Vulnerable L2 Semantics: the Case of Russian Dative Subjects

Abstract

Semantics is argued to be a difficult domain in the second language acquisition. An experiment was conducted on the second language (L2) acquisition of the semantics of Russian impersonal constructions with dative subjects. 13 very advanced English speakers of Russian completed a grammaticality judgment (GJT) and a semantic decision task. The GJT showed that L2 learners have a solid knowledge of Russian morphosyntax. The results on the semantic decision test revealed that the lower proficiency speakers do not have semantic intuitions underlying their L2 grammatical structures. The higher proficiency L2 group performed comparably to the native group; nonetheless, there was a difference between the native group and high proficiency L2 speakers. It is suggested in this paper that the syntax-semantics interface is problematic in the L2 learning.