Response article Full transfer vs. developmentally moderated transfer: a reply to Bohnacker

Manfred Pienemann (1) , Gisela Håkansson (2)

1 University of Paderborn
2 Skane University Hospital [Lund]

Ute Bohnacker's (2006) article on the acquisition of the verb second (V2) property in German by native speakers of Swedish (also a V2 language) is an attempted rebuttal of Håkansson 's (2002) work on first language (L1) transfer and aspects of the underlying theory on which the work is based: Processability Theory (Pienemann, 1998). The article by Håkansson . presented empirical evidence from a similar population of learners (native language Swedish, target language German), showing that V2 is not transferred at the initial state. Unfortunately, Bohnacker misrepresents key aspects of our work on L1 transfer and, paradoxically, her own data constitute empirical evidence supporting our position, as we show in this response.

Mots clés: transfer in L2; Processability Theory; L2 vs. L3 German; verb second; initial state

Manfred Pienemann, Gisela Håkansson. Response article Full transfer vs. developmentally moderated transfer: a reply to Bohnacker. Second Language Research, 2007, 23 (4), pp.485-493. ⟨10.1177/0267658307080332⟩. ⟨hal-00570735⟩