THE THEMATIC VERB MOVEMENT IN INITIAL L3 FRENCH ACQUISITION

This study examines the acquisition of thematic verbs in relation to adverbs and negation by adult third language French beginners who were advanced L2 English learners of L1 Chinese. Results from a grammaticality judgment test indicate that the L2 Status Factor Hypothesis of Bardel and Falk (2007), which views acquired L2 morphosyntax as the primary factor affecting syntactic development in initial L3 acquisition, provides a partial explanation of the observed behavior in which traces of L1 influence are apparent. We propose that, following Schwartz and Sprouse (1994), previously acquired linguistic knowledge constitutes transfer in early L3 development and that early L3 interlanguage grammars involve the use of alternative resources made available by Universal Grammar (UG) instead.