CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by Firenze University Press: E-Journals Quaderni di Linguistica e Studi Orientali / Working Papers in Linguistics and Oriental Studies n. 2 (2016), pp. 141-174 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.13128/QULSO-2421-7220-18752 Acquisition of Locative Case Markers in Finno- Ugric languages: A case study on Finnish L2 Giulia Bellucci and Lena Dal Pozzo Università degli Studi di Firenze (<
[email protected]>, <
[email protected]>) Abstract: The aim of the paper is twofold: in the theoretical part we review the main proposals on the syntactic encoding of locatives and we sketch a new formalization which we fully develop in related work (Bellucci, Dal Pozzo, Franco, Manzini, in preparation); in the experimental part novel data on the acquisition of locative case markers by L2 lower- intermediate Finnish speakers, native speakers of Italian is discussed. The language combination we have chosen may be revealing in more than one respect: in Finnish four locative cases (inessive, illative-the so-called internal cases- and adessive and allative- the so-called exter- nal cases) broadly correspond to the Italian preposition a which can be used to express both stativity and directionality. We created a written translation task aimed at eliciting the locatives cases in the L2. Inter- estingly the L2 grammar is sensitive to the different properties of inter- nal vs. external cases and stative vs. directional cases (non-native-like behaviour is also attested). A clear difference is found between stative and directional cases in the L2, a pattern already attested in Finnish L1 and atypical acquisition.