Raising, Control and their Respective Order of Acquisition

Abstract

The basic aim of the present study is to tease out the respective order of acquisition of Control and Raising constructions in L₂ setting under the subset principle of Learnability Theory in combination with the principles and parameters model of Binding Theory. In the light of the previous relevant L₁ and L₂ acquisition studies, the nativist model of language learnability has been adopted for the current study. The particular measures selected for the current study are a grammaticality judgment task and two translation tasks. For the interpretation of the responses from the subjects, logistic regression has been employed. The findings from both the Acceptability Judgment and the Translation Tasks indicate that the sub-set relationship on acquisition order between control and raising constructions is not instantiated on the behaviour of the subjects in this study.