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Hypotheses and Methods in Second Language Acquisition: Testing the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy on Relative Clauses

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 April 2007

Fred R. Eckman
Fred R. Eckman
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee
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Extract

The purpose of this commentary is to discuss some of the findings and claims of the five articles contained in this special issue that deals with the relationship between the noun phrase accessibility hierarchy (NPAH), first proposed by Keenan and Comrie (1977), and the acquisition of relative clauses (RCs) in three Asian languages—Cantonese, Japanese, and Korean. This topic is of interest to SLA theory for at least two reasons. First, as Ozeki and Shirai (this issue) pointed out, there is significant literature proposing to explain facts about the SLA of RCs involving European languages. This raises the question of whether the NPAH has the same explanatory value for languages that are genetically unrelated and geographically separated. The second reason is that Comrie (1998, 2002) recently proposed that nominal-attributive clauses in some Asian languages differ from RCs in European languages in important ways that might have an impact on whether the NPAH holds true for the acquisition of RCs in these languages.

Type
COMMENTARY
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 29 , Issue 2 , June 2007 , pp. 321 - 327
Copyright
© 2007 Cambridge University Press

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References

REFERENCES

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Comrie, B. (2002). Typology and language acquisition: The case of relative clauses. In A. Giacalone Ramat (Ed.), Typology and second language acquisition (pp. 19–37). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
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