(2011) Processability Theory and German Case Acquisition

Language Learning ISSN 0023-8333

Processability Theory and German

Case Acquisition

Kristof BatenGhent University

This article represents the first attempt to formulate a hypothetical sequence for Ger-man case acquisition by Dutch-speaking learners on the basis of Processability Theory(PT). It will be argued that case forms emerge corresponding to a development fromlexical over phrasal to interphrasal morphemes. This development, however, is subjectto a correction factor due to the principle of direct mapping. In addition, the unmarkedalignment hypothesis allows for a differentiation between similar case contexts (e.g.,preverbal and postverbal nominative or accusative arguments). A cross-sectional studywas performed in order to examine whether the German case system is indeed acquiredaccording to the hypotheses derived from PT. “Fill-in-the-blanks-exercises” were ana-lyzed from 704 Flemish second-language learners of German. The results of the studydo indeed suggest a development in line with PT.

Keywords Processability Theory; sequence of acquisition; German case system;acquisition of German case system; instructed second language acquisition

In the field of second language acquisition (SLA), it is a commonly heldassumption that language acquisition evolves along a developmental sequence,regardless of one’s theoretical approach to SLA. Since Corder (1967, p. 166)formulated the idea of the so-called built-in syllabus, the relatively young fieldof SLA has begun to accumulate an extensive body of research evidence ondevelopmental patterns.1 Some widely known early examples are morphemeorder studies (see, for instance, Burt & Dulay, 1980, for a review of their

I am most grateful to Manfred Pienemann, Klaas Willems, Katja Lochtman, Madeline Lutjeharms,

and the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. The study’s

results were presented at the 8th International Symposium on Processability, Second Language

Acquisition and Bilingualism, held at Verona University, Italy, 15–16 September 2008. I wish

to thank the organizing committee for giving me this opportunity. I gratefully acknowledge the

contribution of the participating teachers and pupils. Any remaining errors and problems are

entirely mine.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Kristof Baten, German De-

partment, Ghent University, Blandijnberg 2, B-9000 Ghent, Belgium. Internet: Kristof.Baten

@UGent.be

Language Learning XX:X, XXXX 2010, pp. 1–51 1C© 2010 Language Learning Research Club, University of MichiganDOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9922.2010.00615.x

Baten Processability Theory and German Case Acquisition

research) and studies on the developmental sequence of syntactic patterns,such as interrogation and negation (see Hatch, 1978). These studies were,however, criticized because of their lack of theoretical explanation (Gregg,1984). In this respect, the research of the ZISA group (Clahsen, Meisel, &Pienemann, 1983) may be seen as a turning point, because, among other things,this group explained sequences through underlying processing strategies thatact as constraints on transformations. Conceptualizing Processability Theory(PT), Pienemann (1998) later discussed the limitations of their approach andfocused the theory by considering SLA as the development of processing skills.

Processability Theory is not restricted to English as a second language (aswas often the case in the initial morpheme order and syntactic sequence studies)or German word order acquisition (as in the ZISA project), but it predictspossible sequences of different structures in different languages. A large bodyof research evidence already exists within the PT framework (e.g., for German:Jansen, 2008; Pienemann, 1998). Chiefly serving a theoretical purpose, thisarticle on German case acquisition from a Dutch-speaking learner’s perspectiveaims to contribute to that growing body of research evidence. The articledevelops a predictive hierarchy for the acquisition of German case based onthe principles of standard and extended PT.

The field of German as a foreign language (GFL) has a considerable amountof empirical evidence at its disposal.2 This evidence deals with developmen-tal sequences of learners with different native languages and discusses adults’and children’s language learning patterns in both natural and instructed lan-guage learning environments. In most cases, these studies were confined toGerman word order rules (e.g., Boss, 1996; Clahsen, 1984; Ellis, 1989; Jansen,20083), but sometimes they also included the acquisition of German morpho-logical features (Diehl, Christen, Leuenberger, Pelvat, & Studer, 2000; KleinGunnewiek, 2000; Pienemann, 1984, 1987). Strikingly, the acquisition of theGerman case system was left out of the picture. Indeed, German case acquisi-tion in an instructed language learning setting has hardly been examined froma developmental point of view.4 As a consequence, Jansen (2008, p. 218) calledthe acquisition of German morphology “a crucial area for future research.”This study on case acquisition takes her advice to heart and aims to give aninitial impetus to further research in this area.

Because PT predicts possible sequences, this theory was adopted as atheoretical basis. The first part of this article will describe the aspects of theGerman case system that are relevant to the discussion. As PT is formalizedwithin Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG), this description will be couchedin an LFG framework. Secondly, the scarce previous research on German

Language Learning XX:X, XXXX 2010, pp. 1–51 2


case acquisition in SLA will be reviewed. Because of the limited literatureavailable in SLA, I will also refer to the relevant research on this matter infirst-language (L1) acquisition. Then PT will be discussed, together with itsrelation to German case acquisition. It will be argued that case forms emergein accordance with a development from lexical over phrasal to interphrasalmorphemes. Such a development will be accounted for by means of the resultsfrom a cross-sectional study.

The German Case System

German has four cases: the nominative, accusative, dative, and genitive. Thesecases primarily designate the different grammatical functions in a sentence. InLFG, grammatical functions indicate the relationship between arguments andpredicational elements to one another (Butt, 2006, 2009). LFG distinguishesthe grammatical functions in (1).

(1) SUBJ OBJ OBJ2 OBL COMP XCOMP ADJUNCT

These grammatical functions, however, “are not inherently identified with anyparticular case in LFG” (Butt, 2009, p. 62). In other words, there is no fixed one-to-one relationship of one particular case form with one particular grammaticalfunction (cf. discussion of examples below). Nevertheless, LFG assumes de-fault case assignments such as the nominative on subjects, the accusative onobjects, and the dative on indirect objects (Butt, 2006). Zaenen, Maling, andThrainsson (1985) referred to these default case assignments as functional orregular case marking.5 Additionally, they also distinguished inherent lexicalcase assignment, which is defined as an idiosyncratic property of a lexicalitem, assigned by a verb, preposition, or adjective.6 This means that lexicalstipulations of a predicate may override the regular case marking. For instance,objects in German can be marked “accusative” or “dative,” depending on theverb (e.g., the dative with intransitive verbs7 such as helfen “to help,” danken“to thank,” and gratulieren “to congratulate”).

In order to discuss case acquisition in SLA, some reduced tabular overviewsof the German case forms as well as some sample sentences will be discussed(because of its decreasing use in modern language usage, the forms and use ofthe genitive case will be left out of the analysis):

Tables 1 and 2 show that the combination of three cases, three genera, andtwo numbers is highly characterized by syncretism. This case syncretism yieldsform-function relationships that are rather complex in comparison to English

3 Language Learning XX:X, XXXX 2010, pp. 1–51


Table 1 German Definite Articles

masculine feminine neuter plural

nominative der die das dieaccusative den die das diedative dem der dem den (+n)

Table 2 German Pronominal System

person nominative accusative dative

singular 1. ich mich mir2. du dich dir3. er ihn ihm

sie sie ihres es ihm

plural 1. wir uns uns2. ihr euch euch3. sie sie ihnen

and Dutch. Dutch, for instance, distinguishes only two definite articles: de formale and female and het for neuter. In the pronominal system there is stilla nominative-accusative distinction, whereas the accusative-dative distinctionhas disappeared, as in most Germanic languages. The PT view on such complexform-function relationships will be discussed further on, because the concep-tualisation of those relationships has important methodological consequences.

With regard to case use, the following sample sentences illustrate the dis-tinction between functional (2) and lexical case marking (3 and 4).

(2) [Der Konig]NP-SUBJ schreibt [seinem Neffen]NP-IO [einen Brief]NP-DO

the-NOM king writes his-DAT nephew. DAT a-ACC letter“The king writes his nephew a letter.”

(3) [Der Konig]NP-SUBJ hilft [seinem Neffen]NP-adv [mit dem Brief]PP-PfK

The- NOM king helps his- DAT nephew. DAT with the- DAT letter“The king helps his nephew with the letter.”

(4) [Der Bote]NP-SUBJ lauft [auf die/der Straße]PP-WP

The-NOM messenger walks on the-ACC/the-DAT street“The messenger walks onto/on the street.”

In (2) each grammatical function corresponds to a specific case, resulting inregular functional case assignment. In (3) the lexical case specification of the



verb helfen overrules the functional case assignment and, as a result, the firstobject takes the dative case. It should be mentioned here that PT actuallyconsiders all case marking licensed by verbs as lexical. Seeing that Germanobjects can be marked “accusative” (5) or “dative” (6), this implies “that for themorphological marking of grammatical objects to be produced, informationhas to be exchanged between the verb and the object” (Pienemann, 1998,p. 168). Conversely, marking of the subject in German is fixed, always beingnominative.8

(5) Der Lehrer unterstutzt [den Schuler]OBJacc

The-NOM teacher supports the-ACC pupil“The teacher supports the pupil.”

(6) Der Lehrer hilft [dem Schuler]OBJdat

The-NOM teacher helps the-DAT pupil“The teacher helps the pupil.”

In (3) and (4) the prepositional phrases show that prepositions also correspondto specific cases. In German, different groups of prepositions exist, dependingon the case they govern: prepositions with an accusative case (e.g., bis, durch,fur, gegen, ohne, um), prepositions with a dative case (e.g., aus, bei, mit, nach,seit, von, zu), and nine prepositions that either take the accusative or the dativecase (an, in, auf, uber, unter, vor, hinter, neben, zwischen). With regard to thelatter group of prepositions, the case marking depends on the differentiationof direction versus location, yielding accusative and dative, respectively. Thisdistinction between prepositions governing a single case versus those governingmore than one will be significant for framing the acquisitional sequence for case.As will become clear in the next sections, it is assumed that case assignment inthe former group will be acquired before case assignment in the latter due to thedifferent procedural skills involved. Prepositions governing the genitive caseexist as well, but their use is largely restricted to written or formal language.Only a few genitive prepositions (e.g., trotz, wahrend, wegen, etc.) are usedin spoken language, but they are not part of the Flemish GFL curriculum.Therefore, they will not be discussed further in this article.

German Case Acquisition

The L1 acquisition of German case marking has been examined extensively(for a review, see Diehl et al., 2000; Eisenbeiss, Bartke, & Clahsen, 2005/2006).These investigations have shown that children, after a caseless phase, first use



the nominative as a default case.9 Later, when the children have learned to dif-ferentiate between nominative and nonnominative forms, they seem to acquireaccusative and dative pronouns before the accusative and dative articles (e.g.,Meisel, 1986; Tracy, 1986). Additionally, the research indicated that regularfunctional case markings appeared before exceptional, lexically determinedones. In the latter category, children initially make mistakes such as usingthe verb helfen with the accusative case (Meisel, 1986; Mills, 1985); helfenrequires the dative. The same tendency was revealed in a study on the natu-ral SLA of Polish, Turkish, and Russian children learning German (Wegener,1995b, p. 342).

In contrast to L1 acquisition, German case acquisition has not been inves-tigated to such a large extent in SLA research, especially when it comes tothe investigation of developmental sequences in a formal context.10 The onlyempirical study so far is the one by the Geneva research group (Diehl et al.,2000), which examined French-speaking L2 learners’ acquisition of Germansyntax, verbal morphology (SV agreement), and nominal morphology (gender,number, and case). Although this study was mainly didactically oriented anddid not incorporate PT, its results are very interesting in relation to case ac-quisition. The researchers made a distinction between noun phrases (NPs) andprepositional phrases (PPs), because they assumed that case acquisition in NPsand PPs would not develop in the same way. With regard to NPs, Diehl et al.(2000) uncovered the following developmental sequence.

Table 3 clearly shows that the acquisition of the German case system ina formal context developed similarly to child language acquisition; that is,French-speaking second-language (L2) learners first used the nominative caseas default, after which they started to differentiate between the different caseforms: first in free variation, later more systematically between the subject andoblique case. When the differentiation among all cases was completed at thelevel of the three-case system, these French-speaking learners also used theaccusative case to mark the object of verbs like helfen. On the other hand,

Table 3 Development of the German Case System in NP

I: One-case system: Only nominative formsII: One-case system: Nominative, accusative and dative forms in free variationIII: Two-case system: Subject in nominative

Objects in accusative and dative, in free variationIV: Three-case system: Systematic marking of nominative subject,

accusative object and dative object



these learners’ language development also differed from child L1 languageacquisition in several respects. In the formal learning environment, an initialphase without case markers did not occur, nor did a preference for accusativeforms. Furthermore, the Geneva research project showed that even advancedlearners still used accusative forms for subjects when these did not take the firstposition in a sentence—a trend that was not demonstrated in L1 research.

Table 3 is a partial adaptation of the sequence table provided by Diehlet al. (2000, p. 364), which also included stages for word order and for ver-bal morphology.11 Remarkably, the Geneva sequence table did not depict theacquisition of case forms in PPs. From a developmental point of view, it istherefore not clear how case acquisition in PPs relates to case acquisition inNPs. However, the Geneva researchers claimed that case acquisition in PPs(especially with regard to the dative case) to some degree developed as it didin NPs but that it nevertheless showed some dissimilarities (Diehl et al., 2000,p. 292). It should be noted, though, that they came to this conclusion withoutportraying an explicit sequence for case acquisition in PPs (as they did forthe NPs). In the one-case system, prepositions were indeed first followed bythe default nominative case, albeit only in nonpronominal PPs.12 Later, theone-case system in PPs was characterized by free variation, but again this onlyheld true for nonpronominal PPs. Personal pronouns were not likely to occur intheir default form after prepositions. Instead, PPs like fur mich (“for me-ACC”)and mit mir (“with me-DAT”) often appeared correctly at this second stage.However, Diehl et al. (2000, pp. 288, 297) contended that the syntagma with furor mit needed to be interpreted as chunks, because similar PPs with nouns, suchas mit dem Madchen (“with the-DAT girl”), generally did not reveal correctcase assignment. It is only from the two-case system onward that prepositionswere no longer followed by nominative forms, but they systematically took anaccusative or dative form. In other words, the French-speaking learners seemedto have discovered the opposition between accusative and dative case sooner inPPs than they did in NPs (Diehl et al., 2000, p. 327; cf. Kwakernaak, 2005, whomade the same assumption concerning Dutch-speaking learners of German).In addition, there were fewer generalizations of accusative case forms in dativecontexts in PPs than in NPs.

The case development in PPs described here does not entirely correspondto the evidence found in L1 research. Indeed, German children did not usenominative forms in PPs. However, they did generalize accusative forms indative contexts (Mills, 1985), which means that the accusative was acquiredbefore the dative in PPs.13 The latter finding is not absolute, however. OtherL1 research indicated that the accusative and the dative were acquired virtually



simultaneously in PPs (Klinge, 1990; Meisel, 1986). This research thus supportsthe idea that the opposition between the accusative and the dative is acquiredsooner in PPs than in NPs—a hypothesis that Wegener’s (1995a) study on natu-ral SLA confirmed. Analogous to Diehl et al.’s (2000) conclusions, L1 researchalso showed that personal pronouns in correct case forms after prepositionswere acquired quite early (Mills, 1985).

The aim of the Geneva project was to discover stages of acquisition andcompare them to the progression of grammar instruction in the GFL classroom,in order to suggest curricular changes. Consequently, the project was not in-tended to justify or falsify a particular SLA theory. On the contrary, it merelyoffered a descriptive account of L2 development. The revealed developmentalpatterns were therefore not theoretically but intrinsically motivated (Jansen,2003). Likewise, L1 research did not use “an adequate theory of language de-velopment (. . .) which should allow one to predict which factors will be mostrelevant at what time during the course of language acquisition” (Meisel, 1986,p. 138). An additional purpose of this article is to link these previous descrip-tions of case acquisition (from the Geneva project as well as from L1 research)with a particular linguistic framework (viz., PT).

Processability Theory

Processability Theory is a theory of L2 development that sees SLA as “theacquisition of the skills needed for the processing of language” (Pienemann,1998, p. 39).14 Those skills are part of the so-called language processor. PTstates that “the learner can produce and comprehend only those second languagelinguistic forms that the current state of the language processor can handle”(Pienemann, 2007, p. 137). Knowledge of the nature of this processor is there-fore extremely important in order to predict possible developmental sequences.The concept of the language processor is derived from Levelt’s (1989) modelof language production and embedded within LFG (Kaplan & Bresnan, 1982).What is common to these models is the principle of feature unification. Take,for instance, the noun phrase zwei Hunde “two dogs” from the sentence Klaussieht zwei Hunde “Klaus sees two dogs”: zwei and Hunde are annotated withthe feature “number,” both having the value “plural” and therefore realizinga perfect grammatical match in this feature. In LFG and Levelt’s model it isassumed that the language processor checks whether the annotated featuresof different parts are compatible. This checking operation is called featureunification.



(7) [Zwei Hund-e]NP

| |PL PL

The process of feature unification constitutes PT’s fundamental principleand implies that developmental trajectories are constrained by the (in)abilityof processing the annotations of the features.15 The language processor deter-mines which annotations can be processed at a certain time and which cannot;it consists of several processing levels that are arranged in a certain order—thatis, the Processability Hierarchy. This order is based on the notion of transferof grammatical information within or across phrase boundaries. Furthermore,it is based on the incremental nature of language generation. The processingprerequisites in the incremental language generation are activated in the fol-lowing sequence and determine the development in language acquisition (seePienemann, 1998, p. 80; 2005b, p. 9):

1. No procedure (lemma access)2. Category procedure3. Phrasal procedure4. Sentence procedure5. Subordinate clause procedure (if applicable)

For a discussion of the theoretical tenets, I refer to Pienemann (2005b, pp. 1–19). In the following section, I will discuss the stages in the ProcessabilityHierarchy one by one and apply them to German case acquisition, therebyrelying on Pienemann’s work (1998, 2005a, b, 2007).

(Original) PT Hierarchy Applied to the German Case SystemThe first stage is called “no procedure” because a beginning learner is unable toexchange diacritic information. The reason for this is that his lexicon is not yetannotated or his language processor is not yet able to store the specific syntacticinformation of the L2 (Pienemann, 1998, p. 76). Some lexical parameters forGerman are, for instance, tense, number, gender, and case, as is shown in thenext example (Figure 1):

(8) Der Mann trinkt einen Wein.The- NOM.M.SG man drink.PRES.3SG a-ACC.M.SG wine“The man is drinking a (glass of) wine.”

These diacritic features are language-specific. Learners of related languages,such as Dutch-speaking GFL learners, have to learn all language-specific fea-tures because “there is no a priori way of knowing for the language learner



Figure 1 c-Structure for der Mann trinkt einen Wein.

how closely related L1 and L2 are” (Pienemann, 2005b, p. 11). Word orderrules in German and Dutch, for instance, are comparable. However, it can-not be assumed that the beginning Dutch-speaking GFL learner will be ableto exploit this close relationship when learning German word order rules (cf.Hakansson, Pienemann, & Sayehli, 2002, for Swedish GFL learners). At theinitial stage of language development there is no exchange of lexical features.Language learning merely comprises the addition of new words, and languageproduction is limited to chunks, such as ins Kino gehen “going to the movies”and unanalyzed formulas, such as Wo wohnst du? “Where do you live?” Ichheiße . . . “my name is . . . ,” and so on.

At the level of the category procedure, exchange of grammatical infor-mation within or between phrases remains impossible because the languageprocessor cannot store the specific L2 information yet. To convey semanticroles, the L2 learner has to resort to simplified procedures, such as canonicalword order (Pienemann, 1998, p. 83). The only thing the learner actually needsto know then is the grammatical category to which a lexical item belongs:

NOUN VERB NOUNAgent Patient“MANN” “TRINKEN” “WEIN”



In such sentences, the position of the NP determines its function: The first NPis the subject; the second is the object of the sentence. Although there is nofeature unification at this stage, some morphological markings can occur; theseare called lexical morphemes. The information given by such morphemes ispart of the lexical item and does not relate to other parts of the sentence. In otherwords, there is still no feature unification. As Pienemann (1998, p. 69) asserted,“[t]he default for NP procedures is ‘subject of S.’ In languages for which Detand N are marked for case, the destination ‘subject’ would also provide NP withthe value ‘nominative.’” Nominative case markers can therefore be conceivedas lexical morphemes, which are retrieved as such from the lexical entry andwhich do not need any information exchange whatsoever upon usage.16

The process of grammatical information exchange occurs for the first timeat the level of phrasal procedures, where the exchange takes place within phraseboundaries. This means that feature unification happens between the head ofa phrase and its constituents, which was illustrated earlier with the example ofzwei Hunde “two dogs.” At this stage, diacritic features can be stored by the lan-guage processor and unified within phrase boundaries. This ability leads to theformation of so-called phrasal morphemes. The following prepositional phraseprovides a clear illustration of the feature “case” in German (Figures 2 and 3):

(9) Der Junge spielt mit einem Ball.The-NOM boy plays with a-DAT ball“The boy plays with a ball.”

In the sample sentence, the head of the prepositional phrase, mit, governsthe dative case, as can be seen in the lexical entry below. At the stage ofphrasal procedures, it is possible for the learner to store this information within

Figure 2 c-Structure of (9).



Figure 3 Lexical entry for (9).

the boundaries of the prepositional phrase and transfer it between the phrasalconstituents P and NP. The prepositional phrase above is well formed becausethe value for “case” is, among other features, matched. Moreover, the NP DerJunge also reflects a perfect match for the feature “case.” The two parts ofthe sentence, Der Junge and spielt, contain the same grammatical information,which is nominative subject. Yet, feature exchange of “case” is not reallynecessary here, because the default for NP procedures is “subject of S.” Innominative-accusative languages with case assignment, this quality results inthe use of nominative case anyway. In other words, the NP Der Junge is retrievedas such from the lexicon. Therefore, information exchange between the verb andthe NPSUBJ is not required with regard to case. As a matter of fact, agreementbetween the heads of different phrases is not even possible until the next stage.

At this next stage of sentence procedures, grammatical information can beexchanged across the phrases. If interphrasal exchange is possible, the canonicalword order need not necessarily be maintained to express semantic roles. It canbe structured according to specific L2 constraints (Pienemann, 1998, p. 85). Inlanguages with relatively free word order, such as German, case assignments, atthis stage also labeled interphrasal morphemes, come into play17 (in contrast toDutch, which simply does not have a morphological distinction18). In order forthe morphological marking of grammatical objects to be produced successfully,it is necessary to exchange information with the verb. If deviations from thecanonical word order arise, the feature of “case” in the NPs and the VP mustcorrespond, as in the following example sentences, all conveying the same



Figure 4 Lexical entry for (10)–(12).

propositional content: “The man gives the boy a book” (Figure 4). At thisstage, case markers can be used functionally, which means that case formsmark the function of the arguments, irrespective of the (canonical) positionthese arguments take in the sentence.19

(10) Der Mann gibt dem Jungen das Buch.The-NOM man gives the-DAT boy the-ACC book

(11) Das Buch gibt der Mann dem Jungen.The-ACC book gives the-NOM man the-DAT boy

(12) Dem Jungen gibt der Mann das Buch.The-DAT boy gives the-NOM man the-ACC book

The processing procedures described above are organized in an implica-tional sequence. This means that one procedural level is always a prerequisitefor the other. Interphrasal morphemes cannot be acquired before their phrasalcounterparts. Note that a morpheme can be both interphrasal and phrasal (andlexical), depending on the type of information exchange. In (13), for example,



Figure 5 Constituent structure of Klaus sieht zwei Hunde.

the definite article morpheme dem (“the-DAT”) is considered to be a phrasalmorpheme, whereas the same article morpheme in (14) is considered to beinterphrasal:

(13) Er konnte mit dem Zug fahren.He could with the-DAT train ride“He could go by train.”

(14) Er erzahlt dem Kind eine Geschichte.He tells the-DAT child a-ACC story“He tells the child a story.”

Extended PTThe extended version of PT (Pienemann, DiBiase, & Kawaguchi, 2005) goesbeyond the concept of feature unification and shows that there are other aspectsto be included in the Processability Hierarchy. In the original PT framework,the transfer of grammatical information occurs within the level of a constituentstructure, as is illustrated in the sample sentence in Figure 5. The features ofzwei Hunde and Klaus sieht are unified in the NPobj-node and the S-node (i.e.,stages 3 and 4 in PT hierarchy), respectively.

Relying on the latest version of LFG (Bresnan, 2001), however, the ex-tended PT framework joins together an argument, a functional, and a constituentstructure in order to make predictions about L2 developmental trajectories.The following sample sentence exemplifies this triadic structure (adapted fromPienemann, 2007, p. 144):

a(rgument) structure → agent theme locativef(unctional) structure → SUBJECT OBJECT OBLIQUEc(onstituent) structure → NPsubj NPobj PP

| | |John (threw) the ball in the water.



The relationship between the a-, f-, and c-structures is not necessarily a directone, because a direct mapping alone would imply that variation in surfacestructures, such as the active and passive, is impossible. On the other hand,Pienemann, Di Biase, and Kawaguchi (2005, p. 208) assumed that in SLA, “thecorrespondence between the parallel syntactic levels of a-, f- and c-structuredevelops from a linear default relationship to the more complex non-linearrelationships found in mature varieties of the target languages.” The abovesentence illustrates a default alignment, in which the first NP in the c-structurealigns with the subject of the f-structure and the highest semantic role (i.e., theagent role of the a-structure).20 Such a one-to-one relationship is typical forbeginning L2 learners, because it requires little procedural energy. Therefore,it is possible to express semantic relationships by using simplified, canonicalprocedures. Pienemann, Di Biase, and Kawaguchi (2005, p. 229) expressedthe direct mapping principle by means of the so-called unmarked alignmenthypothesis:

In second language acquisition learners will initially organise syntax bymapping the most prominent semantic role available onto the subject (i.e.the most prominent grammatical role). The structural expression of thesubject, in turn, will occupy the most prominent linear position inc-structure, namely the initial position.

Departures from unmarked alignment cause nonlinearity, which requires theexchange of grammatical information in order to process sentences and there-fore heightens the procedural cost. As revealed by the discussion in Pienemann,Di Biase, and Kawaguchi (2005), nonlinearity arises due to changes in the re-lationships between the a-structure and f-structure and between the f-structureand c-structure. By rephrasing the former relationship into the lexical mappinghypothesis and the latter into the TOPIC hypothesis, Extended PT employs thechanging nature of those relationships to make predications for L2 develop-ment. Lexical Mapping Theory21 states among other things that

in cases where L1 and L2 predicates have different a-structures (. . .) L2learners will initially have to map arguments canonically onto coregrammatical functions following the LMT hierarchy. (p. 240)22

A Dutch-speaking learner of German, for example, will map the argumentstructure of uitdoen “take off” (15) canonically onto ausziehen, saying ich zogseine Schuhe aus instead of the idiomatically correct ich zog ihm die Schuheaus “I took off his shoes.” The a-structure of (16) is acquired much later.23



(15) uitdoen “take off” < agent theme >

| |SUBJ OBJ

| |ik zijn schoenenI his shoes

(16) ausziehen “take off” < agent beneficiary theme >

| | |SUBJ OBJθ OBJ

| | |ich ihm die SchuheI him-DAT the-ACC shoes

Changing relationships between the a-structure and f-structure cannot beseparated from the changing relationships between the c-structure and f-structure. As far as the latter relationship is concerned, the default functionof the first NP is the subject. Given that the universal default of the subject isalso the TOPIC (Bresnan, 2001), Pienemann, Di Biase, and Kawaguchi (2005,p. 239) claimed that “in second language acquisition learners will initially notdifferentiate between SUBJ and TOP.” Again, deviations from this canonicalmapping are only possible when the fourth stage is reached. In sum, the ex-tended version of PT contends that learners can already produce sentencesbefore the S-procedures have been developed, thanks to direct mapping or un-marked alignment of the a-structure, c-structure, and f-structure. Unmarkedalignment is to be situated at the level of the category procedure, whereassuccessful departures from it occur at the level of S-procedures.24

With regard to case acquisition, the extended version of PT makes it possi-ble to add some interesting hypotheses that could not be accounted for by theoriginal version of PT. If a direct mapping exists between the most prominentfunction (i.e., the agent), the first NP and the Subject, one could continue inthe same line and add the default nominative case.25 In agreement with theUniversal Scale of unmarked mapping developed by Lee (cited in Pienemann,Di Biase, & Kawaguchi 2005, p. 229), one could further argue that in canonicalsentences, a direct mapping of nonSUBJ, noninitial position, and nonnomina-tive or oblique case occurs as well:

GF: SUBJ > NonSUBJCase: NOM > OBLPosition: initial > Noninitial



It is doubtful, however, that GFL learners are already capable of differentiatingwithin OBLique case at the stage of direct mapping. If the opposite were to betrue (i.e., if learners were able to differentiate between accusative and dative),they would also be able to go beyond unmarked alignment and be able to useaccusative and dative case markers functionally, irrespective of the position thearguments take in a sentence.26 Therefore, it is hypothesized that direct mappingin this instance may rather yield a one-to-one relationship among nonsubject,nonagent (or the most prominent subsequent role), noninitial position, andnondefault case, as illustrated in (17).27

(17) Der Hund jagt den Hasen “The dog chases the hare.”| |

agent Non-agent| |

Initial NP Non-initial NP| |

SUBJ Non-SUBJ| |

NOM Non-NOM

In other words, it is possible that in the speech of beginning GFL learners,nondefault case forms already appear in NPs, even before grammatical infor-mation between the heads of different phrases is exchangeable—which wouldbe a prerequisite according to the original version of PT. What ostensibly resultsin a developmental gap (but what is in fact the early emergence of nondefaultcase forms) can then be explained by including the extended version of PT,based on the extended LFG formalism.

In addition, the assumption of direct mapping in both subject position andnonsubject position is supported by frequent errors, illustrated in the hypothet-ical examples (18) and (19)28:

(18) [ ∗DerNOM Mantel]ACC konnen Sie dort hangen.∗The-NOM coat can you-NOM there hang“You can hang your coat over there.”

(19) Gestern kam [ ∗denACC Bus]NOM wieder zu spat.Yesterday came ∗the-ACC bus again too late“Yesterday the bus was late again.”

Based on written production data, Diehl et al. (2000) documented that GFLlearners usually mark sentence-initial arguments with the nominative case and



postverbal subjects with the accusative case. The latter seemed to be an espe-cially persistent error (cf. Diehl et al., 2000, pp. 235–236).

Form-Function RelationshipsIt is important to discuss the conceptualization of form-function relationshipswithin PT, because the interpretation of form-function relationships has majormethodological implications for this study on case acquisition and in factany other study using PT as a paradigm. PT only focuses on the processof sharing diacritic features and therefore only makes predictions about theemergence of this sharing process. The acquisition of the sometimes complexform-function relationships behind it constitute a different learning task, whichought to be separated from the notions of feature unification and mapping.Different kinds of form-function relationships can occur with varying degreesof complexity (Pienemann, 1998, pp. 155ff.). Take, for instance, the many-to-many relationships the German case system reveals, if only with definitearticles (Figure 6).

Because L2 development within the PT framework is seen as the emergenceof the ability to unify lexical features, one-to-one relationships are best suitedto test this ability (Mansouri & Hakansson, 2007). With regard to the German

Figure 6 German form-function relationship for definite articles.



case system, however, such a relationship does not exist. In the present study,some methodological decisions had to be made in order to unambiguouslytest the PT principle of sharing and unifying features. As will become clearin the following discussion, the specific conceptualization of form-functionrelationships within PT restricts the present study in such a way that not allaspects of acquiring the complex German case system can be covered. Becausethe methodology of this study cannot be separated from the form-function issuein PT, the following paragraphs run ahead of the Methodology section below.

To test PT for the feature “case,” one should factor out additional com-plexity due to other form-function relationships. Specifically, case acquisition,in the sense of unifying case values, is independent of gender acquisition andshould therefore be kept separate from it. Because gender is often an arbitrarycharacteristic of lexemes, it is possible that case already emerges in a certaincontext while gender is not correctly marked. In (20), for example, the useof einen (“a-ACC”) might indicate that the accusative case has emerged, eventhough it is not in agreement with the gender of Verabredung.

(20) Er hat [ ∗einen Verabredung]NPacc

| |MASC FEM

He has a-ACC.∗MASC appointment-FEM“He has an appointment.”

Likewise, it is possible that the gender of a word has already been acquired butthat the ability to mark the appropriate case has not yet emerged. In (21), thefeminine article die reflects the correct gender, yet the wrong case.

(21) Er fahrt mit ∗die Bahn zur ArbeitHe goes with ∗the-ACC train to work“He goes to work by train.”

Previous studies have examined the relationship between case and gender inthe acquisition process. In general, three possibilities exist. The least expectedpossibility implies that gender and case features are acquired at the sametime. The two remaining possibilities are more plausible, however: Either casefeatures are acquired before gender features or gender features are acquiredprior to case features. In a study on the acquisition of gender by children learningGerman as their L2, Wegener (2000, p. 531) observed that case distinctionsare well established, whereas “gender as a grammatical category (. . .) is notyet recognized.” In a study on the L1 acquisition of German case and gendermarking, Bittner (2006, p. 127) likewise demonstrated “that case or case-related



features are acquired prior to gender features in the acquisition of article forms”and “that acquisition of gender as a grammatical feature is a by-product of theacquisition of case” (Bittner, 2006, p. 129). Analogously, PT assumes that“‘gender’ is an idiosyncratic diacritic feature of German nouns, the value ofwhich has to be acquired individually for every lexical entry” (Pienemann, 1998,p. 159). This assumption implies that in order to examine case development,case features need to be separated from gender features. As a matter of fact,this is the only way to test the proposed case development based on PT.29

Considering that affixes with one-to-one form-function relationships con-stitute the most straightforward way of testing PT hypotheses, the present studyinevitably focuses on masculine noun phrases, because case distinctions be-come only fully perceptible in this gender class (see Tables 1 and 2). Thefact that feminine and neuter forms are homonymous in the nominative andaccusative may very well result in fewer errors in marking the subject-objectdistinction. Precisely this homonymy, however, makes it impossible to drawwatertight conclusions regarding case development. Pedagogically speaking, itis interesting to note that these forms do not necessarily imply a simplifica-tion of the learning task. On the contrary, Kwakernaak (2005) stated that thehomonymy has a negative impact on the transparency of accusative markingsand thus the acquisition of the subject-object distinction. According to him,learners are only able to acquire the accusative when the dative becomes in-volved.30 In the same vein, Thielmann (2007) argued that teachers, textbookexamples, and so forth should focus on masculine noun phrases when treatingthe subject-object distinction in class. In spite of all that, however, it seemsthat learners overgeneralize the use of die, because this form “is not merelythe most frequent article form in the input but the only form underspecifiedwith respect to case/argument features and thus fitting to all contexts” (Bittner,2006, p. 127).

Because it is not the objective of this study to investigate possible learnerstrategies, the participants were informed that only masculine nouns were used.Because of the focus on masculine nouns, the representativeness of case con-texts is, of course, constrained. However, I believe that this does not have amajor impact on the results of this study on case acquisition. To the contrary,the use of feminine and neuter noun phrases and/or keeping the participantsuninformed on the gender issue would have yielded a whole set of case forms,on the basis of which no immediate conclusion could be drawn with regardto case acquisition.31 Yet, informing participants that only masculine nounswere used posed a serious problem to the theoretical consistency of the studybecause it drew conscious attention to form, which is actually no part of PT



hypotheses. Attention to form therefore possibly intervened with a PT-basedsequence of implicit case knowledge. By building in a time constraint I hopedto overcome this problem. In any case, further research should use spontaneousoral production data, which appeal far less to conscious attention to form.

To conclude this section on form-function relationships it should be addedthat there are several other aspects to the German case system, but they will notbe discussed in this study. Phenomena such as weak nouns, strong adjectivalinflections, case concord with adjectives within a phrase, adjectival case assign-ment, and relative pronouns have been left out of consideration, although it isfeasible to discuss these phenomena in a PT framework. For instance, it is pre-dicted that weak nouns are not being processed differently compared to strongnouns. Given that the ability of unifying features does not change accordingto a particular type of noun, weak nouns will pass through the same stages asstrong nouns. Weak nouns, however, are subject to an additional form-functiondifficulty, because they are marked with an en-affix, as can be seen in the nextexamples of a strong noun (22) and a weak noun (23).

(22) Ich bewundere den SchulerI admire the-ACC pupil-0

(23) Ich bewundere den Student-enI admire the-ACC student-ACC

From a PT point of view, it is claimed that the presence or absence of theen-affix on weak nouns in its various case contexts reveals nothing about thelearner’s ability to unify features and show case distinctions. It is thereforepossible that the dative is acquired before weak nouns are marked according tothe target language (see Pienemann, 1998, pp. 155–159). In (24), for example,the weak noun “Frenchman” should be inflected with an n-affix, though thearticle form correctly indicates the dative case.

(24) Gestern sprach er mit einem ∗FranzoseYesterday spoke he with a-DAT ∗Frenchman-NOM“Yesterday he spoke with a Frenchman.”

Because weak nouns do not add significantly to a discussion on case devel-opment in a PT framework, they have been left out of this study. The extradifficulty could possibly slow down the process of case acquisition with weaknouns compared to strong nouns, yet it is assumed that it cannot alter thegradual case development proposed by PT. Further research should, of course,substantiate this assumption.



The same applies to strong adjectival inflection. The cumulative and impli-cational capability of exchanging and unifying grammatical features regardingstrong adjectival inflection is no different from inflecting articles. Strong adjec-tival inflection is hypothesized to pass through the same stages, as the samplesentences in (25) illustrate for phrasal and inter-phrasal morphemes.32

(25) Phrasal: Wir mussen kunftig mehr arbeiten – bei gleichem GehaltWe have.to in.the.future more work – for same-DAT pay“We will have to work more in the future – for the same pay”

Interphrasal: Die Brauerei liefert kleinen Veranstaltern nicht nur Getranke33

The brewery supplies little-DAT organizers-DAT not only drinks“The brewery does supply small organizers not only with drinks.”

Again, it is assumed that the rate of acquisition of strong adjectival inflectionwill be different, yet the route of acquisition will be the same.

As to the three remaining phenomena mentioned earlier, they can all besituated at a specific stage in the PT hierarchy: Case concord with adjectivesinvolves feature unification within the phrasal boundaries and is therefore lo-cated at stage 3; because of interphrasal information exchange, adjectival casegovernment is located at stage 4; relative pronouns are to be situated at stage 5,the subordinate clause procedure. The following sample sentences illustratethese case phenomena.

(26) Ein Angler fing [einen riesigen Fisch]ACC

A-NOM angler caught a-ACC gigantic-ACC fish“An angler caught a gigantic fish.”

(27) Sie ist der Mutter so [ahnlich]+DAT

She is the-DAT mother so resembling“She resembles her mother so well.”

(28) Das ist die Frau,

That is the-NOM woman, with the-DAT I my-ACC bike bought“That is the woman, with whom I bought my bike.”

Incorporating all these issues in one single study would have overloaded theparticipants. Because this is the first study on German case acquisition in aPT framework, it was decided only to examine the basic assumptions of PT.Further research should scrutinize the issues mentioned earlier.34



Developmentally Moderated Transfer HypothesisUnder the denominator DMTH or developmentally moderated transfer hypoth-esis, PT allows for transfer from the L1 to L2 if and only if the given structurescan be processed within the developing interlanguage system (Pienemann, DiBiase, Kawaguchi, & Hakansson, 2005). This means that the L2 learner canonly use L1 production mechanisms when the L2 system has developed thenecessary prerequisites, even when the L1 and L2 show large typological prox-imity. It is not the objective of this article to falsify or justify the DMTH.Suffice it to say that L2 learners can show, in terms of the Competition Model,preferences for L1-like cues (Pienemann, 1998, p. 82). In other words, L1 cuescan yield some advantages, but only when they are processable at a given stage.

With regard to German case acquisition by Dutch-speaking learners, it isinteresting to note that the case markings of personal pronouns constitute amajor cue, which overrules word order as a cue when the two conflict (McDon-ald & MacWhinney, 1991—for example, Hem heb ik eerder gezien, Ihn habeich fruher schon gesehen “I saw him before”). This might mean that Dutch-speaking GFL learners, in their attempts to readjust their cues, may be ableto discover German case markings in the first place by means of the personalpronouns. Case markings related to nouns (i.e., the determiners) are acquiredafterward. Research within the Competition Model on the reception of Germansentences by Dutch-speaking learners revealed that speakers of Dutch did nothave any problems interpreting sentences with Object-Subject order when per-sonal pronouns are present, as is the case in (29). On the other hand, they didhave difficulties when they could only rely on case markings of the determiner,as is the case in (30) (Duke, Hufeisen, & Lutjeharms, 2004; Lutjeharms, 1998).

(29) Auch der zweiten These kann ich zustimmen.Also the-DAT second thesis can I confirm“I can also confirm the second thesis.”

(30) Dem Unternehmensberater widerspricht Lambsdorff.The-DAT management.consultant disagree.with Lambsdorff“Lambsdorff disagrees with the management consultant.”

In his discussion of Guy’s interlanguage, Pienemann (1998, pp. 118–130)pointed out a similar case. Guy’s interlanguage showed “cases of apparentSV-agreement (which) can be accounted for simply by ‘random hits’” (Piene-mann, 1998, p. 127). However, agreement with pronominal subjects seemedless random than agreement with NP subjects. Compared to lexical subjects,SV agreements seemed to be acquired sooner when the subject is pronominal.



In the former situation, SV structures can be learned as one block (31); in thelatter situation, chunk-learning does not apply (32). In addition, it should benoted that whether SV structures with pronominal subjects can be learned asone block depends on the degree of lexical variation in the verbs. For instance,the lexical variation shown in (33) indicates that SV structures with pronominalsubjects are no longer considered to be one block.

(31) Ich bin, du bist, er ist, ich habe, du hast, er hat . . .I am, you are, he is, I have, you have, he has . . .

(32) Der Bahnhof befindet sich, der Bus fahrt, der Mann spricht . . .

The station is located, the bus runs, the man speaks . . .

(33) Du bist, du warst, du laufst, du liefst, du singst, du sangst . . .

You are, you were, you run, you ran, you sing, you sang . . .

As above, this difference in the acquisition process might indicate that personalpronouns play an important, facilitative role in the acquisition of structureswhere they alternate with nouns. A firm theoretical basis for this assumption,however, does not actually exist within the predictive boundaries of PT, as aresult of which it could be stated that PT in this area underpredicts.

Developmental Sequence

The theoretical issues mentioned earlier enable me to propose a hypothetical de-velopmental sequence along the following lines. Due to processing constraints,beginning Dutch-speaking GFL learners will use canonical word order strate-gies in order to indicate semantic relationships. In other words, they live up tothe principle of unmarked alignment and, as a consequence, they do not have touse case markings functionally. Articles and personal pronouns appear in theirneutral form (i.e., the nominative case). Departures from unmarked alignment,however, seem to prompt the L2 learner to use the appropriate case markings.Clahsen (1984) even saw a causal connection between the use of inversionand the acquisition of the case system. According to him, case markers areacquired in order to disambiguate, because word order [in OS constellations,such as (34)] no longer indicates the grammatical functions of the NPs.

(34) Den Mann kann der Junge nicht finden.The-ACC man can the-NOM boy not find“It’s the man that the boy cannot find.”



Meisel (1986) and Diehl et al. (2000) rejected this functional explanation, be-cause neither L1 nor L2 learners “suffer from functional deficiencies whichhave to be remedied by means of additional markings.” Furthermore, “[t]hereis a need for additional marking only when there are several nominal elementspresent within the same utterance” (Meisel, 1986, p. 174). Additionally, itis not clear exactly how polysemic forms such as die-das and der-den (seeFigure 6) might contribute to disambiguation. Nevertheless, there seems to bea connection between noncanonical word order and the emergence of case dif-ferentiation. According to PT, both features require processing skills that arederived from the S-procedure. In this way, PT provides a valuable explanationas to why their deployment occurs virtually at the same time, thus seeminglyrevealing causality.35 This stage (i.e., the fourth stage in the PT hierarchy) al-lows for interphrasal morphemes and, consequently, enables the differentiationbetween the nominative and the accusative and between the accusative and thedative in NPs to emerge. It implies that learners at stage 4 are able to mark thefunction rather than the position in the sentence. However, one does not have towait for case values to appear until the fourth stage. Depending on the natureof information exchange and depending on the principle of direct mapping,nominative, accusative, and dative forms already occur before the S-procedureis reached, albeit not immediately in their prototypical basic functions andtherefore simply marking the position in the sentence.

The features that are first acquired according to PT are those that requireno or very little “procedural energy.” Because personal pronouns and nouns,together with their determiners, are stored in the default nominative case,lemma access (for which no procedure is demanded) at first always yields thenominative case.36 In this instance, case markers are considered to be lexicalmorphemes, and they occur in every context, also when the accusative or thedative should be used (although dative contexts are probably not frequent inthe speech of beginning learners). This prediction is in agreement with whatprevious research has called the case-neutral phase (cf. L1 research) or theone-case phase (Diehl et al., 2000). Additionally, this stage allows for the useof chunks and formulas. Fixed expressions such as ich bin in der Schweiz, ichwohne in der Nahe von x, and ich gehe ins Kino are not analyzed for case.

Following Lexical Mapping Theory, the extended version of PT contendedthat beginning learners rely on canonical word order strategies to convey seman-tic relationships. As a consequence, direct mapping takes place among the firstNP, the highest thematic role, and the subject in its default case form. However,this alignment can also be conceived from the negative [see (17)] and allowfor a differentiation between the nominative and oblique case. Dutch-speaking



GFL learners will use an oblique case in NPs quite soon. Thereby, they are notrelying on information exchange across phrase boundaries but simply follow-ing the principle of direct mapping. In that case, oblique-case markers alreadyappear before stage 4 is reached. Again, it should be emphasized here that, inthe first place, these case forms mark the position, not necessarily the functionof the argument. In line with the TOPIC hypothesis, it is expected that thisprocess of direct mapping employed for case assignment only succeeds withpreverbal subjects and postverbal objects. If direct mapping applies, learnersare not able to switch positions; that is, direct objects in initial position andpost verbal subject do not occur.37 This indicates that, in fact, case markers atthis stage are not functionally used. In a sense, the morphological marker thatlearners use are not case markers because case only exists when the learnerknows its function. Functional case assignment is hypothesized to occur atstage 4 in the PT hierarchy.

The next stage in the PT hierarchy (i.e., stage 3) concerns phrasal proce-dures and enables learners to process grammatical information within phraseboundaries. In the above discussion of PT, it was argued that case use af-ter prepositions (with fixed case assignment) meets this condition. Previousresearch (Diehl et al., 2000; Klinge, 1990; Meisel, 1986) has indeed shownthat the accusative-dative distinction is acquired sooner in PPs than in NPs.PT predicts this sequence of acquisition because the processing capacities forphrasal procedures are present before those for sentence procedures are. Mills(1985), however, stated that accusative forms are generalized in dative contextsin both PPs and NPs. This implies that the A-D distinction is not discoveredearlier in PPs than in NPs. Therefore, Mills’s study is inconsistent with theassumed existence of a difference between phrasal and sentence procedures.38

Although it would have been interesting to examine whether the overgeneral-ization of accusative forms would disappear simultaneously in PPs and NPs,this question remains unanswered. In any case, following PT, there is no reasonto assume that accusative use after prepositions would be acquired before dativeuse because they both rely on the same processing skills. However, this doesnot imply that GFL learners will always be accurate. Dative forms will occurafter prepositions governing the accusative case and vice versa, but accuracyrates are not a good proxy for developmental sequences (Pienemann, 1998,pp. 131ff.).

The next step in the acquisition brings us back to the beginning of thisdiscussion, where it was argued that sentence procedures or interphrasal in-formation exchange allow for a differentiation between the accusative and thedative in NPs. Due to direct mapping, it was already possible to differentiate



between the nominative and oblique case. Now, it is possible to make a distinc-tion between the accusative and dative case within the oblique. In their descrip-tion of children’s case acquisition, Clahsen (1984), Mills (1985), and Tracy(1986) claimed that accusative forms are acquired before dative forms. Meisel(1986, p. 172), however, asserted that “[t]he alleged developmental precedenceof accusative markings in German simply reflects their significantly higherfrequency in (child and adult) language use (. . .).” Following PT, it is indeednot possible to claim that the accusative is acquired before the dative in NPsbecause they both rely on the same processing skills. In addition, it would bemisleading to speak of the acquisition of the accusative case without contrast-ing it with the dative case. Along the same line, the nominative case cannotbe said to be acquired without its opposition to the oblique case. Analogously,the accusative case can only be understood as such when in opposition to thedative case. That is why it is correct to say that the principle of direct mappingresults in a differentiation between the nominative case and oblique case andnot between the nominative case and accusative case. Although in reality theoblique case forms will mainly be accusative case forms, they cannot be inter-preted as accusatives. Such an interpretation is only possible in opposition to thedative.

Finally, case use with so-called Wechselprapositionen (i.e., the two-wayprepositions that either govern the accusative or the dative case, depending onsemantic notions) needs to be discussed. These highly frequent prepositionsactually illustrate why frequency in the input cannot always be a valid explana-tion for the acquisition of one particular feature before another. Despite theirfrequent occurrence in the input, GFL learners seem to acquire the correct caseuse with two-way prepositions relatively late (cf. Diehl et al., 2000). Never-theless, Wegener (1995a) mentioned frequency in use and input as a possibleexplanation for the occurrence of the dative case after the accusative case. Ina PT framework, however, frequency is not used as a possible explanation foracquisitional sequences. It is the state of the language processor that determineswhether the learner can produce certain L2 forms and structures. Regardingthe Wechselprapositionen, it is difficult within PT to make statements aboutthe processing of case because the use of the accusative or dative forms de-pends on the conceptual, not on the lexical specification of the verb. Arguably,Pienemann (1998, p. 62) did not elaborate on this issue because it is not rele-vant to PT’s core business (i.e., feature unification as a predictive means for L2development). However, for the use of case with two-way prepositions, it doesseem relevant because case use here depends on the meaning the speaker wantsto convey.



(35) Er lauft [auf die Straße]ACC. “He steps/runs onto the street.”(36) Er lauft [auf der Straße]DAT . “He walks on the street.”

The challenge that case alternation with two-way prepositions poses to theability of PT to predict developmental sequences indicates that this is oneof the areas in which PT underpredicts. This manifests itself in two aspects.First, PT is embedded in LFG, which encodes syntactic properties primarilyin the lexicon. Lexical specifications, however, reveal very little about theprecise case that needs to be used with two-way prepositions. Case assignmentwith prepositions governing more than one case, in fact, requires semanticinterpretation of the clause or sentence as a whole. This semantic interpretationgoes beyond feature merging of lexical entries. Second, PT does not accountfor developments within a stage: It predicts what grammatical stages will occurbut not how new structures will merge over time within one stage.39 This meansthat it is not clear how the acquisition of the A-D opposition in NPs relatesto the acquisition of this opposition in relation to two-way prepositions: Is theacquisition of the former a prerequisite for the acquisition of the latter, or isthe opposition learnable at the same time and irrespective of each other? It isnot the objective of this article to elaborate on case assignment with two-wayprepositions within LFG, nor is it its aim to discuss the complex conceptualbackground of case assignment with two-way prepositions. Further researchwill have to show whether LFG as a formal account of the linguistic dynamicsin developing learner grammars is able to provide a PT-based developmentalsequence for case with the necessary linguistic support. In the absence ofsuch a discussion and seeing that the acquisition of the A-D differentiation inNP is hypothesized to occur at stage 4, it is likewise assumed that the A-Ddifferentiation in relation to two-way prepositions will not be processable untilthe fourth stage is reached.

To end this section, Figure 7 summarizes the hypothetical developmentalsequence from a PT perspective.

The Study

MethodologyThis section will describe the results of a cross-sectional study based on “fill-in-the-blanks exercises” (henceforth, blanks exercises). The time-constrained testtook place near the end of each grade in several secondary schools in Flanders,in which German is taught as a foreign language. In total, 704 pupils aged15–18 filled out the test: 203 in the 10th grade, 248 in the 11th grade, and 253



Figure 7 Developmental sequence of GSL case acquisition. (GSL = German as asecond language).

in the 12th grade.40 For those pupils, German is the third foreign language ineducation, after French and English. In the 10th grade, German is taught 1–2hr a week; in the 11th and 12th grades, it is taught 2–3 hr a week.41

This type of research design was set up for two reasons. First, blanksexercises allowed me to supply case contexts, which are normally less frequentin the learners’ language. Various case contexts were incorporated into thetest, resulting in a corpus of 13,376 sentences (i.e., 704 students, each fillingout 19 sentences42). Second, the size of the corpus enabled me to paint anoverall picture of German case development with Dutch-speaking GFL learners.Because of the size of the corpus, it was furthermore possible to determineconfidence intervals (Appendix A).

This approach also has some major limitations, though, some of which werediscussed earlier. It is, for instance, impossible to apply the emergence crite-rion and implicational scaling to the collected data.43 Consequently, individualvariation could not be uncovered. However, the actual purpose of this study wasto give a first impetus to research on German morphology (cf. Jansen, 2008)and thus to determine whether there is reason to believe that sequences, as theycan be hypothesized by PT, exist in GFL case acquisition. As a consequence, inorder to account for variation and to test the overall picture that is painted here,it will be necessary to conduct further research with a qualitative and longitu-dinal design, using oral proficiency data. This is in line with the “considerableagreement, among SLA researchers on both sides of the methodological divide,that qualitative and quantitative studies are in reality complementary ways ofcreating new knowledge” (Markee, 1994, p. 91). In other words, it is importantto know the strengths and weaknesses of a certain design and to draw onlyconsonant conclusions (Tarone, 1994, p. 326). Further research of a more qual-itative type will also allow me to overcome the limitations discussed earlier



(see the Form-Function Relationships section), particularly those concerningthe representativeness of case contexts and case phenomena.

Before discussing the results, I would like to point out yet another method-ological and theoretical issue that should be kept in mind. Blanks exercises tendto impose a certain linguistic standard on the participants, which they might notalways command. For example, beginning learners are said to resort to canon-ical word order strategies. Yet, when filling out blanks exercises, participantsare obliged to complete sentences that deviate from this canonical principle.In addition, this kind of exercise relies on conscious processing, whereas PTtheoretically involves automatic processing. By building in a time constraint,it was hoped that processing would be less conscious and more automatic.

A final issue that should be touched upon before discussing the resultsconcerns the participants’ richness of vocabulary, because their knowledge ofthe lexical items in the test may influence their ability to indicate syntacticroles in the sentences. In this study the influence of not knowing the meaningof a lexical item should be minimal. First, it was made sure that Germanwords were selected on the basis of their similarity with Dutch words (28.75%of the items were similar to Dutch). The common West Germanic roots ofGerman and Dutch, of course, simplified this exercise. Second, 48.00% of theitems in the test corresponded to a much-used basic German vocabulary list,Profile Deutsch (Glaboniat, Muller, Rusch, Schmitz, & Wertenschlag, 2005),the lexical items of which should be known to beginning learners of Germanafter 1 year (Level A1–A2 of the Common European Framework of Reference).This leaves 23.25% of lexical items that could be unfamiliar to the participants.However, as far as possible, it was assured that knowledge of these items wasnot necessary to adequately indicate grammatical relationships.

For each grade, the results will be portrayed in two graphs (one for theNPs and one for the PPs), thereby showing the proportion of case use in acertain case context. More details on the abbreviations used in these graphs,as well as sample sentences for all of the case contexts used, can be found inAppendix B. By using these proportions, I aim to go beyond mere accuracyrates of target language use (cf. Dewaele & Veronique, 2001). The reservationsthat Pienemann (1998, pp. 131–153) had with regard to the use of accuracyrates are well known. I want to overcome his objections with an analysis of caseproportion in certain case contexts. However, further research should be of aqualitative nature. As discussed earlier, intervening variables are factored out,meaning that, for instance, gender is ruled out. As a consequence, morpholog-ical markers were only analyzed for their case values. This applies to personalpronouns, for example, because it was not always obvious what form exactly



was elicited. In (37), for instance, several answers are possible (e.g., mich “me,”dich “you,” and ihn “him.”). Although one of these forms might be more likelythan another, they all indicate the accusative value, or, in any case, an obliquevalue. Case use with nouns did not cause such problems because the pupils hadbeen informed that all nouns were masculine singular. In spite of this, somenouns were interpreted as either feminine or neuter, or as plural [e.g., becauseof L1 interference—e.g., Briefkasten “post box”—or because some nouns donot morphologically distinguish between singular and plural (38)].44

(37) Ich habe ihn gefragt, ob er mitmachen wollte. Aber [gegen _____]ACC

will er nicht mehr spielen. Ich weiß nicht warum.I have him-ACC asked, if he-NOM join wanted.to. But against me-ACCwant he- NOM not anymore play. I-NOM know not why.“I asked him if he wanted to join. But he does not want to play againstme anymore. I don’t know why.”

(38) Der Kriminelle hat [d_____ Richter]ACC gefragt, ob er Strafmilderungbekommen konnte, aber das war leider nicht moglich.The-NOM criminal has the-ACC judge asked, if he-NOM reduc-tion.of.sentence get could, but that was unfortunately not possible.“The criminal asked the judge if he could get reduction of sentence, butthat was unfortunately not possible.”

Hence, the distribution graphs incorporate more than just target usage. Am-biguous forms are indicated as “N = A,” blanks as “Ø,” and unclear forms as“?”. The distributions are based on the test administered in the 10th, 11th, and12th grades. The tests reveal a reliability coefficient (Cronbach’s alpha) of .91,.77, and .77, respectively. For a test to be reliable, alpha should be higher than.70. In addition, the relatively small confidence intervals indicate that the testsare reliable.

In the following analysis, statistically significant differences were calculatedby means of Fisher’s ANOVA. The test was used to detect whether the proportionof a certain case in a certain context is significantly higher than the proportionof that same case in another context. In other words, it compares the use ofa certain case in a correct context (e.g., nominative case in subject positions)with the use of that case in a wrong context (e.g., nominative case in objectposition). If the use of a case in the right context differs significantly from its usein the wrong context, one could say that the L2 learner associates certain caseswith certain contexts; for example, when the proportion of nominative case in



Figure 8 Proportion of case values in nominal phrases in grade 10 (n = 203).

subject positions is significantly higher than its proportion in object positions,one could argue that nominative case is associated with subject positions. Theadvantage of using group proportions (supplied in Appendix C) to determinethe acquisition of case lies in the fact that the group itself determines for eachcase context where the acquisition boundary is. There is, in other words, noarbitrary, fixed accuracy rate set in advance.

Findings and DiscussionThe first graph shows the distribution of the different case values in differentcase contexts at the end of the 10th grade (n = 203).

Figure 8 indicates that the nominative case value has emerged, especially insentences with canonical word order [i.e., when the [noun[ subject is in initialposition [SiP[, as is the case in (39)]. This should not be surprising becausethe nominative case is the default case, which is retrieved as such from thelexicon. It therefore stands to reason that the proportion of the default form in aSiP context is significantly higher than its proportion in oblique position (AKKNPs pv, DAT NPs), F(1, 209) = 69.08, p < .0001. This suggests that defaultforms are associated with initial-subject positions from the start.

(39) [Der Film “Atlantis”]NOM ist ein Bruch mit der Tradition.The-NOM film “Atlantis” is a break with the-DAT tradition“The film “Atlantis” is a break with tradition.”

In sentences deviating from the canonical word order (i.e., nominative contextsin postverbal [pv] positions), the students’ results were less satisfactory. Default



forms indeed occur more often in initial position than in postverbal position,F(1, 591) = 17.14, p < .0001. However, they were not as bad as was expectedby the hypotheses derived from Extended PT. Due to direct mapping, postverbalsubject arguments were thought to get nonnominative or oblique case values. AsFigure 8 shows, though, this was not always the case. A considerable portionof the participants still filled out the correct default value. Here, one againhas to take into account that beginning learners will normally not producesuch sentences but were nevertheless now asked to assign the right case value.The fact that they decided to use default forms in these contexts does notnecessarily contradict the hypothesis that learners typically assign noninitialarguments with oblique case values. First, many participants are not yet awareof oblique case forms—indeed, many pupils simply wrote der in every slot(NOM NPs pv). Second, the same logic that Pienemann (1998) used for Guy’sinterlanguage holds true here, namely that Subject-Verb agreements such as dukannst, er geht, er arbeitet, and ich bin are stored as such, whether it be in SVor in VS order (NOM NPp pv).

With regard to the other, nondefault, case contexts, the share of Ø isstriking. Again, the participants were asked to write down a construction thatthey probably did not yet use at this stage of acquisition. The fact that manypupils did not fill out these slots might indicate that they knew that the use ofthe default forms is not appropriate. Hence, two types of 10th-grade learnerscould be distinguished. On the one hand, the majority of learners had onlydiscussed nominative forms in class; consequently, they used default formseverywhere or just left a blank (stage 1 in the PT hierarchy). On the other hand,a small number of learners were already acquainted with oblique forms; theywere responsible for the limited share of oblique assignments (stage 2 in thePT hierarchy). In other words, the few oblique case values and the many blanksmight indicate that there is an awareness of the nonnominative case, or perhapseven the nonsubject case. I therefore believe that an opposition between thenominative and oblique case has emerged, even if the learners do not show itformally. An exception in this matter (i.e., when the opposition is expressedformally) is the quite reasonable share of oblique forms in preverbal accusativecontexts (AKK NPp ip, 40 and AKK NPs ip, 41). Oddly enough—because itruns counter to PT predictions—the share of oblique forms is higher in theinitial position than in the canonical postverbal position, F(1, 100) = 6.79,p < .01; F(1, 175) = 5.01, p < .05.

(40) Markus hat gestern angerufen. [Ihn]ACC soll ich heute noch vomBahnhof abholen,



seinen Kollegen erst morgen.Markus has yesterday phoned. Him-ACC should I-NOM today yetfrom.the-DAT station pick.up, his-ACC colleague only tomorrow“Markus had phoned yesterday. I should pick him up yet today, and hiscolleague only tomorrow.”

(41) Wir haben nur noch Zeit fur einen Besuch des Museums. [Den Dom]ACC

besuchen wir dann erst Morgen.We-NOM have only just time for a-ACC visit the-GEN museum. The-ACC Dom visit we-NOM then first tomorrow.“We only have time left to visit the museum. We will visit the Dom firstthing tomorrow.”

In these instances, the salience of the pronominal subject might have triggeredthe use of nonsubject forms [as in (40)], as far as the learners had already learnedthese in class, of course. With respect to direct objects in initial position (AKKNPs ip, 41), the use of default and oblique values is divided somewhat equally.

In sum, the results of the NPs show that the nominative case has emerged,as well as an awareness of nominative and nonnominative case values. Adifferentiation within the nonnominative case, however, is not present. If thatwere the case, the proportion of dative forms should differ significantly from theproportion of accusative forms. In DAT NPp, there is, however, no significantdifference, F(1, 122) = 1.15, p = .28, and in DAT NPs, accusative forms occurmore frequently, which makes an F-statistic for a significant higher dativeproportion superfluous.

The results of the PPs show a major proportion of oblique forms andblanks, thereby indicating a certain awareness of obliqueness. The learnersseem to realize that their present knowledge (i.e., only default forms) is notsufficient to correctly mark the PP arguments. However, this does not mean thatno default markers appear at all. Although marginally, even default personalpronouns appear after prepositions (42), as Wegener (1992) has also shown.

(42) Tut mir Leid, diese Blumen sind nicht [fur ∗duNOM ]ACC. Ich gebe siedeiner Schwester.Does me-DAT regret, these-NOM flowers are not for ∗you-NOM. I-NOM give them-ACC your-DAT sister“To my regret, these flowers are not for you. I will give them to yoursister.”

Figure 9 indicates that there is a sense of obliqueness but no differentiation



Figure 9 Proportion of case values in prepositional phrases in grade 10 (n = 203).

within the oblique case. Indeed, no statistical difference could be revealed thatwould suggest association between accusative forms and acc-prepositions andbetween dative forms and dat-prepositions, F(1, 207) = 1.92, p = .17. Thedistribution of DAT PPs WP might seem somewhat odd in this respect. Theacronym refers to some stationary or position-determined situation expressedthrough one of the nine Wechselprapositionen, as is the case in (43) [see also(4) and Appendix C].

(43) [Unter dem großen Baum]DAT im Park werden viele gemutliche Picknicksgehalten.Underneath the-DAT big-DAT tree in.the-DAT park are a.lot.of-NOMcozy-NOM picnics organized“Underneath the big tree in the park, a lot of cozy picnics are organized.”

Following the norm of the target language, the dative value should be usedhere. However, the students of the 10th grade had not been taught the dativeuse and forms. Nevertheless, some did in fact assign the right case value. Theexplanation is quite simple: In those classes, the rule location : dem had beenprovided, resulting in a significant difference, F(1, 211) = 15.31, p < .0001.The use of dative forms in this case context, in other words, is comparable tochunk-learning, for which no grammatical information exchange is required(for instance, im Garten, auf dem Land, etc.).

At the end of the 11th grade, the emergence of case values intensifies. Thenominative case forms still serve as the default case, and the principle of directmapping in canonical word order is generally adopted. This leads to a strong




opposition between the nominative and oblique case, F(1, 1702) = 551.26,p < .0001. Contrary to the pupils of the 10th grade, the opposition is this timelargely expressed formally (viz., no blanks). Sentence-initial arguments aregenerally marked with the default case, whereas the noninitial ones are markedwith the oblique case.

Figure 10 indicates that the results are more diffuse in sentences departingfrom unmarked alignment. Personal pronouns in postverbal nominative posi-tions (NOM NPp pv) or in preverbal oblique positions (AKK NPp ip) do notcause insurmountable problems. In the former situation, the SV agreementsare probably stored as such, even in VS order. In the latter situation, the SVagreement that is already present triggers the use of an oblique personal pro-noun. Seeing that there is no significant difference between the proportion ofaccusative pronouns in the initial and postverbal position, F(1, 234) = .47, p =0.49, these results suggest that Dutch-speaking GFL learners are indeed influ-enced by personal pronouns as a strong cue. In the case of nouns, departuresfrom unmarked alignment do seem to cause more difficulties (NOM NPs pvand AKK NPs ip). Both the use of default case in subject-initial position andthe oblique case in postverbal position is significantly better than its respectiveuse in noncanonical positions, F(1, 760) = 8.49, p < .05; F(1, 244) = 27.12,p < .0001. The principle of direct mapping thus causes false case assignmentsto occur, as is the case in (44) and (45).

(44) Nicht weit von hier befindet sich [ ∗denACC Bahnhof]NOM .Not far from here is.located ∗the-ACC station“The station is located not far from here.”



(45) [ ∗DerNOM Mantel]ACC habe ich heute Morgen schon verkauft.∗the-NOM coat have I-NOM this.morning already sold“I have sold the coat already this morning.”

In sum, the results of the NPs demonstrate that the distinction betweenthe nominative and oblique case is now formally acquired. With that, stage 2of the PT hierarchy is reached. It constitutes the prerequisite for phrasal andinterphrasal morphemes to be acquirable. The acquisition of interphrasal casemorphemes in the 11th grade will be considered first; after that, phrasal casemorphemes will be discussed. Interphrasal case morphemes concern the dif-ferentiation between accusative and dative within the oblique case. A statisticaldifference could be detected when it comes to personal pronouns, F(1, 350) =94.92, p < 0.0001. As far as the nouns are concerned, it was again superfluousto perform an F-statistic, seeing that accusative forms still outnumber dativeforms in the dative context (DAT NPs). These results suggest again that per-sonal pronouns are indeed an important cue for Dutch-speaking GFL learnersand that case is generally discovered through personal pronouns.

Within the phrasal boundaries, some changes took place in comparison tothe results of the 10th grade (Figure 11).

The distribution of case values in prepositional phrases governing a fixedcase (PfK) reveals that the majority of the learners understands that certainprepositions can govern either the accusative or the dative, F(1, 861) = 157.46,p < .0001. I would not say there is a particular preference for accusativeforms, though, as Mills (1985) argued. In any case, the results indicate thatin PPs, the difference between the accusative and the dative has emerged. In





the semantically determined PPs (WP), no such differentiation can be detected,F (1, 785) = 1.50, p = .22. In sum, the above establishes that the majority ofthe GFL learners at the end of the 11th grade has reached stage 3 of PT and thatdue to the workings of personal pronouns as a cue, interphrasal morphemesbegin to occur—not so, however, with nouns.

The results of the 12th grade largely correspond to those of the 11th grade(Figure 12). The nominative case, for instance, remains associated with initial-subject positions, F(1, 444) = 202.42, p < .0001. Additionally, the proportionof the nominative forms in this position is still significantly higher than inpostverbal position, F(1, 769) = 24.46, p < .0001. With regard to oblique caseforms, the proportion of oblique personal pronouns does not differ significantlybetween the initial and postverbal position, F(1, 246) = 0.35, p = .55, whereasthe proportion of oblique forms with nouns does, F(1, 250) = 13.54, p < .001,oblique forms in postverbal positions being significantly higher than in initialpositions. With regard to the differentiation within the oblique forms, personalpronouns seem to play a facilitative role. For example, a differentiation betweenaccusative- and dative-marked personal pronouns is significant, F(1, 359) =87.03, p < .0001, whereas in DAT NPs, accusative forms are again in themajority.

Analogous to the results in the NPs, the proportions in the PPs show thatphrasal morphemes are acquired, whereas interphrasal ones are not (Figure 13).

Even with the naked eye, one is able to detect on this graph a significantdifference between the proportion of accusative forms and dative forms in thecontext of fixed prepositions, F(1, 831) = 286.85, p < .0001. In the context ofthe semantically based prepositions, there is no such difference, F(1, 789) =2.58, p = .11.




Because the acquisition of phrasal procedures was already present at theend of the 11th grade and because such morphemes are a prerequisite for theoccurrence of interphrasal morphemes, one could have expected interphrasalmorphemes to have appeared significantly more at the end of the 12th grade.Because this was not the case, one might come to the rash conclusion thatDutch-speaking GFL learners do not reach the fourth stage in the PT hierarchywhen they graduate from secondary school. Some would even see a confir-mation of their doubts about the reality of a distinction between phrasal andinterphrasal morphemes. Due to the research design, such conclusions cannotbe drawn. This study gives an overall picture of case acquisition and cannotaccount for individual variation. Consequently, it cannot be ruled out that somepupils use significantly more dative forms in dative contexts, both with indirectobjects and with the semantically based prepositions. Their results are, however,lost in the large group and its averages. In fact, this exactly reflects Pienemann’scritique on using accuracy rates to determine developmental sequences. More-over, when one uses accuracy rates, one actually looks at the end phase ofacquisition. Instead, one should look at the early stages of the acquisition pro-cess of certain structures and, as a consequence, apply the emergence criterion.When using a suppliance level of .75 as an acquisition criterion, an accuracyrate of .25 for the use of dative articles in a dative context means that the dativeis not acquired. That rate of .25, however, hides a small group of pupils whohave acquired the dative; they simply cannot be detected in a cross-sectionaldesign. A follow-up study with a longitudinal design should remedy thisshortcoming.



Conclusions

So far, case acquisition by GFL learners has hardly been investigated. In par-ticular, its relationship to the interlanguage development requires further study.Even within the PT framework, which stems from research on German wordorder rules and German morphology, no such studies are available.

In this article, I formulated a hypothetical sequence for case acquisition byGFL learners on the basis of PT. It was argued that case forms would emergecorresponding to a development from lexical to phrasal and interphrasal mor-phemes. In this respect, the principle of direct mapping serves as a sort ofcorrection factor to the emergence of interphrasal morphemes. In addition, theunmarked alignment hypothesis allows for a differentiation between similarcase contexts (e.g., preverbal and postverbal nominative or accusative argu-ments). This leads to the hypothetical developmental sequence depicted inFigure 7.

A cross-sectional study was performed in order to determine whether therewas reason to believe that such a sequence existed. The study clearly suggestsa development in line with the one proposed on the basis of PT. Not surpris-ingly, case use in fixed lexical items appears from the start, just like the defaultnominative case forms, which are called lexical morphemes at that stage. Anawareness of obliqueness soon becomes present and intensifies gradually. Theearly presence of these oblique markers in NPs, which are in fact interphrasalmarkers, is explained by using Lexical Mapping Theory. This allows for in-terphrasal morphemes to occur before S-procedures are processable. In PPs,these oblique markers are already separated into accusative and dative markers,which then constitute phrasal morphemes. This shows that the accusative-dativedistinction is acquired sooner in PPs than in NPs. In NPs, the breakdown ofthe oblique case appears later, when dative-marked personal pronouns emergeas indirect objects. The emergence of dative markers with indirect objects in-dicates the start of information exchange across phrase boundaries, apparentlyfirst in relation to personal pronouns and later to determiners.

On the other hand, this study also fails to reveal some aspects. It is, for in-stance, not possible to verify the assumption expressed by the extended versionof PT that beginning learners will not correctly produce sentences deviatingfrom unmarked alignment. Individual variation could not be investigated either,nor the intrastage emergence, which is especially relevant to the fourth stage ofPT. In fact, PT says little about intrastage development. The findings of previousresearch (Diehl et al., 2000; Mills, 1985) that the A-D differentiation in bothPPs and NPs occurs sooner with personal pronouns than with determiners are



corroborated by this study, yet underpredicted by PT. Within PT, this especiallywill need further theoretical scrutinizing.

Finally, it should be emphasized once again that case contexts in this studywere narrowly defined: Abstraction was made of gender features and case phe-nomena concerning adjectival concord, and weak nouns and relative pronounswere ignored. These limitations will be dealt with by means of a longitudinalfollow-up study with data based on time-constrained language production andan analysis based on the emergence criterion and implicational scaling.

Revised version accepted 20 November 2009

Notes

1 Ellis (1994, p. 73) used this term as an umbrella term for all research dealing withany kind of sequence.

2 For a review of recent research (2002–2008) in the field, see Eckerth, Schramm, &Tschirner (2009).

3 Jansen (2008, p. 220, f.11) explicitly stated that her study only dealt with Germanword order rules, not with German morphology. The present article in a waycomplements her research because it focuses on morphology, not word order.

4 In contrast to L1 research (see the section German Case Acquisition section).5 In a footnote, Zaenen et al. (1985, fn. 18, p. 132) added that functional case

assignment in LFG is “in a certain sense the equivalent of structural case markingin GB (. . .).”

6 For the sake of completeness, it should be noted that Zaenen et al. (1985) alsodistinguished semantic case marking, such as accusatives of time. As this type ofcase assignment is not relevant for the present study, it will not be consideredfurther.

7 In English and Dutch, these verbs are transitive.8 Normally there is no assumption in LFG that subjects will always be nominative. In

their study of Icelandic case agreement, Zaenen et al. (1985) considered theexistence of nonnominative subjects. An association between subject andnominative is therefore only language-specific in LFG and cannot be defined as across-linguistic universal (Butt, 2009).

9 According to Blake (1994, p.199), the default value is the one that will be used ifno value is specially assigned. The term came into vogue together with the use ofcomputers. Terms such as “citation form” (Clahsen, 1984; Clahsen, Eisenbeiss, &Vainikka, 1994) and “unmarked/neutral case” (Meisel, 1986; Tracy, 1986;Wegener, 1995b) also turn up to denote the nominative case. It is legitimate to use“case” in conjunction with “default,” because the nominative, as a “default case,”owes its status to the existence of marked cases. This is reminiscent of Jakobson’s



(1936/1971) classical argument that the nominative, as an “unmarked case,” isformally the absence of case.

10 Jordens (1983) offered an error analysis on German case acquisition in passivesentences.

11 A sequence in gender and number could not be discovered.12 However, Wegener (1992) provided evidence of default pronominal forms in PPs at

this stage (e.g., ∗fur er “∗for he”).13 Seeing a case system as a system of oppositions, it is in fact misleading to speak of

generalizations of the accusative case without contrasting it with the dative case. Inthe section Developmental Sequence, I will refer back to the issue that theaccusative case can only be understood as such when in opposition to the dativecase.

14 Initially, PT was solely concerned with the developmental problem. Later, in amodular fashion, PT also addressed the logical problem (i.e., the origin oflinguistic knowledge). This modular approach is practical when attempting tofalsify the predictions made by each module (Pienemann, 2005a, pp. 69, 78–79).

15 It should be noted that feature unification is one of the fundamental principles inthe original version of PT (Pienemann, 1998). The extended version (Pienemann,Di Biase, & Kawaguchi, 2005) provides further fundamental principles.

16 Note that this assumption is restricted to nominative-accusative languages and doesnot hold for ergative-absolutive languages.

17 Yet, it should be noted that a nominative-accusative distinction in the article systemonly manifests itself with masculine nouns (see Table 1).

18 A case distinction exists, however, in the pronominal system.19 With this statement I run ahead of things a bit, because the basis for this statement

actually lies in the extended version of PT, to be discussed later.20 A default a-f-relationship means that the highest semantic role of a verb will be the

subject of the sentence, according to the following semantic hierarchy: agent >

beneficiary > experiencer/goal > instrument > patient/theme > locative (Bresnan,2001, p. 307).

21 Lexical Mapping Theory is a formal theory that discusses the correspondence andmapping between functional structure and argument structure, or, put differently,between grammatical functions and their characteristic thematic roles. It originatesfrom Fillmore’s (1968) pioneering work. The theory has been incorporated into theLFG formalism (cf. Bresnan 2001).

22 With regard to the LMT hierarchy, see Note 20.23 The theta (θ ) in (16) indicates that this grammatical function is sensitive to

thematic role information. The canonical example for OBJθ is the indirect dativeobject (Butt, 2006, p. 121).

24 It should be noted that separation of Subj and TOPIC emerges earlier than stage 4(viz., at stage 3).

25 As indicated above, this only holds for nominative-accusative languages.



26 Because this implies a deviation from unmarked alignment, such differentiationwithin the OBLique already goes beyond the stage of direct mapping.

27 It should be noted that learners at this stage are not expected to supply theaccusative marker –n on the noun Hasen “hare” (and the third-person singular –tmarker on the verb for that matter).

28 Examples are taken from my corpus.29 For more on gender acquisition in a GFL context, see Menzel (2004) and Krohn

and Krohn (2008).30 Note that Kwakernaak’s claims are underpinned by PT. Due to the principle of

direct mapping, accusative markings occur very early in the acquisition process(stage 2 in the PT hierarchy), but the real acquisition of the subject-objectdistinction emerges only at a later stage (stage 4 of the PT hierarchy; see thesection Developmental Sequence).

31 Nonetheless, further research needs to be done on the gender issue. Bittner (2006,p. 126) argued, for instance, that “[t]he first gender-related distinction the childacquires is the opposition of +feminine and –feminine in dative contexts.” It wouldbe interesting to examine whether this holds true in foreign language acquisition aswell.

32 Lexical morphemes do not exist in strong adjectival inflection. In sauber-es Wassersoll Grundrecht werden “clean-NOM water must become basic right,” the –es-affixis not considered to be a lexical morpheme because sauberes Wasser is not storedas such in the lexicon (das Wasser and sauber Wasser are). NPs from the type ofsauberes Wasser depend on the verb for their inflection, as do the accusative directobject and the dative indirect object, and are therefore considered to consist ofinterphrasal morphemes.

33 Dative indirect objects without articles or pronouns, but with adjectives, hardlyoccur in combination with singular nouns, except for newspaper headlines such asBono bricht kleinem Kind das Herz “Bono breaks little-DAT child the-ACC heart.”

34 In my own ongoing research, I compile spoken production data of Flemish GFLlearners. As natural data cannot be restricted with regard to case context, these datawill probably cover all possible case phenomena, thereby significantly contributingto the representativeness of case contexts.

35 Note in this context that in the sequence table of the Geneva project (Diehl et al.2000, p. 364), the dotted line indicating the emergence of the two-case system isportrayed lower than the dotted line indicating the beginning of inversionstructures. When using a PT perspective, there is no reason to do this. Although itshould be mentioned that PT says little about intrastage sequencing. Theemergence of the two-case system and inversion structure are indeed both to belocated at stage 4, although nothing is actually said about their intrastagedevelopment.

36 For instance, Meisel (personal communication in Dewaele & Veronique 2001,p. 290) mentioned a strong link between a determiner and a noun.



37 If learners for some reason switch these positions, while the principle of direct casemapping still applies, incorrect case use will be the result: Direct objects in initialposition receive the nominative case and subjects in postverbal positions take theaccusative case. In spoken language, this is expected to be very unlikely (preciselybecause of the principle of direct mapping). In written language, however, sucherrors already have been attested frequently (cf. Diehl et al., 2000, pp. 235–236).

38 Of course, PT did not yet exist at the time of the publication of Mills’s study, whichmeans that different acquisition criteria were used, making a comparison with PTpossible only with the necessary reservation.

39 A MOGUL perspective might account for this and tackle the developmentalproblem, not by positing stages but by explicating transition itself (SharwoodSmith, 2007).

40 In Flanders these grades are referred to as grades 4, 5, and 6 of secondaryeducation.

41 For comparison: in the 10th grade, French 3–4 hr/week and English 2 hr/week; inthe 11th and 12th grades, French 3–4 hr/week and English 3 hr/week.

42 These 19 sentences represent the examined case contexts in this study. Casecontexts in this study were limited to nominative subjects, accusative direct objects,dative indirect objects, case use after one-way prepositions, and case use aftertwo-way prepositions; in each case either with pronouns or nouns.

43 Similar approaches to PT, with accuracy measures as a major indicator fordevelopment, have been published elsewhere (see Glahn et al., 2001, forScandinavian languages).

44 In Dutch nouns, the affix –en indicates the plural form. Likewise, singular weaknouns with an en-affix also induced “errors,” as the participants used pluralmarkers instead of singular ones.

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Appendix A

Figure A1 Means of targetlike usage in noun phrases.

Figure A2 Means of targetlike usage in prepositional phrases.



Appendix B

List of Abbreviations With Example Sentences

NP: noun phrase• SubjectNOM NPs SiP: nominative-marked

noun argument as subject in initialposition

DER europaische Markt wird fast volligvon der japanischenHochtechnologie erobert.

NOM NPs pv: nominative-marked nounargument as subject in postverbalposition

Ich brauche noch Brot fur heute Abend.Ist DER Aldi-Supermarkt hier in derNahe?

NOM NPp pv: nominative-markedpersonal pronoun as subject inpostverbal position

Ich finde, das Kleid kannst DU nicht zudem Fest anziehen. Es ware zuextravagant.

• Direct ObjectAKK NPs pv: accusative-marked noun

argument as direct object inpostverbal position

Hast du DEN neuen Staubsauger schonausprobiert? Er ist wirklich Klasse!

AKK NPp pv: accusative-markedpersonal pronoun as direct object inpostverbal position

Hallo, Peter, ich habe DICH schonlange nicht mehr gesehen. Warst duin Urlaub?

AKK NPs ip: accusative-markednoun-argument as direct object inpreverbal position

Erwin, DEN Herd hast du dochausgemacht, oder?

AKK NPp ip: accusative-markedpersonal pronoun as direct object inpreverbal position

Markus hat gestern angerufen. IHN sollich heute noch vom Bahnhof abholen,seinen Kollegen erst morgen.

• Indirect ObjectDAT NPs: dative-marked noun

argument as indirect objectDer Arzt hat DEM Mann das Rauchen

verboten. Rauchen schadet seinerGesundheit.

DAT NPp: dative-marked personalpronoun as indirect object

Mutti, wurdest du MIR bitte eine Tasseheiße Milch mit Honig bringen? Ichfuhle mich so krank.

PP: prepositional phrase• PfK: fixed case governmentAKK PPs PfK: accusative-marked noun

argument after accusative prepositionDer Lieferwagen ist mit hoher

Geschwindigkeit gegen DENgeparkten Wagen da gefahren.



AKK PPp PfK: accusative-markedpersonal pronoun after accusativepreposition

Kommst du heute Abend mit? Dennohne DICH gehe ich einfach nicht insKino.

DAT PPs PfK: dative-marked nounargument after dative preposition

Bei diesem Wetter gehe ich nicht mitDEM Hund raus. Es ist nicht malHundewetter.

DAT PPp PfK: dative-marked personalpronoun after dative preposition

Ich war sehr frech zu meinem Kollegen.Ich muss mich bei IHMentschuldigen.

• WP: semantically based casegovernment ‘Wechselprapositionen’

AKK PPs WP: accusative-marked nounargument after WP

Die Eltern stellten fur den BesuchKaffee und Spekulatius auf DENTisch.

AKK PPp WP: accusative-markedpersonal pronoun after WP

Ich habe keine Ahnung, warum”Google Groups“ E-Mails an MICHsendet, denn ich habe mich fur diesenService nicht angemeldet.

DAT PPs WP: dative-marked nounargument after WP

Normalerweise werden wir dieses Jahrunseren Urlaub in DEM BayerischenWald verbringen.

DAT PPp WP: dative-marked personalpronoun after WP

Die Fans von Peter Maffay schrieen dieganze Zeit: ”Du bist alles, wir stehenimmer hinter DIR.



Ap

pen

dix

C

Mean

so

fC

ase

Pro

po

rtio

n

10th

Gra

de11

thG

rade

12th

Gra

de

defa

ult

N=

AO

BL

AO

BL

DØ

?de

faul

tN

=A

OB

LA

OB

LD

Ø?

defa

ult

N=

AO

BL

AO

BL

DØ

?

NO

MN

Ps

SiP

0,89

0,05

0,03

0,00

0,03

0,00

0,77

0,06

0,09

0,04

0,04

0,00

0,93

0,02

0,04

0,00

0,00

0,00

NO

MN

Pp

pv0,

660,

040,

050,

010,

150,

080,

700,

040,

140,

100,

020,

000,

710,

040,

180,

060,

020,

00

NO

MN

Ps

pv0,

560,

060,

280,

050,

040,

000,

580,

040,

300,

050,

010,

020,

560,

050,

320,

050,

000,

02

AK

KN

Pp

pv0,

170,

020,

170,

030,

560,

050,

160,

020,

720,

090,

010,

000,

080,

020,

780,

120,

010,

00

AK

KN

Pp

ip0,

180,

020,

520,

090,

200,

000,

100,

040,

570,

180,

060,

060,

060,

010,

780,

110,

020,

02

AK

KN

Ps

pv0,

300,

120,

270,

010,

300,

000,

150,

040,

770,

030,

010,

000,

090,

070,

770,

070,

000,

00

AK

KN

Ps

ip0,

380,

030,

520,

060,

020,

000,

360,

130,

480,

020,

010,

000,

360,

040,

560,

030,

010,

00

DA

TN

Pp

0,07

0,02

0,15

0,14

0,55

0,07

0,03

0,02

0,40

0,46

0,09

0,00

0,02

0,01

0,38

0,53

0,06

0,01

DA

TN

Ps

0,16

0,03

0,24

0,10

0,48

0,00

0,15

0,05

0,48

0,27

0,05

0,00

0,17

0,08

0,44

0,28

0,04

0,00

AK

KP

Pp

PfK

0,18

0,03

0,22

0,02

0,50

0,05

0,08

0,02

0,67

0,17

0,04

0,00

0,10

0,03

0,61

0,21

0,06

0,00

AK

KP

Ps

PfK

0,13

0,02

0,19

0,03

0,60

0,03

0,18

0,06

0,61

0,13

0,01

0,00

0,13

0,05

0,65

0,15

0,02

0,00

DA

TP

Pp

PfK

0,05

0,19

0,12

0,02

0,60

0,01

0,06

0,27

0,14

0,51

0,02

0,00

0,04

0,10

0,23

0,62

0,01

0,00

DA

TP

Ps

PfK

0,14

0,05

0,35

0,07

0,38

0,00

0,08

0,02

0,32

0,57

0,01

0,00

0,08

0,02

0,25

0,64

0,00

0,00

AK

KP

Pp

WP

0,08

0,00

0,15

0,02

0,73

0,01

0,07

0,03

0,51

0,32

0,06

0,01

0,09

0,02

0,44

0,39

0,06

0,01

AK

KP

Ps

WP

0,25

0,01

0,16

0,06

0,51

0,00

0,15

0,02

0,49

0,28

0,05

0,00

0,11

0,05

0,52

0,29

0,04

0,00

DA

TP

Pp

WP

0,08

0,03

0,12

0,02

0,71

0,03

0,09

0,03

0,38

0,33

0,13

0,04

0,11

0,05

0,41

0,35

0,07

0,02

DA

TP

Ps

WP

0,23

0,03

0,16

0,27

0,30

0,01

0,17

0,05

0,43

0,27

0,06

0,01

0,13

0,05

0,38

0,35

0,07

0,01


(2011) Processability Theory and German Case Acquisition

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