Many languages that have articles show a so-called definiteness effect, also called definiteness restriction or “weak-strong distinction” (Milsark 1974 & 1977) according to which only indefinite, or weak expressions such as the indefinite article or weak quantifiers such as many, some, etc. can occur in proper existential sentences (ECs) whereas definite, or strong expressions such as the definite article, strong quantifiers such as every and all, demonstratives, possessives, proper names and pronouns are excluded.

Two types of weak definites (WDs) commonly found in ECs are “kind readings” (McNally 2011: 1842) as shown in (1) as well as “extremely readings” (Lyons 1999: 247) as shown in (2) both of which clearly evoke an indefinite reading. Even though English ECs abide by the definiteness restriction, the indefinite meaning of the WD renders them compatible with an EC:

(1) There was every flavor of ice cream for sale. (Musan 1996: 169)

(2) There is the most intriguing girl in the garden. (Lyons 1999: 247)

Milsark (1977) observes that any expression that can occur in an English EC has to be assigned a weak/indefinite reading, whereas expressions that cannot be licensed in English there-sentences have to be interpreted as strong/definite. Every flavour of ice cream as well as the most intriguing girl thus have to be considered indefinites, even though formally they look like definites. Since (1) and (2) qualify as proper ECs and can be uttered in an out-of-the-blue context, presenting new information, it would indeed be difficult to find a presupposed referent in the discourse for the two expressions in (1) and (2).

Note that the WDs found in ECs and investigated in this paper are not identical to ‘classical’ WDs such as in (3) and (4):

.

(3) Lola went to the hospital and Alice did too.

(Aguilar-Guevara & Zwarts 2010: 2)

.

(4) Lola went to the hotel and Alice did too.

(Aguilar-Guevara & Zwarts 2010: 2)

Whereas to the hotel in (4) implies that Alice went to the same hotel, to the hospital in (3) does not. DPs such as to the hospital in (3) have been referred to as “weak definite” (Schwartz 2012) or “indefinite definite” (Carlson et alii 2006). One characteristic that sets them apart from true definites is that they lack any presupposition of uniqueness (Alonso- Ovalle & Menéndez-Benito 2002). However, the indefinite reading implied by WDs such as the hospital cannot be maintained when used in an EC:

.

(5) *There is the hospital in this neighbourhood.

.

Therefore, WDs such as the hospital on the one hand and WDs in the shape of extremely and kind readings on the other have to be kept apart since they do not seem to stem from the same phenomenon. Extremely and kind readings do not represent the ‘classical’ case of WDs as they have been defined repeatedly in the literature (cf. Aguilar-Guevara & Zwarts: 2010; Carlson et alii. 2006; Schwartz 2012). The reason they can be labelled WDs is because although they are definite in form, they escape the presupposition of uniqueness usually implied by definite expressions. However, what both kinds of WDs have in common is that they clearly differ from ‘regular’ definites (Carlson et alii 2006).

ECs in European Spanish, too, allow WDs:

.

(6) En esta librería hay los mejores libros.

in this book-store there-are the best books

‘In this book store there are the best books.’

.

In this paper I will focus on the acquisition of WDs in the form of extremely readings in ECs in the L2 Spanish of L1 German and L1 Turkish speakers. Whereas there have been a few studies on the acquisition of the definiteness effect in ECs in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) (cf. White 2008, White et alii. 2012, Palacios-Martínez & Martínez-Insua 2006), up to now there has not been a single study explicitly testing the acquisition of WDs in ECs in an L2. Although White (2008) and White et alii (2012) have shown that the definiteness effect present in English ECs was acquired rather effortlessly by intermediate and advanced L2 speakers of English whose L1 was Turkish, Russian or Mandarin, to my knowledge there has not been a single study focusing on the acquisition of WDs in SLA.

A group of 14 L1 speakers of German and 10 L1 speakers of Turkish who were acquiring L2 European Spanish at the time of testing provided judgments on WDs in ECs. Both German and Turkish allow extremely and kind readings in ECs. They differ, however, in how they are marked morphologically. German extremely readings include a definite article:

.

(7) In diesem Bücherladen gab es die besten Bücher.

in this book-store gave it the best books

‘In this book store there were the best books.’

.

Turkish also allows extremely readings in ECs. In (8) en güzel means ‘the most beautiful’:

.

(8) Rio de Janeiro’da dünyanin en güzel plajlari var.

Rio de Janeiro.LOC of.the.world.GEN most beautiful beaches.GEN exist

‘In Rio de Janeiro there are the most beautiful beaches in the world.’

.

Extremely readings without superlatives, however, can be interpreted both as extremely readings or ‘regular’ indefinite readings expressing ‘any’:

.

(9) Hicbir fikrim yok.

Slightest idea mine not-exist

Interpretation 1: ‘I don’t have the slightest idea/There isn’t the slightest idea.’

Interpretation 2: ‘I don’t have any idea/There isn’t any idea.’

.

What is interesting is that the second interpretation does not imply any discrepancy between a formally strong expression and a semantically weak interpretation but is both formally and semantically weak. As far as the first interpretation is concerned, the WD is not actually present but only arises within the speaker’s interpretation.

The results of this study were obtained by means of a computer- based bi-modal Acceptability Judgment Task consisting of a total of 80 items. The test was originally designed to investigate the L2 speakers’ acquisition of the weak-strong distinction in ECs. Within the test, ECs containing WDs were included as control items. Although the test was not specifically designed to test the acquisition of WDs, the speakers’ judgments can provide a first look into how WDs are treated by L2 speakers of European Spanish.

I hypothesize that even though WDs are licensed in Turkish ECs, they will be more difficult to acquire for the L1 Turkish speakers than for the L1 German speakers since they are not always as straightforward in Turkish as they are in German. The L1 German group, on the other hand, has an advantage in that the phenomenon plays out exactly the same in their L1. Hence, it is likely that the L1 German group outperforms the L1 Turkish group.

Many languages that have articles show a so-called definiteness effect, also called definiteness restriction or “weak-strong distinction” (Milsark 1974 & 1977) according to which only indefinite, or weak expressions such as the indefinite article or weak quantifiers such as many, some, etc. can occur in true ECs whereas definite, or strong expressions such as the definite article, strong quantifiers such as every and all, demonstratives, possessives, proper names and pronouns are excluded from proper ECs1. English clearly displays this restriction:

The data used for this study has been obtained by means of a computer-based bi-modal Acceptability Judgement Task (AJT) and was a modified version of the AJT White et alii (2012) used for their study on the acquisition of the weak-strong distinction in the L2 English of L1 Russian and L1 Turkish speakers. Making use of an AJT is particularly rewarding for a study like this since it triggers intuitional data that is able to reflect the L2 learners’ interlanguage, or intergrammar (White 2003: 17). The subjects were also asked to fill out a Spanish cloze test in order to obtain an idea of the overall proficiency level of Spanish of the subjects.

In order to determine whether WDs have been acquired correctly, two things are in order:

1) The L2ers have to have understood the concept of definiteness and indefiniteness in general. Only if their use of the (in)definite article is correct, their judgments on ECs become reliable – otherwise they might just be generally unsure about the use of articles in any construction and about the concept of (in)definiteness; therefore only the judgments on ECs made by those speakers whose judgments on the general use of the articles were correct about 75% were included;

2) In order to evaluate whether WDs were actually troublesome for the L2ers, they have to have acquired the fact that only weak expressions are licensed in existential constructions in European Spanish and that strong expressions are ruled out. Otherwise their results might be accounted for by a general insecurity about ECs. Therefore, only those speakers whose judgments on grammatical ECs including weak expressions and on ungrammatical existential sentences containing strong expressions were correct about 75% were included in the analysis. This leaves us with 10 L1 German speakers and 5 L1 Turkish speakers out of 14 L1 German and 10 L1 Turkish speakers who took the test:

As was shown in the previous chapter the L1 Turkish speakers less readily accepted WDs in ECs in European Spanish; their acceptance rate was about 31.4%. Even the speakers of this group who scored very high on the cloze test did not accept all test items. A speaker’s performance on the weak-strong distinction in other ECs did not seem to have an influence on their performance on the WD items, either. With the exception of one speaker, no L1 Turkish speaker accepted more than 28.6% of the items. The fact that they acquired the weak-strong distinction quite well (accuracy rates on the weak-strong distinction ranged from 88.4% to 97.7%) but that they were far from target-like on the WD items suggests that they were overgeneralizing the weak-strong distinction to contexts in which it does not apply.

The L1 German speakers accepted WDs in ECs only a little more over 50%; their acceptance rate was 55.7%. This is quite surprising considering the fact that ECs including WDs look the same in German and European Spanish. The assumption that the L1 German group would display positive L1 transfer was thus only partly borne out: although, as expected, the L1 German group did outperform the L1 Turkish group, the extent of their outperformance was rather low.

However, the AJT only contained 7 items testing the acquisition of WDs in ECs. Since these items were construed as control items for the original study on the acquisition of the weak.-strong distinction, they were not sufficiently varied and did, of course, not represent the whole range of WDs possible in European Spanish ECs. The present study can therefore only give a first look into the acquisition process of this phenomenon in SLA. A more elaborate test design is necessary to obtain a more fine-grained picture of how WDs are acquired by foreign language learners. Such a test design should include WDs in existential as well as non-existential sentences and should include control items testing whether the concept of (in)definiteness as well as of the weak- strong distinction have been understood since otherwise the results might not be reliable. Considering the fact that in Turkish there are two possible WDs in ECs – one containing en ‘the most’ and one including a null WD – a sufficient number of items testing both structures should be included in the test. This way, it will be possible to see whether the lack of an overt WD in some Turkish ECs leads to more difficulties.

Although – as was shown in chapter 2 – WDs are usually not perceived as violations of the grammar by L1 speakers of this variety of Spanish, there are many other ways in which the same idea can be uttered. In fact, L1 speakers of European Spanish often resort to verbs that are more precise such as tener ‘have’, vender ‘sell’ or impersonal constructions with se ‘one’ such as En esta librería venden los mejores libros ‘In this book store they sell the best books’ or En esta librería se pueden comprar los mejores libros ‘In this book store you can buy the best books’ instead of making use of an EC. Hence, it is possible that both the L1 German and L1 Turkish speakers have not come across any WDs in ECs while learning Spanish. Another factor that might be of importance is the fact that European Spanish was not the speakers’ L2 but their L3. Both in Germany and in Turkey English is the first foreign language learned/taught at school and proper L2 speakers of Spanish are practically non-existent unless they attended a special kind of school or learned Spanish outside of school. English was, of course, not the only background language. Within the L1 German group many speakers claimed to also speak French, Italian and Portuguese. Within the L1 Turkish group frequent languages other than English were French and German. In L3 acquisition with the L3 being the language that is currently learned/studied and L2 referring to all other languages learned before, there are many more transfer sources. In order to rule out that the speakers transfer properties of one of their dominant background language, they would have to take a test about the phenomenon of the weak-strong distinction as well as of WDs in ECs in those background languages in which the phenomenon plays out differently from European Spanish as well. In the case of the weak- strong distinction and WDs in existential sentences, however, English can probably be ruled out as a transfer source since it works just like European Spanish and would have led to higher acceptance rates of WDs.

Investigating how WDs are treated by foreign language learners is

thus not an easy task and requires a more elaborate test design specifically designed to investigate the acquisition of WDs.

The present study investigated the acquisition of WDs in ECs in the L2 European Spanish of L1 German and L1 Turkish speakers by means of a bi-modal computer-based Acceptability Judgment Task consisting of a total of 80 items. The results show that the L1 German and the L1 Turkish speakers were rather reluctant to accept WDs. This was particularly true for the L1 Turkish group who less readily accepted these items (33.4%). No correlations between the L2 speakers’ acceptance of WDs in ECs and their performance on the weak-strong distinction as well as their overall proficiency level could be found. At least for the L1 Turkish group part of the problem could be attributed to the fact that WDs are not always recognizable as such in Turkish. Interestingly, however, even those L1 Turkish speakers who performed well on the weak-strong distinction had problems with WDs in existential contexts. This underlines one more time that there might be an overgeneralization of the weak-strong distinction onto contexts in which it does not apply.

However, the present study can only be considered a first glance into the acquisition of WDs. A more elaborate test design investigating a wider range of different WDs in existential as well as non-existential sentences is necessary to obtain a more fine-grained picture of what the acquisition process for WDs in SLA looks like. Especially when studying L1 speakers of Turkish there should be a sufficient number of test items studying the acquisition of the two different structures found in ECs that contain WDs in Turkish. Also, possible other background languages of the speakers should be taken into consideration since European Spanish is usually not the first foreign language taught at school neither in Germany nor in Turkey.