Variability in L2 learning: insights from verb phrase ellipsis in Greek learners of English

This study investigates variability in second language learning. It contributes new data to the ongoing discussion on whether L2 learners can acquire grammatical phenomena that are absent from their L1. We focus on knowledge of English Verb Phrase Ellipsis (VPE) in Greek advanced learners of English and explore reasons for variability in their performance. Greek does not have VPE and the subtleties surrounding its regulation make it unlikely that most learners can obtain these rules from the linguistic data available to them. If this is so, then the proficiency they illustrate must tap into underlying knowledge they already possess. We examine what this knowledge looks like by testing their judgements of (a) VPE sentences where there is strict parallelism between the antecedent and elided clause, (b) VPE sentences where this parallelism is disrupted in different ways, and (c) VPE sentences whose acceptability is mediated by the interpretability of the aspectual feature in the elided clause. 27 Greek learners of English and 32 L1 speakers of English undertook a sentence-completion judgement task, based on Hawkins (2012). Greek participants accepted VPE sentences and rejected those ruled out by recoverability (Rouveret, 2012). However, their judgements of examples mediated by interpretability did not demonstrate conclusively that they could draw a distinction between interpretable (perfective) and uninterpretable (progressive) features in English. Our data provide further cross-linguistic support for L2 learners being able not only to acquire constructions absent from their L1 but also to operate in accordance with the restrictions that regulate them. However, they remain inconclusive as to whether feature interpretability is the driving force behind the variability seen in (c), a finding that merits further testing.