Definiteness in second language acquisition: Preliminary results regarding Indo-European and Afroasiatic languages

Abstract

This article describes and compares the way in which definiteness is expressed in Romance (Catalan and Spanish) and some Slavic and Afro-Asian languages. We present some difficulties concerning definite nominal expressions that speakers of Ukrainian, Egyptian Arabic and Amazigh as L1 face when learning Catalan or Spanish as a second language and we show that the acquisition of definite determiners is, in general, problematic regardless of the typological nature of the L1. We also indicate that these difficulties can be related to the emergence of different determiner layers in the higher functional field in the nominal domain during the acquisition process.