The syllable structure in the interlanguage of Brazilian learners of German as a Foreign Language

Abstract

The present research explores the strategies to reformulate complex syllabic constituents in the Interlanguage of 18 Brazilian learners of German as a Foreign Language. Our hypothesis predicts that these learners have difficulties in producing initial onsets and final codas in German and apply different repair strategies to accommodate them to the syllabic structure of L1. From the concept of Interlanguage (SELINKER 1972) as a natural language, emerging from a systematic and complex dynamic process, which is developed independently by non-native speakers of an L2 in its acquisition / learning process, with the aim of strategic communication and suffering adaptations from the testing of hypothesis about L2 and interaction events, we analyzed across onsets and codas in correlation with the learner's level of proficiency, style (LIN 2001, 2003) and markedness of the constituent (GRENNBERG 1966b). The results reveal that the frequency of clusters modification shows correlation with these factors: the more formal the task and more advanced the learner, the fewer modifications occur. The influence of syllable markedness and linguistic universals was observed for the coda, typologically marked, being more often modified than the onset.