The acquisition of verb and negation placement in L3 German

Abstract

The present study examines the acquisition of the verb-second (V2) word order and non-verb-adjacent negation with object scrambling in intermediate-level L3 German. 64 upper-secondary school students with L1 Norwegian and L2 English were recruited to perform three different elicitation tasks (acceptability judgments, element rearrangement, negation fill-in). The results show that the students generally have acquired the V2 word order, but struggle with non-verb-adjacent negation. Moreover, both previously learned languages seem to exert influence on the acquisition of German verb and negation placement. Whereas L2 English influences the students’ verb placement, transfer from L1 Norwegian is present in their negation placement preferences. Finally, the students’ verb placement accuracy differs depending on the linguistic context (adverbial complexity and verb type), suggesting that V2 is learned in a stepwise fashion.