Entering Foreign Lands: How Acceptable Is Extraction from Adjunct Clauses to L1 Users of English in L2 Danish?

TY - JOUR

T1 - Entering Foreign Lands

T2 - How Acceptable Is Extraction from Adjunct Clauses to L1 Users of English in L2 Danish?

AU - Nyvad, Anne Mette

AU - Christensen, Ken Ramshøj

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2025 by the authors.

PY - 2025/4

Y1 - 2025/4

N2 - Adjunct clauses have traditionally been assumed to be syntactic configurations from which extraction is universally impossible. However, numerous studies have challenged this assumption and extraction from finite adjunct clauses has been shown to be acceptable to varying degrees in the Mainland Scandinavian languages, as well as in English. The relative acceptability of extraction appears to depend on a number of factors, including the type of adjunct clause and the type of extraction dependency. Research on L2 learning has shown that learners often transfer properties of their L1 grammar into their L2 during the process of learning a second language. Our previous studies on L1 English and L1 Danish found a surprising contrast in which L1 English users found relativization out of adverbial clauses to be better than L1 Danish users did. Based on these findings, we conducted an L2 acceptability judgment experiment on extraction from three types of finite adjunct clauses in Danish (corresponding to English if-, when- and because-clauses) in order to test whether language-specific parameters related to extractability are transferred from L1 to L2. Our results show that the judgments from L2 Danish speakers are intermediate between and significantly different from L1 English and L1 Danish, which does not suggest a parameter resetting.

AB - Adjunct clauses have traditionally been assumed to be syntactic configurations from which extraction is universally impossible. However, numerous studies have challenged this assumption and extraction from finite adjunct clauses has been shown to be acceptable to varying degrees in the Mainland Scandinavian languages, as well as in English. The relative acceptability of extraction appears to depend on a number of factors, including the type of adjunct clause and the type of extraction dependency. Research on L2 learning has shown that learners often transfer properties of their L1 grammar into their L2 during the process of learning a second language. Our previous studies on L1 English and L1 Danish found a surprising contrast in which L1 English users found relativization out of adverbial clauses to be better than L1 Danish users did. Based on these findings, we conducted an L2 acceptability judgment experiment on extraction from three types of finite adjunct clauses in Danish (corresponding to English if-, when- and because-clauses) in order to test whether language-specific parameters related to extractability are transferred from L1 to L2. Our results show that the judgments from L2 Danish speakers are intermediate between and significantly different from L1 English and L1 Danish, which does not suggest a parameter resetting.

KW - acceptability

KW - adjunct clauses

KW - extractability

KW - second language acquisition

KW - syntactic islands

KW - transfer

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=105003503525&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.3390/languages10040063

DO - 10.3390/languages10040063

M3 - Journal article

AN - SCOPUS:105003503525

SN - 2226-471X

VL - 10

JO - Languages

JF - Languages

IS - 4

M1 - 63

ER -