L2 Acquisition of English ‘Verb + Prepositional Phrase’ and ‘Verb + Particle’ Constructions by Persian Speakers

Poverty of the stimulus (POS) studies, as noted by Hawkins (2001), contribute to the development and understanding of the SLA process. So as to establish the operation of UG in L2 acquisition, White (2003) offers two conditions to be met. First, the construction investigated should be underrepresented by the L2 input and secondly, the syntactic property should not be derived from the L1. The present paper endeavours to contribute to the body of research on POS from the perspective of distributional syntax as classified by Schwartz and Sprouse (2000). The organization of this paper is as follows: Section 2 reviews the distributional properties of VPPs and VPCs in English. Section 3 offers a syntactic account of VPPs and VPCs within the framework of the Minimalist Program. Section 4 briefly reviews the above structures in Persian. The learnability problem associated with these constructions is discussed in section 5 followed by the methodology in section 6. Sections 7 and 8 present the results and discussion followed by some concluding remarks in section 9.