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in terms of notions such as definiteness, specificity, and partitivity. For instance, as Katz and Blyth (2007) pointed out, the French article system is markedly different from its English counterpart in terms of forms and functions. In French, the form of the article can vary according to the grammatical gender, number, or case of its noun. Hence, it is understandable that French learners of English have to remap their L1 article system with the English article system.
Semantic mismatch can also be reflected in the difference between the L1 and the L2 with respect to how the notion of definiteness and indefiniteness is encoded in the L1 and the L2. As summarized by C. Lyons (1999), based on his cross-linguistic studies, definiteness exists in some form of either simple definite or complex definite in all languages. English has a free form article the to encode definiteness, which is a straightforward way of expressing definiteness. Quite differently, Arabic has a prefixal article and Icelandic has a suffixal article to function as the definiteness marker attached to the head noun. There are also instances of mixed free form and affixal article systems. Apart from these direct ways of encoding definiteness, there are other languages that have less direct ways to do so. For instance, some languages have a prepositional or postpositional object marker which only occurs with “definite” object noun phrases, while other languages use word order, stress or context to signal definiteness. Thus, L2 learners have to adjust their L1 semantics to match the L2.
Factors Related to L2 Learners and Learning Processes
It can be argued that SLA is fundamentally different from first language acquisition (FLA) especially in terms of the ultimate attainment, the access to UG, the cognitive maturity, the input, as well as the impact of age and affective factors. Some of the major differences between SLA and FLA can be summarized in the following table, adapted from Ellis (1994, p. 107).
It has been reported that functional categories like articles are subject to a critical period after which it is very difficult for articles to be acquired by L2 learners. In other words, the age factor may account for at least one of the difficulties in the acquisition of English articles, and