L2-Learner Varieties by Moroccan Adolescents in French and Dutch

In earlier work on second language acquisition by adults, Klein & Perdue (1997) have shown that L2-learners tend to create their own language system. They do this, not only by trying to follow the grammatical rules of the L2, but also by imposing on their new language system a number of constraints. If the learners do not violate these constraints, chances are that their utterances will be correct and will be understood. Klein & Perdue (1997) call the ‘interlanguage’ that the learners create in this way The Basic Variety. In their study, usually referred to as the ESF-project (European Science Foundation), they based their results on language production data from 40 adult learners of Dutch, English, French, German and Swedish (Klein & Perdue, 1992). They all were in daily contact with the language of their new social environment but they did not receive any second language training in or outside a classroom. The speakers of the Basic Variety are recognizable as non-native speakers rather easily because these constraints can be violated without any problem in the target language. The Basic Variety is simply a reflection of the most frequently used utterance structures and organizational principles. Hence, they use a restricted system that is recognizable right away as that of a non-native speaker of the language in question. On the basis of the analyzed utterances of the ESF-database, Klein & Perdue defined three types of self-imposed constraints: “phrasal constraints which define the patterns in which lexemes may occur, semantic constraints which attribute arguments to particular positions and pragmatic constraints which organize information in connected discourse” (Jordens, 1997:292). In this paper it is investigated if other groups of L2-learners also show fossilization-features. I looked at Moroccan-Arabic speaking learners of Dutch and French as a second language. There were three groups: 12-16 year old learners of L2-French (early years of secondary education), 16-20 year old learners of L2-Dutch (later years of secondary education) and 20-25 year old learners of L2-Dutch (university students). All these learners have a higher education than the informants of the ESFdatabase. Two of these groups learned their second language without any formal training and the third group followed an intensive one-year course in Dutch as a second language. The data consist of grammaticality judgments in the L2 of the learners and of picture description and film fragment description. The theoretical starting point of investigating these constraints is the idea of modular linguistics. According to this approach language consists of a number of modules (such as phonology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics). Not all modules are acquired simultaneously, nor do they all have the same status: some are language specific (e.g. semantics) and others are believed to be universal (e.g. pragmatics). In this paper I focus on the semantic constraints (which are about argument structure, what I would call pragmatics) as formulated by Klein & Perdue (1992) because they offer an interesting opportunity to investigate what happens at the interface of the modules syntax and pragmatics: the syntax of the L2 says it is no problem to violate these constraints but pragmatics tells the L2-learner it is wiser to not violate the constraint. However, if we assume that the learner wants to acquire the language to a level that is comparable to that of a native speaker, (s)he will somehow have to overcome this collision. That is the moment that acquisition could take place and therefore it is also the focus of this paper.