Chapter published in:
Focus on Additivity: Adverbial modifiers in Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages
Edited by Anna-Maria De Cesare Greenwald and Cecilia Andorno
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 278] 2017
► pp. 237–264

Additive focus particles in German-speaking learners of Italian as L2

| Goethe Universität, Frankfurt am Main
German-speaking learners of Italian as L2 often misplace the additive focalizer anche (‘also, too’) in the sentence and therefore fail at conveying the intended meaning. The present study investigates mistakes through a multiple-choice task in which participants choose the word order that sounds the most correct among alternatives that only differ in the positioning of anche. Short dialogues force the interpretation towards either an object-, a predicate- or a subject scope. Data shows that learners master the use of additive focalizers in structures with scope on the subject, rather than in those with scope either on the predicate or on the object. Moreover, learners tend to transfer the position of additive focalizers in the sentence from their L1, independent of the scope to be realized.
Keywords: additive focalizers, L2 acquisition, transfer, error analysis
Published online: 24 August 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.278.08cal
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