al. (2004).
The way in which Ionin et al. (2004) operationalize specificity in their study can be viewed as problematic. For example, specificity was often operationalized via the notion of noteworthiness.
Ionin et al. (2004, p. 5) define noteworthiness as when “a Determiner Phrase (DP) of the form [D NP] is … [+specific], then the speaker intends to refer to a unique individual in the set denoted by the NP and considers this individual to possess some noteworthy property”. The vague notion and definition of noteworthiness becomes problematic in the formulation of the FH using the ACP. For example, Trenkic (2008, p. 8) suggests that the idea of noteworthiness “may inadvertently lead to the blurring of [the] distinction” between having a referent in mind (speaker specificity) and intending to refer to it (intent to refer). Ionin et al. (2004) label this difference between
“speaker knowledge” and “no speaker knowledge” as a way of operationalizing specificity in their study. In other words, two unrelated factors were often conflated: the speaker’s explicit statement of her familiarity with the person/object being talked about and the intention to refer to a person/object (specificity). Therefore, Ionin et al. (2004) were effectively testing the distinction between “intent to refer” and “speaker specificity” rather than actually testing [±specific], meaning that the ACP does not adequately explain the results of their study. Furthermore, the results of the production task presented by Ionin et al. (2004) are far less conclusive than the results for the elicitation task, where the contexts could be more easily controlled.
R. Hawkins et al. (2006) conducted a study to test the FH and claims made by Ionin et al. (2004) in two L2 upper-intermediate/advanced populations of L2-English learners (Japanese and Greek).
Being as Greek encodes definiteness, they hypothesized that the L1-Greek speakers would transfer the marking of definiteness from Greek into their interlanguage grammar of English, while the L1-Japanese speakers would fluctuate between selecting English articles on the basis of
definiteness (the correct setting) or specificity (the incorrect setting). To test their hypothesis, they devised a forced-choice elicitation task very similar to that used by Ionin et al. (2004) but with some minor modifications such as number (see R. Hawkins et al., 2006, pp. 115-116). The results for the Japanese speakers supported the FH as they found this group fluctuated between interpreting the as a marker of definiteness and specificity, but the same could not be said about the Greek speakers. The Greek speakers, on the other hand, overwhelmingly selected the/a to mark definiteness and specificity. They take these results to suggest that fluctuation does not happen as part of a “general L2 developmental phenomenon” (p. 18). Instead, speakers of an L1 that does have an article system that marks definiteness establish early on that English articles also mark definiteness. They further argue that the individual results of the Japanese speakers in their study do not suggest fluctuation patterns as posited by the FH but instead propose an alternative account of the data within UG based on Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz, 1993; Harley & Noyer, 1999). More specifically, R. Hawkins et al. (2006) explained the transfer of features from the L1 to the L2 at the level of feature assembly in the lexicon and then insertion into syntactic terminal nodes.
Snape et al. (2006) also tested the Fluctuation Hypothesis with L1 speakers of Japanese, Mandarin, and Spanish at an intermediate proficiency level. Their empirical data came from previous studies conducted by Reid et al. (2006), who tested 14 Japanese and 9 Spanish learners of English with an intermediate proficiency level, and Ting (2005), who tested 8 Mandarin learners and 5 Spanish learners of English at an intermediate proficiency level. When taking these data together, the findings of Snape et al. (2006) support the FH for Japanese learners, but not for Spanish learners.
Furthermore, the L1-Mandarin speaker data also did not fluctuate between definiteness and specificity as predicted. They take these data to further reject the patterns posited by the FH.
A study conducted by Trenkic (2008) in a classroom environment using a forced-choice elicitation task explored the acquisition of articles with 43 L1-Mandarin, L2-English participants. In her study, she employed the notion of explicitly stated knowledge (ESK) to further investigate the contexts and conclusions in Ionin et al. (2004) and “test the predictions that specificity (i.e. speaker intent to refer) plays a role in L2 learners’ article choices on a forced-choice elicitation task]” (p.
12). In her study, [±definite] was crossed with three combinations of [±specific] and [±ESK], yielding the six contexts seen in )–(.
(19) [–definite], [+specific; +ESK]
(20) [–definite], [–specific; –ESK]
(21) [–definite], [+specific; –ESK]
(22) [+definite], [+specific; +ESK]
(23) [+definite], [–specific; –ESK]
(24) [+definite], [+specific; –ESK]
Each context in )–( was represented by four items in a forced-choice elicitation task. Examples of each item can be found below (Trenkic, 2008, pp. 12-13).
(25) [–definite], [+specific; +ESK]: The speaker has a specific referent in mind, and she explicitly states that she knows the identity of the person being talked about.
a. Gary: I heard that you just started college. How do you like it?
b. Melissa: It’s great! My classes are very interesting.
c. Gary: That’s wonderful. And do you have fun outside of class?
d. Melissa: Yes. In fact, today I’m having dinner with (a, the, –) girl from my class—her name is Angela, and she is really nice!
(26) [–definite], [–specific; –ESK]: The speaker does not have a specific referent in mind, and she explicitly denies that she knows the identity of the person being talked about.
a. At a university
b. Professor Clark: I’m looking for Professor Anne Peterson.
c. Secretary: I’m afraid she is busy. She has office hours right now.
d. Professor Clark: What is she doing?
e. Secretary: She is meeting with (a, the, –) student, but I don’t know who it is.
(27) [–definite], [+specific; –ESK]: The speaker has a specific referent in mind, but she explicitly denies that she knows the identity of the person being talked about.
a. Office gossip
b. Gina: …and what about the others?
c. Mary: Well, Dave is single, Paul is happily married, and Peter… he is engaged to (a, the –) merchant banker, but none of us knows who she is, or what she’s like.
(28) [+definite], [+specific; +ESK]: The speaker has a specific referent in mind, and she explicitly states that she knows the identity of the person being talked about.
a. Paul: Do you have time for lunch?
b. Shelia: No, I’m very busy. I am meeting with (a, the, –) president of our university, Dr. McKinely; it’s an important meeting.
(29) [+definite], [–specific; –ESK]: The speaker does not have a specific referent in mind, and she explicitly denies that she knows the identity of the person being talked about.
a. Bill: I’m looking for Erik. Is he home?
b. Rick: Yes, but he’s on the phone. It’s an important business matter. He’s
b. Rick: Yes, but he’s on the phone. It’s an important business matter. He’s