Argument structure and lexicon : cross-linguistic studies in English L2 and Japanese L2

![CDATA[This cross-linguistic study investigates the acquisition of non-canonical mapping between thematic roles (e.g. Agent, Patient) and grammatical functions (e.g. Subject, Object) in second language (L2), which is commonly held to be problematic for L2 learners. Non-canonical mapping may be triggered structurally by discourse-pragmatic information (e.g. causatives, passives) or lexically (e.g., unaccusatives, psych verbs). This issue is investigated with two groups of learners on opposite constellations i.e., Japanese L1 speakers of English L2 (N=22) and English speaking learners of Japanese L2 (N=13). The metrics sued for development is Processability Theory (PT) (Pienemann, Di Biase & Kawaguchi 2005). Specifically we look at: (i) the acquisition of verbs requiring non-canonical mapping (e.g. unaccusatives, psych verbs, passives and causatives) and (ii) the relationship between the L2 speakers’ ability to produce non-canonical mapping and (a) their vocabulary size (Nation & Beglar 2007), and (b) their syntactic development. Assuming that the lexicon drives grammar (Bresnan 2001), the L2 lexical size may be a broad indicator of L2 comprehension. However, given the rich qualitative range of the verb lexical category, a broadly defined lexical size may not predict the ability to produce the appropriate grammatical construction with verbs that behave non-canonically. Elicitation tasks comprised a lexical size test and a translation task. Despite the typological distance between the two languages results show similar outcomes for both groups: non-canonical mapping is acquired later than canonical mapping. However, while all types of non-canonical mapping are acquired only after canonical mapping as PT predicts, vocabulary size partly predicts the grammatical skills necessary to produce non-canonical mapping. Both low and middle lexical size groups showed problems with non-canonical mapping.]]