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Annette Fahrner (verteidigt)

Poster

The Acquisition of German "es" constructions by Spanish-speaking Learners of German as a Foreign Language

1. SupervisorProf. Dr. Martin Hilpert
2. SupervisorProf. Dr. Daniel Jacob
Abstract

My PhD project lies in the field of Second Language Acquisition and contrastive analysis. I aim to investigate how Spanish-speaking adults acquire German constructions containing the pronoun "es" (i.e. "it"). The theoretical framework is Construction Grammar and the usage-based approach. The general hypothesis is as follows: the grammatical complexity of a German "es" construction is not crucial to the effort Spanish learners have to make in order to acquire that construction. However, the most important factor is the frequency of a construction in spoken German that learners hear everyday. Thus, I expect my empirical study to show that few mistakes are made with highly frequent constructions and vice versa.

DisciplinLinguistics
LanguagesGerman, Spanish
Research DirectionSecond Language Acquisition, Construction Grammar
KeywordsConstruction Grammar, Second Language Acquisition, usage-based models