Abstract:
This paper aims at investigating the acquisition of Italian complex predicates by native speakers of Persian. Complex predication is not as pervasive a phenomenon in Italian as it is in Persian. Yet Italian native speakers use complex predicates productively; spontaneous data show that Persian learners of Italian seem to be perfectly aware of Italian complex predicates and use this familiar feature as a bridge between their native language (NL) and the target language (TL). Elicitation of complex predicates in guided context seems to indicate that the Persian group learners’ group is strikingly uniform to the Native Speakers’ group and quite homogeneous with the control group of learners with NL other than Persian. This research shows that the use of complex predicates in Italian Interlanguage (IL) cannot be considered a simple effect of transfer, but could be also analyzed as a more general IL strategy.
Machine summary:
"The preverbal element can be a noun, an adjective, an adverb or a preposition phrase, which combines with a verb to form a single syntactic predicate" (Megerdoomian 2001: 97; see also Folli, Harley and Karimi 2005, Megerdoomian 2002a; for a reference grammar of Persian, see Lambton 1953, Lazard 1957 and Mahootian 1997).
‘make wrong’) the learner produces an original construction; the abstract choice of a CP structure is NL-like (TL has SP), but both the verbal and the preverbal elements of the new lexical unit do not correspond to their counterparts in the Persian semantic equivalent; in this case there is no reason to assume a specific interference of the native lexical structure determining the production in IL; it is more plausible to hypothesize a general transfer of an abstract strategy of information "packaging".
For instance they all produce a very common TL CP with no SP equivalent in TL: (9) fare il bagno / far-si il bagno make the bath make-REFL the bath ‘take a bath’ the two less advanced informants are more productive in creating non TL- like CPs: (10) dare scontrino give receipt ‘give the receipt’ the CP status here is due to lack of article, and therefore arguable, but the informant normally uses the articles with a TL-like distribution; (11) dare il codice give the code ‘enter the code’ the informant produces a new CP in IL, which is licit in Italian (dare looses its trivalent valency scheme), which is not used by Italian informants, who select the SP digitare, followed by il codice; (12) preso la freddore taken the cold ‘got a cold’ this example shows a TL-like CP preferred over SP equivalent (raffreddarsi)."