(In)definiteness across languages and in L2 acquisition Bert Le Bruyn Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS This paper argues that the cross-linguistic study of definiteness is an indispensable condition for advancing work on the second language acquisition of definites. We briefly sketch the latter field (Section 1), work out a promising line of research (Sections 2-4) and show how methodological advances in the cross-linguistic study of definiteness hold the key to operationalize this research program (Section 5). 1. From an articleless L1 to an article L2 Research on the second language acquisition of definite articles by L1 speakers of articleless languages dates back at least four decades (see e.g. Hakuta 1976). Early studies (Huebner, 1983; Tarone & Parrish, 1989, Thomas, 1989) used the typology of definite/indefinite contexts proposed by Bickerton (1981) to analyze the production of L2 learners. This typology is based on two binary features, viz. ‘speaker reference’ [+/-SR] and ‘hearer knowledge’ [+/-HK]. The outcomes of these studies were mixed, e.g. Thomas (1989) argues that L2 learners associate the definite with the feature [+SR] whereas Master (1987) argues that they associate it with the feature [+HK], thus leading to significantly different predictions. In the early years of this century, an experimental paradigm came up that singled out one specific subtype of [+SR; -HK] contexts. Ionin (2003) initiated this paradigm and hypothesized that the problems that pop up in [+SR; -HK] contexts are primarily due to the fact that learners confuse specificity and definiteness. Specificity in this paradigm is defined as the speaker’s intention to refer to a unique and noteworthy individual in the set denoted by the NP (Ionin et al. 2004). (1) presents an item with a specific referent (‘a very important client from Seattle’) while (2) presents an item with a non-specific referent (‘a student’): (1)

specific referent Jennifer: Hello, Helen? This is Jennifer! Helen: Hi Jennifer! It’s wonderful to hear from you. I suppose you want to talk to my sister? Jennifer: Yes, I haven’t spoken to her in years! Helen: I’m very sorry, but she doesn’t have time to talk right now. She is meeting with a very important client from Seattle. He is quite rich, and she really wants to get his business for our company. Ko et al. (2010)

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non-specific referent At a university Professor Clark: I’m looking for Professor Anne Peterson. Secretary: I’m afraid she is busy. She has office hours right now. Professor Clark: What is she doing? Secretary: She is meeting with a student, but I don’t know who it is. Ko et al. (2010) 1

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We provide examples taken from Ko et al. (2010). These represent the most recent instance of Ionin’s (2003) paradigm by Ionin and colleagues.

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Specificity in (1) is operationalized by having Helen add details about the referent in the form of modifiers and a follow-up sentence. These details suggest that Helen has a unique client in mind who is furthermore noteworthy. The operationalization of non-specificity in (2) lies in the absence of additional information about the referent and the explicit statement of the lack of knowledge about his/her identity. Ionin et al. (2004) show how Korean and Russian L2 learners of English who are asked to choose between a, the or ø as a determiner for very important client and student are more likely to choose the for the former than for the latter.2 Ionin’s paradigm has generated consistent results in a number of replication studies involving L2 learners of English with an articleless L1 (e.g., Ko et al. 2010 for Russian and Korean, Hawkins et al. 2006 for Japanese). On the most widely cited interpretation of the data the paradigm has generated (Ionin et al. 2009), the problem L2 learners face is that article systems cross-linguistically come in two varieties, one organized around definiteness, the other around specificity and definiteness. English represents the former, Samoan the latter: +definite

-definite

+specific

the

a

-specific

the

a

Figure 1: The English article system +definite

-definite

+specific

le

le

-specific

le

se

Figure 2: The Samoan article system (Ionin et al. 2009) The difference between the two systems lies in the fact that the Samoan ‘definite’ article is also used for specific indefinites. Ionin and colleagues hypothesize that L2 learners need to determine which of the two article systems applies in the languages they are learning, leading them to fluctuate between the two systems and sometimes overproduce definite articles in specific indefinite contexts. This hypothesis is known as the Fluctuation Hypothesis and is the most influential theory-driven explanation about L2 definite article acquisition to date. 2. Evidence against the Fluctuation Hypothesis? This section is named after Snape et al. (2006), a paper that brings together three independently carried out replication studies of Ionin et al. (2004) and finds that Japanese learners of English nicely follow the predictions of the Fluctuation Hypothesis but that Mandarin learners of English do not. 2.1. Snape et al. (2006) The data from the Japanese learners Snape et al. (2006) report on comes from Hawkins et al. (2006) and Reid (2006). Tables 1 and 2 provide a summary of the data, focusing on the two contexts that

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In this paper, we do not separately report on native speaker controls but refer to Ionin et al. (2004) and Le Bruyn & Dong (2017a,b) for the relevant data. Native speakers in these studies performed at ceiling on providing indefinite articles both in the indefinite specific and indefinite non-specific condition.

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allow us to check the predictions of the Fluctuation Hypothesis: specific indefinite contexts and nonspecific indefinite contexts.3 The responses for Korean L2 learners in Hawkins et al. (2006) (N=12) The Non-specific 8% (4/48) Specific 50% (24/48) Table 1: percentage of the responses by 12 Japanese respondents in the specific and non-specific conditions in Hawkins et al. (2006) A and the responses for Japanese L2 learners in Reid et al. (2006) (N=14) A the Non-specific 94% 4% Specific 70% 29% Table 2: percentage of a and the responses by 14 Japanese respondents in the specific and nonspecific conditions in Reid et al. (2006) Even though we lack some details about the studies and cannot report the data fully in parallel, the general picture is clear: Japanese learners appear to be sensitive to specificity and their production of English articles bears out the predictions of the Fluctuation Hypothesis. Both in Hawkins et al. (2006) and Reid et al. (2006), Japanese learners overproduce definites in the specific indefinite condition but not in the non-specific indefinite condition. The data from Mandarin learners that Snape et al. (2006) report on are taken from Ting (2005). They are summarized in Table 3: A and the responses for Mandarin L2 learners in Ting et al. (2005) (N=8) A the Non-specific 94% 4% 3% Specific 92% Table 3: percentage of a and the responses by 8 Mandarin respondents in the specific and non-specific conditions in Ting (2005) The contrast between the Mandarin and the Japanese learners is striking: whereas Japanese learners overproduce definites in 29 to 50% of specific indefinite contexts, Mandarin learners seem to behave like native speakers in only overproducing definites in 3% of the same contexts. Snape et al. (2006) conjecture that the contrast between Mandarin and Japanese learners might be explained by the fact that Mandarin is in a more advanced stage of developing an article system parallel to that of English. It would be grammaticalizing the numeral yi (‘one’) as the indefinite and the demonstrative nei (‘that’) as the definite. L1 transfer could then explain why Mandarin learners perform more native-like. 3

To present the cleanest possible picture, we restrict ourselves to data from experimental items without scopal interactions and data that focus – as in Ionin’s original experiment – on the singular.

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2.2. Assessing data and analyses Let us – for the moment – take the data at face value and ignore the small sample size of Ting’s study. What the data indicate then is that there is – in all likelihood – L1 influence. Whether Snape et al.’s conjecture is on the right track or even plausible is however impossible to tell. The study falls short of providing sufficient motivation at two levels: (i) it does not provide any comparative data that would support the difference in grammaticalization between Mandarin and Japanese, (ii) it provides no systematic way of linking the alleged difference to the performance of L2 learners. The limitations of the Snape et al. study were difficult to avoid at the stage of research SLA and general linguistics were in back in (2006). The study of the syntax/semantics interface is a recent addition to the field of SLA and requires a level of systematic comparison between languages that went beyond what the general linguistics literature could offer. The latter excelled at fine-grained analyses of detailed phenomena in individual and closely related languages. It also boasted major insights into broader cross-linguistic variation. What it however lacked was a methodology that allowed it to reach the level of sophisticated comparison between typologically distant languages that is relevant for advanced SLA research within the syntax/semantics interface like the one that the Snape et al. study would require. The upshot of this is that – rather than passing through the normal process of falsification and fine-tuning of hypotheses – the SLA literature investigating the issue of fluctuation and L1 influence simply never took off and an exciting research program died a silent death. In the following sections, we want to revive this program by (i) replicating the null result of Ting’s study with a decent sample size (section 3); (ii) providing evidence that suggests Mandarin (in)definiteness influences L2 production (section 4); and (iii) showing how advances in general linguistics provide us with the relevant theoretical insights and methodology to investigate fine-grained L1 influence in the domain of L2 definiteness acquisition (section 5). 3. Replicating the null result The replication of a null result might seem like an irrelevant exercise but – given the small sample size of Ting’s original study – we think it is a worthwhile enterprise to convince us that Mandarin learners are likely to be different from learners with other articleless L1s. We report here on an experiment we ran with 35 second year students of the Zhejiang Ruian High School. We selected this population rather than university students in or outside of China to make sure that their general proficiency was unlikely to be higher than that of the Japanese learners Hawkins et al. (2006) and Reid et al. (2006) report on. Their ages matched the year they were in (16 and 17) and none of them had spent time abroad or was proficient in an article language other than English. We recycled 4 specific indefinite and 4 non-specific indefinite items from Ionin et al. (2004). 4 We furthermore added 36 fillers (partly recycled, partly invented), balancing the anticipated a and the responses.

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The specific indefinite items we used were items 25, 26, 27 and 28 from Ionin et al. (2004). For the non-specific indefinite items, we used items 37, 38, 39 and 40. These non-specific items were control items in the original study but do not contain the explicit statement of lack of speaker knowledge criticized in Trenkic (2008). Ionin et al. (2009) indicate that this explicit statement of lack of speaker knowledge is not a crucial part of the operationalization of non-specificity and Ionin et al. (2004) found that their indefinite control items pattern with

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The items were semi-randomized and presented as a paper and pencil forced-choice elicitation task that was followed by a language proficiency test with the same format. Participation was framed in a classroom setting. As in Ionin’s original study, each item of the experiment came with a blank and three options to choose from: a, the or ø. There was no time limit but students all finished the experiment and proficiency test within 45 minutes. The proficiency test was not designed to classify the level of the learners based on standardized levels like those of the CEFR but to allow for a relative comparison between the subjects of the current experiment and those of three parallel experiments probing the role of modification. As such, the results are less relevant to the current study and we will consequently restrict ourselves to reporting the results of the experiment itself. Table 4 presents the descriptive results of the study in parallel with the data in Tables 1 to 3:

Non-specific Specific

A, the and ø responses for Mandarin L2 learners (N=35) A the 84% (118/140) 9% (13/140) 88% (123/140) 9% (13/140)

ø 6% (9/140) 3% (4/140)

Table 4: percentages and absolute frequencies of a, the and ø responses by 35 Mandarin respondents The data of the non-specific and the specific condition are almost fully parallel. We did run a mixed effects model with item and participant as random factors. Given that the selection of ø gives us no insight into whether subjects consider the item indefinite or definite, we modelled these responses as missing data. As expected, there was no overall effect of condition and pairwise comparisons showed no difference between the two conditions ((t(265)=0.046, p=.963). We interpret the data in Table 4 as indicating that Mandarin L2 learners are unlikely to be sensitive to specificity in the way it is operationalized by Ionin et al. (2004). As we indicated before, we are aware of the fact that few to no conclusions can be drawn on the basis of a null result but we did consider it relevant to at least check whether the null result found in Ting (2005) is not merely due to its small sample size. In Section 4, we follow-up on the intuition of Snape et al. (2006) that Mandarin might be on the way to grammaticalize the numeral yi (‘one’) as an indefinite article. We show how this intuition might be one of the explanations for the results of an experiment we report on in Le Bruyn & Dong (2017b). 4. Discourse prominence and the role of grammaticalization In Le Bruyn & Dong (2017b), we investigate the role of discourse prominence in the L2 production of Mandarin learners of English, opposing two types of indefinites:

non-specific indefinite items: there is a significant difference in the responses with the specific indefinite test items (p<.001) but not with the non-specific indefinite test items.

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Have I already told you about the scariest moment of my life? Well, one day I saw a girl on top of a building… All of a sudden, she starts to dance, slips on a brick and falls of the building! Fortunately she landed on some cardboard boxes and didn’t get hurt…

The girl in (3) is foregrounded: after her introduction, she is immediately picked up as the subject of the next sentence and remains the main character of the story throughout. The brick is backgrounded: it is introduced but never referred back to. 4.1. Le Bruyn & Dong (2017b) The paradigm of Le Bruyn & Dong (2017b) has two experimental conditions: a foregrounded indefinite condition and a backgrounded indefinite condition.5 To operationalize indefiniteness, we used DPs whose semantic content does not guarantee uniqueness and whose referents are non-familiar. This choice was inspired by the fact that DPs whose semantic content guarantees uniqueness involve nouns and adjectives (like superlatives) that typically occur with a definite. Using these nouns would make it hard to distinguish grammatical from collocational knowledge. To operationalize backgrounding and foregrounding, we made 8 stories following the setup of the one in (3): (i) introduction of the protagonist, (ii) story about actions of the protagonist, (iii) optional introduction of a secondary inanimate character, (iv) continuation of the story about the protagonist. A further 8 stories were created as fillers and had a freer structure. 6 We adopted the forced choice setup used in Ionin et al.’s specificity paradigm but limited the answer possibilities to the definite and the indefinite article. For the experimental items, an article had to be selected for the DP introducing the protagonist (four items) or the secondary character (four items), thus leading to our two experimental conditions. For the fillers, the relevant DPs concerned collocationally and/or grammatically enforced definites (four items) and indefinites (four items): (4)

You’ll never guess what happened today! I’ve seen a woodpecker for the first time in my life.

(5)

You’ll never guess what happened today! You know I have a sister? Well, she came to visit me for the first time in 10 years!

Wherever possible, we maximized the similarity between the stories across the two conditions. We however made sure to create sufficient variation to prevent subjects from inferring answers. One way of doing so was to use the possessive my daughter in the experimental item based on (3) when asking participants to fill in the blank for the backgrounded character. To create a communicative contexts for the stories, we inserted them in a pub context in which one guy tells them to another. This was done pictorially as in Figures 3 and 4.

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The paradigm was originally proposed in Le Bruyn & Dong (2017a) as a paradigm testing the Fluctuation Hypothesis. We get back to this later on. 6 To keep the processing cost of the task as low as possible we decided not to increase the number of fillers beyond 8.

6

Figure 3: example of a non-specific/backgrounded item

Figure 4: example of a specific/foregrounded item The participants were 22 L1 Mandarin/L2 English speakers. All were undergraduate students of English at the Beijing International Studies University. The test was administered by a student assistant in a quiet environment at the university. Participants were tested individually. The instructions as well as the semi-randomized 16 test stories (8 experimental items and 8 fillers) were presented in a PowerPoint presentation with one slide for the instructions and one slide for each test story. Participants were asked to indicate for each story whether they preferred the version with the indefinite (Option 1) or the definite article (Option 2). A small language biography survey was orally carried out by the student assistant to check for the potential influence of stays abroad or other languages. No such influences were found. The participants were given no time limit but all of them completed the experiment in under five minutes. Table 5 summarizes the results of our 22 participants on the test items. L2 learners are at ceiling in the specific/foregrounded condition but produce 31% of definites in the non-specific/backgrounded condition.

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A and the responses for Mandarin L2 learners in Le Bruyn & Dong (2017b) (N=22) A the Backgrounded 69% (53/88) 31% (27/88) 5% (5/88) Foregrounded 95% (75/88) Table 5: percentage of a and the responses by 22 Mandarin respondents in the foregrounded and backgrounded conditions in Le Bruyn & Dong (2017b) To determine the significance of these results, we ran a mixed effects model with item and participant as random factors. There was a significant effect of condition. Pairwise comparisons of the model showed that the foregrounded and the backgrounded conditions were significantly different from each other (t(174)=4.576, p<.001). 4.2. Interpreting the results The results of the experiment we briefly summarized in section 4.1 allow for at least three interpretations. We go through of them and end with the one that implements Snape et al.’s intuition that the grammaticalization of articles in Mandarin might play a role. The first interpretation of the results is based on the original rationale behind the experiment. The paradigm was first proposed in Le Bruyn & Dong (2017a) as an alternative paradigm to the one developed by Ionin and colleagues to test the Fluctuation Hypothesis: foregrounding was hypothesized to operationalize specificity whereas backgrounding was hypothesized to operationalize non-specificity. Justification for the equation of foregrounding/backgrounding and specificity/nonspecificity comes from the observation that Samoan le and English indefinite this – two expressions that Ionin and colleagues consider unambiguously specific – are used to introduce foregrounded characters into discourse: (6)

‘O le ulugāli’I, fānau l=a lā tama PRES ART couple give birth ART=Poss3.du. child ‘o le teine ‘o Sina. PRES ART girl PRES Sina ‘There was a couple who had a child, a girl called Sina.’ (Mosel & Hovdhaugen 1992)

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And th-- it was like there was this couple and they were like I dun no (pause) about (pause) sixty, sixty five the pair of them. (British National Corpus)

(6) and (7) constitute the beginnings of a story and none of the referents of the bolded DPs are familiar. The speakers do however have unique referents in mind that they consider noteworthy enough to tell a story about. In this sense, Samoan le and English indefinite this count as specificity markers on the definition of Ionin and colleagues (see also Ionin, Ko & Wexler 2014; Ionin 2006). If the experimental paradigm in Le Bruyn & Dong (2017a,b) tests the Fluctuation Hypothesis, the results are unexpected: not only do they not provide evidence in favor, they show exactly the opposite pattern. One interpretation could then be that they replicate the null result of Ting (2005) and the experiment we reported on in section 3 but a more likely conclusion is that the paradigm operationalizes something different from the phenomenon operationalized in the Ionin et al. studies. 8

The unexpected results pushed Le Bruyn & Dong (2017b) to propose an alternative to the Fluctuation Hypothesis that would do justice to the fact that what was really being operationalized was foregrounding/backgrounding. This resulted in an extension of the Discourse Hypothesis known from the literature on the L2 acquisition of tense and aspect (Bardovi-Harlig 1994, 1995, 1998). The original Discourse Hypothesis proposes that L2 learners use emerging verbal morphology to distinguish foregrounded discourse segments from backgrounded ones in narratives. The foreground in narratives consists of those events that move the time forward (Dry 1981) whereas the background “provides supportive material that elaborates on or evaluates the events in the foreground” (BardoviHarlig 1998:476): (8)

Foreground

Background

A man entered the White Hart. He was wearing a black jacket. Bill served him a beer. The man paid. He drank the beer. He liked it. (Kamp & Reyle 1993) The sentences on the left provide the main storyline, the sentences on the right provide background information. The extension of the Discourse Hypothesis Le Bruyn & Dong (2017b) propose is that emerging article systems are used to distinguish foregrounded from backgrounded referents. They furthermore attribute the particular division of labour they find in their results to the fact that the indefinite article – within the paradigm of indefinites – is neutral in terms of foregrounding/backgrounding whereas the definite article – compared to pronouns and demonstratives – is typically not used for referents that are activated and in focus (Gundel et al. 1993). The third and final interpretation we would like to discuss here goes back to the suggestion by Snape et al. (2006) that Mandarin is grammaticalizing an article system and that this might help Mandarin L2 learners of English. Clearly, the facts from Le Bruyn & Dong (2017b) show that this suggestion is to be worked out further if it were to have any chance of dealing with non-native performance in Le Bruyn & Dong’s paradigm. This is however not impossible and we sketch here one way to achieve this. The literature on the grammaticalization of indefinite articles (see e.g. Givón 1981 for a classical reference and Pozas-Loyo 2010 for more recent work) has consistently suggested that the first article uses of numerals pop up with pragmatically important referents. The uses of the numeral yi in Mandarin have been argued to follow this pattern. Wright & Givón (1987) report that yi-marked referents in their corpus recur 14.5 times on average in the subsequent discourse whereas their unmarked counterparts – bare nouns – only recur 1.87 times. Rather than appealing to the grammaticalization of a full article system, we could then use the insight that the Mandarin grammaticalizing indefinite article marks foregrounded referents and correctly predict that Mandarin L2 learners of English will be native-like on foregrounded referents but not necessarily on backgrounded referents. Interestingly, this would mean that understanding the L2 production of the definite article implies understanding how indefiniteness works in the learner’s L1. 9

Summing up, we discarded the first interpretation of the results of Le Bruyn & Dong (2017b) but the two other interpretations still stand. To work out the Discourse Hypothesis, one would need to check whether L2 learners from other articleless L1s behave in the same way as Mandarin learners. If they do not, one would like to know what it is in Mandarin that pushes L2 learners to behave the way they do. As for the yi grammaticalization hypothesis, one would need to show that grammaticalization is more advanced in Mandarin than in Japanese, Korean and Russian and one would then hope to find that Japanese, Korean and Russian learners are insensitive to the foreground/background divide. If all of this turns out to be the case, one would however still need to answer the question what it is in Mandarin that allows learners to behave native-like in the paradigm of Ionin et al. 4.3. The need for (more) cross-linguistic work on definiteness Independently of which hypothesis we choose to follow-up on, the success of research in the L2 acquisition of definiteness crucially depends on the success of cross-linguistic work in syntax and semantics that allows us to systematically track differences between L1s and link them to L2 performance. The general linguistics community already provides L2 researchers with a wealth of data and analyses, in particular through the work of Schwarz (see Schwarz this volume for an up-to-date overview). There however remains work to be done. Cross-linguistic research on definiteness has identified a number of functions related to definiteness that can be systematically linked to lexical items/constructions in various languages. E.g., Jenks (2016) convincingly argues that Mandarin uses bare nouns to mark weak definiteness and demonstratives to mark strong definiteness. This is however not sufficient from an L2 perspective as L1 influence need not be restricted to definiteness uses of an expression. We know Mandarin L2 learners use the definite article non-presuppositionally in English (Le Bruyn & Schutter 2017), a fact that could follow from the absence of a formal way of distinguishing weak definiteness from indefiniteness in Mandarin. We furthermore know that demonstratives exert L1 influence beyond their definiteness function (Ionin et al. 2012). Another limitation of working with a pre-established set of definiteness functions is that it suggests definiteness is described in a language as soon as all functions have been ticked off. Jenks (2016) studies weak and strong definiteness in Mandarin, links these to bare nouns and demonstratives, and presents these as the relevant manifestations of definiteness. Mandarin however has other ways to mark some form of definiteness as well, in particular in the classifier domain where a sequence of a modifier, numeral, classifier and noun marks something close to definiteness: (9)

Zhangsan de san John DE three ‘the three books of John’

ben CL

shu book

Previous analyses have qualified this sequence as specific, referential, not non-definite (Huang, 1982), familiar, non-maximal (Yang, 2005; Partee, 2006), specific indefinite (Sio, 2006; Zhang, 2006), and familiar, maximal (Hall, 2015). In a number of pilot experiments reported in Le Bruyn & Dong (2015), we tried to assess the exact status of the construction with a focus on relative clause modifiers. We found that we were dealing with expressions that were necessarily familiar and probably non-maximal but that the combination of these two features was not sufficient to fully characterize them. As familiarity is a crucial ingredient of strong definiteness, it remains to be seen whether Mandarin only instantiates strong definiteness (as with demonstratives) or also something slightly different like nonmaximal familiarity. This could explain why Mandarin learners have been found to accept the definite article in English with a non-maximal interpretation (Yang & Ionin 2009). 10

A final limitation of current analyses of definiteness is that they focus on individual (pairs of) expressions of definiteness and do not systematically investigate the interplay with markers of (specific) indefiniteness. Jenks (2016) analyses bare nouns and demonstratives but does not provide insight into the larger system of definite and indefinite reference in Mandarin. To investigate the yi grammaticalization hypothesis, Jenks’ data and analysis would need to be complemented with data on indefinites. We note furthermore that some analyses of definiteness omit a discussion of demonstratives and their interaction with definiteness (see e.g. Arkoh & Matthewson 2013). The data from Jenks show that this is an important omission and – more generally speaking – cross-linguistic studies should provide analyses of full paradigms rather than of individual items. 5. Cross-linguistic research into definiteness and L2 acquisition The discussion in section 4 shows that current approaches to definiteness should be extended in at least three ways to allow them to be relevant not only for our understanding of definiteness but also for the study of L1 influence in SLA: - Analyses of items that mark definiteness should cover all functions of the items and not only those that correspond to functions of the definite article; - Analyses of definiteness should not only focus on functions of definites that have been identified in the literature; - Analyses of individual (pairs of) markers of definiteness should be extended to analyses of definiteness and indefiniteness paradigms. These extensions call for a bottom-up, data-driven approach that takes differences and similarities between languages as its core data and basis for analysis. In this final section, we sketch how such an approach could be conceived of, relying for its feasibility on a set of tools that we are currently developing in Utrecht (van der Klis, Le Bruyn, de Swart 2017) and the extensive literature on definiteness as a guide for analysis. To generate the comparative data we need, we propose to use sentence-aligned parallel corpora that include source texts from all the languages one would want to compare, including the native speaker languages as well as the target languages. This corpus would optimally contain a variety of genres, including at least narrative text as well as dialogue. The data collection is layered. The first step is to take a and the as seed words, look up all their uses in the English source texts and match their translations. As a second step, one looks up all uses of the translations of a and the in the source and target texts of the other languages and matches the translations of these in all the languages of the corpus. The first step creates one-way contrastive analyses focusing on how definiteness – as instantiated in the English article paradigm – is rendered in the other languages. The second step creates a many-to-many contrastive analysis that gives us access to the paradigms of definiteness and indefiniteness cross-linguistically. The procedure of translating back translations is called an iteration in the field of translation corpus studies. Building in more than one increases representativeness. The output of the data collection is a set of contexts with – for every language – an indication of the markers of definiteness/indefiniteness. Custom-made software allows us to automatically generate groupings of contexts in a two-dimensional space by maximizing the distances between contexts in which languages use different markers and minimizing the distances between contexts in which the

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same markers are used. 7 Based on Analyses of Similarities (Clarke 1993), we can determine the significance of these groupings. The combination of the groupings and the contexts that appear in them are the basis for language-specific lexical and grammatical analyses. The use of feature-based formal semantics in combination with constraint-based OT grammars guarantees comparability across languages and allows us to investigate which variations on their L1 and L2 a learner uses at a given point in time. Initial experiments with the approach sketched above indicate that relevant results can be obtained with as little as four to five languages. It should be clear though that the more languages are included, the more fine-grained the approach becomes. 6. Conclusion The take-home message of this paper is that cross-linguistic work on definiteness is an indispensable condition for studying the second language acquisition of definiteness. If we do not know where learners are coming from, it is difficult to understand what it is they have to acquire and why learners from different language backgrounds sometimes behave differently. We have proposed a research program that focuses on L1 influence in the acquisition of definiteness and we have shown how current cross-linguistic work can be extended to allow us to carry out this program. The crucial change of mindset is that we should not look for meaning in different languages but take variation in forms across contexts and languages as our core data and basis for analysis. References Bardovi-Harlig, K. (1994). Anecdote or evidence? Evaluating support for hypotheses concerning the development of tense and aspect. Research methodology in second language acquisition, 41-60. Bardovi-Harlig, K. (1995). A narrative perspective on the development of the tense/aspect system in second language acquisition. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 17(02), 263-291. Bardovi-Harlig, K. (1998). Narrative structure and lexical aspect: Conspiring factors in second language acquisition of tense-aspect morphology. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 20, 471-508. Bickerton, D. (1981). Roots of language. Ann Arbor: Karoma Publishers. Dry, H. (1981). Sentence aspect and the movement of narrative time. Text, 1(3), 233-240. Givón, T. (1981). On the development of the numeral ‘one’ as an indefinite marker. Folia Linguistica Historica, 15(Historica vol. 2, 1), 35-54. Gundel, J. K., Hedberg, N., & Zacharski, R. (1993). Cognitive status and the form of referring expressions in discourse. Language, 274-307. Hakuta, K. (1976). A case study of a Japanese child learning English as a second language. Language learning, 26, 321-351. Hawkins, R., Al-Eid, S., Almahboob, I., Athanasopoulos, P., Chaengchenkit, R., Hu, J., Rezai, M., Jaensch, C., Jeon, Y., Jiang, A. & Leung, Y. K. I. (2006). Accounting for English article interpretation by L2 speakers. EUROSLA yearbook, 6, 7-25.

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Same and different are assessed language internally. Suppose we have two languages (English and Dutch) and two contexts (A and B) and that English uses the in both and Dutch the in A and a bare noun in B. From an English perspective, contexts A and B are identical but they are different from a Dutch perspective.

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