Acquisition of Locative Case Markers in Finno-Ugric languages: A case study on Finnish L2.

Natural languages syntactically encode locative meanings in two basic ways: they either make use of locative prepositions or they employ locative case markers. In this paper we address the implications of this (broad) divide for L2 acquisition. The aim of the present paper is twofold: in the theoretical part of the paper we review the main proposals on the syntactic encoding of locatives and we sketch a new formalization which we develop in more detail in a related study (Bellucci, Dal Pozzo, Franco, Manzini, in preparation); in the experimental part of the paper we discuss novel data on the acquisition of locative case markers by L2 lower-intermediate Finnish speakers with Italian as their L1. 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 external cases) broadly correspond to the Italian preposition a which can be felicitously used to express both stativity and directionality. We created a written translation task aimed at eliciting the L2 production of the locatives cases mentioned above. Interestingly the L2 grammar is sensitive to the different properties of internal vs. external cases and stative vs. directional cases (some non-native-like behaviour is also attested). Our results point to a clear difference between stative and directional cases in the L2, a pattern already found in Finnish L1 and atypical acquisition. In addition, a difference is also observed between internal and external cases, adding new evidence to previous findings.