Project
This
is the website of the European research network "The structure of
learner varieties". This project involves about 40 researchers from
different European countries and is co-ordinated at the Max-Planck
Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. The
project co-ordinator is Christine
Dimroth.
In this project, the process of second language acquisition is not characterized in terms of errors and deviations, but in terms of the two-fold systematicity which it exhibits: the inherent systematicity of a learner variety at a given time, and the way in which such a learner variety evolves into another one. New types of naturalistic and experimental data collections are constantly added to the joint L2-corpus that is hosted at the MPI archive and also includes the ESF data.
The project is concerned with the study of untutored second language acquisition from a cross-linguistic and longitudinal perspective. Structure and development of learner varieties are investigated in the project's six research areas that are dealing with the following topics:
Research Area | Responsible |
---|---|
Acquisition of aspect & temporal structure | Monique Lambert (U. Paris 8) |
Acquisition of finiteness | Christine Dimroth (MPI, Nijmegen) |
Lexical development | Giuliano Bernini (U. Bergamo) |
Scope particles and Information Structure | Sandra Benazzo (U. Lille 3) |
Development of the topic component | Marina Chini (U. Pavia) |
Phonetics and phonology of learner intonation | Aoju Chen (MPI, Nijmegen) |