Event date:

WA Distinguished Professor’s Lecture: “Crosslinguistic Influence in Early L3 German: Determiner Phrase and Adjective Placement Acquisition by Chinese Speakers of Advanced English”

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Time: Wednesday 8 October 2025 @ 15:00
Venue: Sala Górna, Collegium Heliodori Święcicki, Grunwaldzka 6
Speaker: Prof. Stano Kong (Tunghai University, Taiwan)

Crosslinguistic Influence in Early L3 German: Determiner Phrase and Adjective Placement Acquisition by Chinese Speakers of Advanced English

Abstract

This talk reports on an empirical study on third language (L3) German in the initial state, focusing on Chinese speakers with advanced L2 English. The study examines Determiner Phrase (DP) and Adjective Placement to explore the influence of prior linguistic knowledge. While English and German both have articles, only German marks grammatical gender, and Chinese lacks articles entirely. For adjectives, all three languages allow attributive and predicative use, but only German inflects attributive adjectives. Findings show that typological similarity is not determinative in L3 acquisition, challenging the Typological Primacy Model and supporting the Interpretability Hypothesis regarding uninterpretable syntactic features.

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About the speaker

Stano Kong is Lifetime Distinguished Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at Tunghai University, Taiwan, and founding director of the International Graduate Programme in Teaching Chinese as a Second Language (TCSL). He has also served as Chair of the department and as Dean of the College of Arts, which includes the Departments of Chinese, Foreign Languages, History, Philosophy, Japanese, the TCSL programme, and the English Language Centre.

Dr. Kong’s research centres on second and multilingual language acquisition within the generative framework. His early work explored L2 Chinese, focusing on wh-questions and classifier use by non-native speakers. More recently, his studies address third language (L3) acquisition, examining the morphosyntactic development of French, German, and Spanish by native Chinese speakers with English as an L2. His current project investigates Spanish noun phrase structures and adjectival placement, aiming to shed light on cross-linguistic influence in multilingual acquisition.

About the lecture series

WA Distinguished Professors’ Lectures Series features internationally renowned scholars visiting the Faculty of English to share their research and professional expertise with the faculty and students.