L1 Transfer, Definiteness and Specificity of De-terminers in L2 English

Abstract

This study investigates L1 transfer from Cypriot Greek (CG), definiteness and speci-ficity of determiners in L2 English. 100 CG undergraduate students (ages 17-23) participated in the study. The linguistic (socio-economic) background questionnaires were used. Their written corpus (100 essays) was analysed in terms of determiner production. They were also offered an elicitation task based on Ionin et al. (2003, 2004), which was focused on elicitation of definite determiner the in [+def; +spec] and [+def; ‒spec] environments and indefinite determiner a in [‒def; +spec] and [‒def; ‒spec] environments. The results of the study showed that the most problem-atic condition for CG students was [‒def; +spec] with target indefinite determiner as they fluctuated in their written production between target and non-target settings.