[Avoidance or Ignorance? Underproduction of Phrasal Verbs by Polish Speakers of English]

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Avoidance or Ignorance?

Introduction

The basic assumption underlying this paper is that crosslinguistic influence is an important factor in the acquisition of a second or foreign language. Though the traditional Contrastive Analysis fell out of favour in the 70s and the role of L1 was called into question, nowadays, however, the influence of L1 and other familiar languages on the acquisition of new languages is hardly disputed (James 1994; Nickel et al. 1999).

One manifestation of crosslinguistic influence is avoidance which is defined as a strategy learners may resort to in order to overcome a communicative difficulty. Specifically, when expressing themselves, in spoken or written language, learners may decide to use one form rather than another with which they feel safer (grammatical or lexical), in order to express the intended meaning.

Avoidance is an indicator of difficulty learners may have with the avoided form, not of its ignorance. The learner cannot avoid something s/he does not know. Hence, avoidance presumes some knowledge of the target feature and a choice to replace it with an alternative which is perceived as less difficult and less error prone. Avoidance can be explained in terms of crosslinguistic influence in two ways. Traditionally, avoidance, similarly to other L2 difficulties, has been attributed to L1-L2 differences (Kleinmann 1977, 1978; Levenston 1971; Schachter 1974). This view found support in some later empirical studies (Dagut and Laufer 1985; Laufer and Eliasson 1993; Sjoholm 1998). An opposing view claims that identity between L1 and L2, particularly in marked grammatical structures, or peripheral meanings of words will often be perceived as difference by learners and will consequently lead to avoidance of these constructions (Jordens 1977; Kellerman 1978, 1986). This view too found support in later studies (Julstijn & Marchena 1989, Sjoholm 1995).

Types of L1-L2 similarity/difference

Conceptual differences between two languages occur when a category which is present in one language does not exist in another. For example, English, unlike French, does not possess grammatical gender, Russian, unlike English, does not have articles, Polish, unlike English, does not distinguish between the simple and the progressive aspects. An example of conceptual similarity is grammatical gender which is subdivided into masculine and feminine in both Polish and French. Phrases in Polish and English

The three-dimensional framework of comparison suggested above will be used now to compare phrases in Polish and English. The two languages do not differ conceptually in phrases since they possess the category of phrases. Formally, however, phrases may be similar or different in the two languages, depending on their closeness of translation, as will be shown below. Distributionally too, phrases can be similar or different depending on whether the same meanings are expressed phraseatically in both languages, or whether they are expressed phraseatically in one language only and non phraseatically in another. On the basis of these L1-L2 relationships, we can distinguish four degrees of phrase similarity between the languages.

Total formal similarity. This category includes English phrases which have ...