Do we first talk about others or about ourselves (in L2)?

Second language acquisition is a gradual process that takes place when a person is surrounded by the target language of the community he or she plans to become a part of at least to some extent. An adult living in the... [ view full abstract ]

Second language acquisition is a gradual process that takes place when a person is surrounded by the target language of the community he or she plans to become a part of at least to some extent. An adult living in the environment of another language has an immediate need to communicate and the primary need is to talk about oneself rather than others. The process of acquisition goes through various stages and the first sufficient stage for elementary communication is the basic variety. What distinguishes the basic variety is the entrance of a verb form into the interlanguage of the acquirer. While some languages, where person is not morphologically marked in the verb form itself, do not show much difference up to rather advanced stages (such as English), in languages that do morphologically express person in the verb form, a significant difference is noted when analyzing the verb forms used by L2 learners in a spontaneous context.

This paper presents a study of acquisition of Lithuanian as a second language. The naturalistic speech data (27 hours transcribed with Clan and morphologically coded) has been collected from 17 foreigners living in Lithuania who have a very diverse linguistic attainment. The paper focuses on the acquisition of the verb and
more specifically on the verb forms of different persons used by the subjects.
The Lithuanian L2 verb base form often is the third person of the present
tense, however, overextensions happen not only in the basic variety and not
only in the present tense. Moreover, social context and interactional
situations as well as social distance with interlocutors have an effect on the
forms used by the native speakers and therefore condition the input of the L2
learner. Therefore, the paper will look into what social factors, such as
social status, education etc. are at play and act in favor of a wider
conjugational repertoire.