Hilpert, Martin

2017, Fahrner, Annette, Hilpert, Martin, Jacob, Daniel, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg i. Brisgau

This dissertation lies in the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) and contrastive analysis. It investigates how adult Spanish learners of German as a foreign language acquire constructions with the German pronoun “es” (Engl. “it”). The theoretical framework is Construction Grammar (CxG) and the usage-based approach. The general hypothesis is the following: Spanish learners of German have to make a substantial effort in order to acquire German constructions with “es”. Traditionally, the difficulty of this task has been related to the grammatical complexity of German “es” constructions. However, this thesis argues that other factors, such as frequency and saliency, have to be taken into account. The dissertation consists of two empirical studies. In the first study, a constructional analysis of German “es” occurrences is presented. The second study focuses on the acquisition of “es” constructions by Spanish-speaking learners of German as a foreign language, combining a small corpus analysis of a corpus of learner data and a psycholinguistic experiment.