Recent years have seen a growing interest in the role of tasks in second language acquisition. A substantial body of research now exists investigating the effects of different task types and their accompanying instructions on learning. Less is known about how tasks affect intake and the relationship between intake and acquisition. This study investigated the effects of 1) implicit and explicit inductive instructions and 2) various task types on both intake and acquisition of two English grammatical structures. Fifty adult ESL learners enrolled in private language schools in New Zealand were pretested with the help of a timed and an untimed grammaticality judgement test for prior knowledge of negative adverbs and adverb placement and were randomly assigned to either a dictation, an individual reconstruction, or a collaborative reconstruction treatment. Treatments were accompanied by either implicit instructions (containing only practical instructions on how to perform the task) or explicit instructions (drawing participants' attention to the target structures and giving an example of them). Performance on the treatments was taken as a measure of intake, and talk-aloud reports were obtained to gauge participants' awareness during task completion. Gain scores from pretest to posttest and to delayed posttest were taken as an indication of learning effects. The results show that the explicit instructions of the inductive type used in this study were unable to affect participants' intake and acquisition in comparison with the implicit instructions. Also, the three types of treatments did not have an effect on acquisition in many cases. Where there was an effect, the treatments differentially affected intake and acquisition. Dictation led to high intake, but less acquisition, and the individual reconstruction treatment led to low intake, but greater acquisition. The collaborative reconstruction treatment was the most consistent of the three. The cognitively more demanding reconstruction treatments (i.e. those involving the retention of larger amounts of texts over longer periods of time) resulted in greater acquisition than the dictation treatment. The main theoretical implications of the results are that the type of inductive and low-level explicit instructions used in this study were not sufficient to differentially affect intake and acquisition. Other, more explicit types of treatments may be necessary. The results also indicate that task types that are relatively easy, affect intake to a greater extent than more demanding tasks, but that more demanding tasks are more likely to affect acquisition. On a methodological level, the concept of intake was found to be very difficult to operationalise, and it is suggested that additional measures be developed. Finally, the implications for teaching practice are that for relatively complex structures such as negative adverbs and adverb placement exposure to the input with minimal pedagogic intervention may not be sufficient. Teachers may also want to consider the effects of different task types on both intake and acquisition and both teachers and researchers need to be careful in drawing conclusionson the basis of immediate task performance.

Recent years have seen a growing interest in the role of tasks in second language acquisition. A substantial body of research now exists investigating the effects of different task types and their accompanying instructions on learning. Less is known about how tasks affect intake and the relationship between intake and acquisition. This study investigated the effects of 1) implicit and explicit inductive instructions and 2) various task types on both intake and acquisition of two English grammatical structures. Fifty adult ESL learners enrolled in private language schools in New Zealand were pretested with the help of a timed and an untimed grammaticality judgement test for prior knowledge of negative adverbs and adverb placement and were randomly assigned to either a dictation, an individual reconstruction, or a collaborative reconstruction treatment. Treatments were accompanied by either implicit instructions (containing only practical instructions on how to perform the task) or explicit instructions (drawing participants' attention to the target structures and giving an example of them). Performance on the treatments was taken as a measure of intake, and talk-aloud reports were obtained to gauge participants' awareness during task completion. Gain scores from pretest to posttest and to delayed posttest were taken as an indication of learning effects. The results show that the explicit instructions of the inductive type used in this study were unable to affect participants' intake and acquisition in comparison with the implicit instructions. Also, the three types of treatments did not have an effect on acquisition in many cases. Where there was an effect, the treatments differentially affected intake and acquisition. Dictation led to high intake, but less acquisition, and the individual reconstruction treatment led to low intake, but greater acquisition. The collaborative reconstruction treatment was the most consistent of the three. The cognitively more demanding reconstruction treatments (i.e. those involving the retention of larger amounts of texts over longer periods of time) resulted in greater acquisition than the dictation treatment. The main theoretical implications of the results are that the type of inductive and low-level explicit instructions used in this study were not sufficient to differentially affect intake and acquisition. Other, more explicit types of treatments may be necessary. The results also indicate that task types that are relatively easy, affect intake to a greater extent than more demanding tasks, but that more demanding tasks are more likely to affect acquisition. On a methodological level, the concept of intake was found to be very difficult to operationalise, and it is suggested that additional measures be developed. Finally, the implications for teaching practice are that for relatively complex structures such as negative adverbs and adverb placement exposure to the input with minimal pedagogic intervention may not be sufficient. Teachers may also want to consider the effects of different task types on both intake and acquisition and both teachers and researchers need to be careful in drawing conclusionson the basis of immediate task performance.

Master of Arts / Department of Modern Languages / Mary T. Copple / El tema de este estudio es el reconocimiento de los verbos en presente, futuro e imperfecto por parte de estudiantes intermedios y avanzados de español como un segundo idioma. Los estudiantes escucharon los estímulos y asignaron el valor del tiempo en cada oración. En general los avanzados demostraron un mejor dominio en el reconocimiento del valor temporal morfológico de los verbos. Ambos grupos reconocieron con más certeza el presente que el futuro. Los intermedios reconocieron con más facilidad el presente que el imperfecto. Sin embargo, a los avanzados les fue más fácil reconocer el imperfecto que el presente. En este caso los morfemas del imperfecto presentaban aspectos sobresalientes tales como silabas más largas, las tildes y el estrés tónico. Aunque a ambos grupos beneficia la exposición a la lengua, son los intermedios los que necesitan periodos más largos de tiempo expuestos al segundo idioma. Los intermedios requieren más input formal o informal para poder percibir o comprender mejor la temporalidad de los verbos.

This study examines L2 learners’ difficulties in the acquisition of the Spanish subjunctive. In particular, it investigates the interpretations English-speaking L2 learners of Spanish assign to the subjunctive in temporal, concessive, and conditional clauses, where mood choice involves the interaction of morpho-syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic knowledge. In contrast to previous research that has given little attention to the difficulties L2 learners experience, this study hypothesizes they might be attributed to “input traps” resulting from L1 transfer of syntactic and semantic properties of the subjunctive adjuncts and misanalysis of the input due to the lack of integration of different types of information. This study tests this claim by comparing the grammars of English-speaking L2 learners of Spanish with those of native Spanish speakers. If L2 learners share similar patterns with L1 speakers in contexts where both languages behave similarly, and exhibit different patterns from L1 speakers in contexts where both languages behave differently, difficulties should be attributed to L1 influence on the L2. On the other hand, if L2 learners exhibit different patterns from L1 speakers in contexts where semantic or pragmatic features determine the use of the subjunctive, difficulties should be attributed to failures in form-meaning mappings. Data collection involved a Preference Task with three possible options: a sentence with the indicative, with the subjunctive, or no preference. Subjects were asked to select which of the three choices they preferred according to the context presented in the story. Twenty advanced English-speaking L2 learners of Spanish and twenty native speakers from different Spanish-speaking countries, who served as the control group, took part in this study. Results indicate that subjunctive adjuncts present difficulties in L2 acquisition even for advanced L2 learners. Although they exhibit sensitivity to certain subjunctive features and contextual meanings, data reveal that convergence and non-convergence were primarily determined by L1 influence on L2. Crucially, those features absent from the L1 give rise to greater efforts and difficulties in L2 form-meaning mappings of mood selection.

This thesis proposes a novel theory to account for the structural Case facts in Standard Arabic (SA). It argues that structural Nom and Acc Cases are licensed by Verbal Case (VC). Thus it argues against the proposal that structural Case in SA is licensed as a reflex of phi-agreement (Schütze 1997 and Chomsky 2001 crosslinguistically, and Soltan 2007 for SA), and also against the view that structural Case is a [uT] feature on the DP (Pesetsky & Torrego 2001, 2004). After arguing against these two approaches, it is shown that verbless sentences, where the verb is not licensed (by VC), do not witness the licensing of structural Case. Thus verbless sentences provide a context where verbs are not licensed, similar to the embedded subject position of control verbs like ‘try’ (where lexical DPs are not licensed). Investigation of the SA verbal system reveals that SA verbs are licensed through Case checking/assignment by verbal particles. Thus, like DPs, verbs receive a form of Case, which I call VC, represented as unvalued [VC] features on I and v*. Since the VC-assigning particles are Comp elements, I propose that [VC] is valued on I and v* by a valued [VC] feature on Fin (via Agree), which enables I and v* to value the [Case] features on the subject and object as Nom and Acc, respectively. Thus the DP is licensed by the same feature that licenses the verb, which is VC. Given the observation that [T], [phi], and [Mood] do not license Case in SA, I argue for two types of finiteness, Infl-finiteness, related to [T], [Mood], and [phi], and Comp-finiteness, related to [VC]. To account for the Case facts in various SA sentence types, I propose that Fin0 has a [VC] feature iff it selects an XP that has (at least) one I-finiteness feature ([T], [Mood], [phi]) and a categorial [V] feature.

Light verb constructions have been treated as a relevant linguistic topic because they show unique characteristics that are not found in other verb constructions in Korean. Thus, previous studies are mainly focused on specific characteristics: (i) the relationship between light verbs and v and (ii) the affixation of accusative case particles. However, in this thesis, I examine more important issues related to light verb constructions in Korean: (i) how light verb constructions can works as predicates in clauses, (ii) the nature of the relationship between the complement and the light verb in light verb constructions, and (iii) where the complement and the light verb are present in the surface structure in Korean. Operating under the assumption that the light verb construction is a way of presenting a predicative type similar to lexical verbs or adjectives in Korean, I claim that (i) the lexical-semantic and syntactic information of all predicates, including light verb constructions, is determined in the “lexical conceptual structure” (e.g., Levin & Rappaport 1998), (ii) the conceptual categories in the lexical conceptual structure become the lexical items in the lexicon differently in light verb constructions than in lexical verb constructions, and (iii) the light verb construction is built by incorporation which is similar to semantic noun incorporation (e.g., Dayal 2010). In addition, in this thesis I will present new characteristics of light verb constructions in Korean: (i) the function of each component in the light verb construction such as the modifier and the modified item, (ii) the relationship between components in the light verb construction (i.e., s-selection), (iii) the existence of a functional projection between two components (i.e., Event Phrase), and (iv) the generation of the negation particle an ‘not’ under the head of vP.

Linguistic research on adverbs has taken many forms: typological, morphological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic. However, little work has been conducted on adverbs using the tools of quantitative sociolinguistics, and most of that work has focused solely on morphological variation of the -ly suffix. This work addresses the lacuna by examining two adverb phenomena using quantitative variationist methodology. Data come from two large, socially stratified, sociolinguistic corpora of vernacular English. The two corpora contain data collected in Ontario, Canada and in Northern England, and are comprised of the speech of over 150 speakers across all age groups. In the first case study, I examine a claim in usage guides (e.g., Swan 2001) that North American English widely permits pre-auxiliary adverbs in canonical, declarative sentences, while British English prohibits them unless accompanied by contrastive stress. As I show, the varietal differences in speech are not only minimal and unrelated to stress, but instead are highly circumscribed. In addition, I demonstrate that the positioning of adverbs observed here must involve post-syntactic processes. The second case study examines variability in the discourse adverb "actually" and several related adverbials (e.g., "really" and "in fact") and examines the path of grammaticalization (Traugott & Dasher 2002) in the two communities. I demonstrate that Canadians, regardless of sex or education level, prefer the more grammaticalized forms of "actually"; in the UK, the more grammaticalized use is less common, though some young men are leading a shift to the more grammaticalized pattern.

This study examines L2 learners’ difficulties in the acquisition of the Spanish subjunctive. In particular, it investigates the interpretations English-speaking L2 learners of Spanish assign to the subjunctive in temporal, concessive, and conditional clauses, where mood choice involves the interaction of morpho-syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic knowledge. In contrast to previous research that has given little attention to the difficulties L2 learners experience, this study hypothesizes they might be attributed to “input traps” resulting from L1 transfer of syntactic and semantic properties of the subjunctive adjuncts and misanalysis of the input due to the lack of integration of different types of information. This study tests this claim by comparing the grammars of English-speaking L2 learners of Spanish with those of native Spanish speakers. If L2 learners share similar patterns with L1 speakers in contexts where both languages behave similarly, and exhibit different patterns from L1 speakers in contexts where both languages behave differently, difficulties should be attributed to L1 influence on the L2. On the other hand, if L2 learners exhibit different patterns from L1 speakers in contexts where semantic or pragmatic features determine the use of the subjunctive, difficulties should be attributed to failures in form-meaning mappings. Data collection involved a Preference Task with three possible options: a sentence with the indicative, with the subjunctive, or no preference. Subjects were asked to select which of the three choices they preferred according to the context presented in the story. Twenty advanced English-speaking L2 learners of Spanish and twenty native speakers from different Spanish-speaking countries, who served as the control group, took part in this study. Results indicate that subjunctive adjuncts present difficulties in L2 acquisition even for advanced L2 learners. Although they exhibit sensitivity to certain subjunctive features and contextual meanings, data reveal that convergence and non-convergence were primarily determined by L1 influence on L2. Crucially, those features absent from the L1 give rise to greater efforts and difficulties in L2 form-meaning mappings of mood selection.

This thesis proposes a novel theory to account for the structural Case facts in Standard Arabic (SA). It argues that structural Nom and Acc Cases are licensed by Verbal Case (VC). Thus it argues against the proposal that structural Case in SA is licensed as a reflex of phi-agreement (Schütze 1997 and Chomsky 2001 crosslinguistically, and Soltan 2007 for SA), and also against the view that structural Case is a [uT] feature on the DP (Pesetsky & Torrego 2001, 2004). After arguing against these two approaches, it is shown that verbless sentences, where the verb is not licensed (by VC), do not witness the licensing of structural Case. Thus verbless sentences provide a context where verbs are not licensed, similar to the embedded subject position of control verbs like ‘try’ (where lexical DPs are not licensed). Investigation of the SA verbal system reveals that SA verbs are licensed through Case checking/assignment by verbal particles. Thus, like DPs, verbs receive a form of Case, which I call VC, represented as unvalued [VC] features on I and v*. Since the VC-assigning particles are Comp elements, I propose that [VC] is valued on I and v* by a valued [VC] feature on Fin (via Agree), which enables I and v* to value the [Case] features on the subject and object as Nom and Acc, respectively. Thus the DP is licensed by the same feature that licenses the verb, which is VC. Given the observation that [T], [phi], and [Mood] do not license Case in SA, I argue for two types of finiteness, Infl-finiteness, related to [T], [Mood], and [phi], and Comp-finiteness, related to [VC]. To account for the Case facts in various SA sentence types, I propose that Fin0 has a [VC] feature iff it selects an XP that has (at least) one I-finiteness feature ([T], [Mood], [phi]) and a categorial [V] feature.

Linguistic research on adverbs has taken many forms: typological, morphological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic. However, little work has been conducted on adverbs using the tools of quantitative sociolinguistics, and most of that work has focused solely on morphological variation of the -ly suffix. This work addresses the lacuna by examining two adverb phenomena using quantitative variationist methodology. Data come from two large, socially stratified, sociolinguistic corpora of vernacular English. The two corpora contain data collected in Ontario, Canada and in Northern England, and are comprised of the speech of over 150 speakers across all age groups. In the first case study, I examine a claim in usage guides (e.g., Swan 2001) that North American English widely permits pre-auxiliary adverbs in canonical, declarative sentences, while British English prohibits them unless accompanied by contrastive stress. As I show, the varietal differences in speech are not only minimal and unrelated to stress, but instead are highly circumscribed. In addition, I demonstrate that the positioning of adverbs observed here must involve post-syntactic processes. The second case study examines variability in the discourse adverb "actually" and several related adverbials (e.g., "really" and "in fact") and examines the path of grammaticalization (Traugott & Dasher 2002) in the two communities. I demonstrate that Canadians, regardless of sex or education level, prefer the more grammaticalized forms of "actually"; in the UK, the more grammaticalized use is less common, though some young men are leading a shift to the more grammaticalized pattern.