Telicity judgments in L2 English by L1 Slovak speakers

Abstract

The study investigates the acquisition of telicity in L2 English by L1 Slovak speakers as a function of L2 proficiency (measured by a cloze test score), exposure (operationalized as length of stay in an English-speaking country) and instruction type (monolingual vs. bilingual). Telicity judgments were collected from Slovak learners of L2 English (n = 50) and a control group of American English native speakers (n = 15) in two offline acceptability judgment tasks. Two types of telicity encoding were examined: (1) the contribution of the [±quantized] feature of the object argument to predicate telicity, which involves processes in narrow syntax; and (2) the contribution of adverbial modifiers to telicity interpretations, including coercion contexts, which involve processes of aspectual reinterpretation. Based on previous research, it was hypothesized that the contribution of the [±quantized] feature of the object argument to predicate telicity, which is a syntactic phenomenon, will be easier to acquire than aspectual coercion by means of adverbial modifiers, which relies on pragmatic cues. The results indicate that the most significant predictor of telicity judgments based on syntactic cues is L2 proficiency, while length of stay affects telicity judgments in predicate categories involving coercion contexts.