Incomplete vs. divergent representations of unaccusativity in non native grammars of Italian

Abstract

The term 'near-native', used to refer to speakers at the most advanced stage of second language acquisition, may denote either incompleteness of their competence (lack of given L2 properties) or divergence (interlanguage representations of L2 properties that are consistently different from native representations). An undifferentiated use of the term conceals the fact that incompleteness and divergence are two distinct states of grammatical compe tence, corresponding to two qualitatively different kinds of ultimate attain ment. This article looks at the linguistic intuitions of French L1 and English L1 near-native speakers of Italian L2 about some syntactic and semantic properties related to unaccusativity in Italian, and concludes that the near-native grammar of French subjects exhibits divergence whereas the near-native grammar of English subjects exhibits incompleteness. It is argued that these competence differences reflect differences in the overall repre sentations of unaccusativity in French and English.